For years I’ve told my wife about the trauma of a couple of muppet show skits. In one of them, Kermit sings The Lime in the Coconut song and starts hallucinating. In the other, a little girl sings about killing visitors to her house. I saw these when I was a kid, and I think they gave me nightmares. My wife never quite got why they were so traumatizing.
Until I thought of Youtube.
You’re Always Welcome at Our House.
Were the Muppets often this horrorshow? How did they traumatize you as a child?
Ha! Thanks for the links.
This gave me the heebie jeebies:
That last smile is going to give me nightmares. I’d better go watch Psycho or something to clear my palate.
This kind of fun stuff is evidence of how the Muppets have lost their edge. They don’t do this funky weird stuff anymore, they go for very tame and sad attempts at humour instead. It’s quite disappointing.
According to the link, she was Tony Perkins’s sister in law.
Another trauma victim checking in. I can’t remember exact skits, I think I 've blocked them out and would need regression therapy to remember them, but I know there were a few nightmare generating sketches.
But even just the puppet design was downright scary for me. Lady! You’re dancing with a monster. Seriously I’ve seen him eat people - get the hell out of there! There was also an archetypal villain who would tie the damsel to the railway tracks - he freaked me out. Beaker too - why the hell can’t he speak? Oh I know why - because you’ve fracken traumatized him too with your inhuman experiments you sick doctor honeydew!!
Maybe I was too young for muppets. 
Hmm, I seem to have had a decidedly different reaction to Marissa Berenson prancing around in those pigtails…
All of those are nothing compared to the horror that is the Orange that sings an aria from Carmen on Sesame Street, just something about that weird orange with it’s dead eyes and rubberband mouth just creeps me out…
<shudder>
I missed out on the Muppet Show when I was young and so didn’t get to experience real childhood trauma, but this clip just leaves me baffled: You and Me, featuring Alice Cooper singing a really nice love song to the creepiest Muppet I’ve ever seen. I keep expecting “her” to take a bite out of him with that beak, like a female mantis preys on her mate.
Dear god, that…that Muppet is…the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe he touched it.
Thisone really freaked me out as a kid - even the muppets themselves admitted it was weird. Now, I’m mostly in awe of their ambition.
“'Twas mimsy…”
So did I when I first saw the episode when I was 12. When she hiked up her dress, I stopped noticing that she was singing about killing houseguests.
Anyway, from the very beginning the Muppets did a lot of dark-humored stuff. Just take a look at these adsfor Wilkins Coffee they did back in the 50’s.
Throughout the Alice Cooper episode, he attempts to get the muppets to sign their souls over to the devil. You don’t really see that kind of stuff on a kid’s show nowdays.
The muppet show never creeped me out as a kid but there was one skit on Electric Company that always did. A couple of guys put up a picture of a tunnel and a train comes running through it. I knew it was fake, I knew it was just a goofy skit, but that train coming out straight at you and the two guys pressing themselves against the wall and holding on for life always got me.
Thanks for the links, folks–I knew you wouldn’t disappoint! Especially the Alice Cooper rivet-steel-beaked monstrosity, and the awesomeness of Jabberwocky.
And I had no idea the muppets were around in the fifties!
The first error is to believe the Muppet Show was written for children.
This is what I was coming in to say. The Muppet Show was at least as much for adults as it ever was for kids. It was, perhaps, a “family show”, in the sense that people of all ages could watch together - I think at least that it did a good job of that. But it was more of an adult show that children could also watch and enjoy, than a children’s show with some in-jokes and asides for the parents.
There he is, Uncle Deadly
For some reason I was freaked out by him. He seems quite comical now.
I don’t have youtube at work, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like the punchline is missing from that skit.
He and Sweetums used to give me nightmares as a small child.
It’s just the song with nothing else at the end. Or do you mean Cooper’s little speech at the beginning, where he says, “And with the power vested in me, I have touched you and made you beautiful. Let no man call you ugly,” etc.?