The SD had a column some weeks back about whether The Lion King borrowed heavily from a Japanese cartoon. Recently, I’ve been wondering if Miss Piggy, the diva of The Muppett Show was also based unwittingly or not on another character.
Quite a long time ago (early 1970s?) there was a Saturday morning cartoon about the adventures of Smokey the Bear. Smokey had several animal companions, including a large, loud, pushy, amorous sow. The resemblance is remarkable. However I don’t know which came first, so I’m not sure whether Jim Henson might have been influenced by this or not. Can anyone out there chase down the particulars?
First, let’s get one thing perfectly clear: It’s Smokey Bear, not Smokey the Bear. The Smokey Bear Show ran from 1969-1971. The pig’s name was Bessie. Here is a site about the cartoon.
That cartoon site was pretty extensive–except for one thing. Search for Miss Piggy and nothing comes up until the eighties. She doesn’t seem to have been a cast member of Sesame Street, which was first broadcast in November of 1969. Smokey Bear (or Smokey the Bear, as they say there) was also 1969.
Sheesh, RM, you needed a web page to tell you that Ms. Piggy wasn’t on Sesame Street? Some of us can remember that on our own… No, she was never on it, except for a couple of times when they had some sort of “all-Muppet extravaganza”, and all of the Sesame Streeters, together with the regulars of the Muppet Show and the Fraggles, got together for some big musical number.
You want to look for the Muppet Show, and possibly some of the earlier shows where Muppets made sporadic appearences (I believe that Kermit originated on the Tonight Show).
Yeah, but you’re younger than I am. I guess Miss Piggy was born in 1976.
I don’t know the answer, but you might want to ask about this possible influence on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.henson+muppets.
Miss Piggy first appeared on the 1974 Muppet TV special “Sex and Violence” in a minor role. In the first season of The Muppet Show in 1975, her first appearances began small and non-descript. She was performed sometimes by Frank Oz and sometimes by Richard Hunt. Her character developed slowly, but in the second season of TMS she began developing into a major character. Around this time Frank Oz became her sole performer.
One of Miss Piggy’s influences was probably the character Major Margaret Houlihan of MASH, played by Loretta Swit. In the last season of TMS Swit was a guest who took over most of Miss Piggy’s parts in the show, including Pigs In Space (with a phony pig nose). At the end of the show, Miss Piggy came on in MASH fatigues.
Kermit began as a simple lizard-like character on Henson’s show “Sam and Friends.” This was a 5-minute show on WRC-TV in Washington, DC from 5/9/55 to 12/61. The show aired twice a day, just before “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” and just before “The Tonight Show.” Kermit first appeared with a collar on the Muppet TV special “The Frog Prince” in 1971.
It’s probably just a UL, but the story I heard was that Miss Piggy was originally called “Miss Piggy Lee”, modeled after singer Peggy Lee, who cultivated a “tough broad” stage persona, and was always billed as “Miss Peggy Lee”. The “Lee” was dropped from Piggy’s name after Peggy threatened to sue.