GO HOME! GO HOME!
For me, it was any episode of “Pigs in Space”.
A story that I still tell to unsuspecting friends…
Liberace was hosting, and the the scene opens with him sitting at the piano. He invites the cameraman to do a closeup on the half-dozen HUGE gaudy stone-encrusted rings he’s wearing, saying to the audience, “I wanted you to get a good look at them, because, after all, YOU paid for them.”
Cracks me up! He may have been more than slightly strange but he enjoyed it to the hilt. Gotta love it
Here are my favorites:
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The entire episode with Harry Belafonte (Banana Boat, drum duel with Animal, and the amazing song “Turn the World Around”)
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Kermit goes to the planet Koozbane to report on Koozbanian mating habits… the male and female call to each other, do a dance, then back up and run into each other at top speed! After the collision, the male and female have been obliterated; the scene is filled with rising smoke and a dozen or so baby Koozbanians on the ground!
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Similarly, the Koozbanian marching band. Impossible to describe; it’s just weird.
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Paul Simon sings “Scarborough Fair” in a medieval fair setting. The scene is so vivid and detailed, and so many things are going on at once – Muppets walking on stilts, selling various foods, dancing around a maypole, Scooter playing the flute… it is quite impressive.
Side note: Does anyone remember the pigs singing “In the Navy” while playing Vikings sacking a city? Does anyone else think that the song is related to “YMCA”?
These Muppet show scenes scared me silly when I was a kid… we had to turn off the TV every time one of them would come on.
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The African mask puppets singing in Harry Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around”. Now I enjoy the song immensely and consider it the best Muppet Show scene ever, but there was something about their shapes, their sheer foreignness that gave me the willies back then.
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In one “Muppet News Flash”, furniture turns into monsters and starts eating people. One poor guy got eaten by his TV set while he was watching the news flash. I couldn’t go near the TV, or the couch, for quite a while after that…
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Yes, jayjay, the blue goat-faced Phantom guy really freaked me out too! It didn’t strike me until much later that having Vincent Price sing “You’ve got a Friend” in a Phantom-of-the-Opera setting was really funny.
So much of the show was definitely not for kids! Now that I got my Muppet videos from Time Life and can watch them for the first time in years, I realize how much of the show was completely over my head at the young age I was watching it. Exposing a kid to the Muppets because they’re cute and fuzzy is like showing your kid The Simpsons because it’s a cartoon… it’s just not right!
That said, though, there were so many layers to the Muppets that I was happy enough just watching the fuzzy puppets and I didn’t care that I couldn’t understand what the jokes were about. It’s a work of genius – the whole family can enjoy it at once, because each generation sees a different part of it.
YAAAAUGGHHHHHHHH! Ol’ Jim definitely took the brown acid!
I love many of the moments that have already been mentioned. Some others:
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Robin singing “I’m Five.” When I was a little kid, I adored that song.
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“The natural element of a bear. A Studabaker”.
Oh, and every time Kermit does that “yaaaaay!” thing.
One of my favorite pictures of Hanson shows him holding Kermit in a window frame. It’s beautiful.
My favorite Muppet moment was live; I was at a speech being given by Jim Henson to some high school seniors at a seminar in San Franscisco in 1989. I was seated behind a pillar and couldn’t see Henson, so all I heard was the voice I knew as a frog.
The line that brought down the house was a guy sitting near me, first name of Kermit (Harvard-bound, dont’cha know). When Q&A came around, he strode to the microphone and said:
“Mr. Henson, my name is Kermit Hutchinson the Third, and I have waited my whole life to say… thanks a LOT.”
There was an episode where Baryshnikov (sp?) guest starred. He did a dance with an incredibly fat, life-sized piggy. Of course, she’s very ungraceful. I think towards the end, he starts throwing her all over the dance floor. My brother and I love that sketch.
Fire, I remember that sketch! I also remember that Sam the Eagle had his drawers in a knot at the beginning of the show, because the show was finally going to be Cultural. He wanted all the male Muppets in tuxedoes and the females in gowns, Dr. Teeth and Rowlf to play classical, and so on, and he kept lecturing everyone on etiquette. Then this skinny guy in a leather jacket came in the stage door, and Sam chased him out. “These kids today! Who do they think they are?”
Kermit piped up, “Well, that one thinks he’s Rudolf Nureyev…In fact, that one is Rudolf Nureyev.”
I don’t think Sam ever fully recovered.
GargoyleWB, I absolutely LOVED that episode. I still remember watching it as a kid. Thanks for giving me a great childhood flashback!!