Alice is in full-on spooky mode in the episode - he has an entourage of monsters, he’s trying to get the Muppets to sell their souls over to the devil, and so forth - so, of course, when he sings a nice, straight up love song*, it’s going to be a creepy monster, because Alice** and the monster really are in love.
You and Me is a track off of Lace and Whisky, which is Alice deliberately moving away from his spooky ‘evil’ image for an album.
** Alice the character, of course - should be clear, but I felt the need to clarify.
You want creepiness leading to years of nightmares? Try Bert and Ernie exploring a pyramid. That skit terrified me to the point of demanding my mother remove all pictures from the wall of my bedroom in case they came to life at night. And I was scared to look at my stuffed animals, in case I’d see them blink or something, so I’d turn them to the wall.
After Alice is done with the song, Scooter knocks on the door to tell Miss Piggy to get ready for Pigs in Space. The monster Alice was cuddling with replys (in Miss Piggy’s voice) that she’ll be right there. She gets up and catches a look at herself in the mirror and sees what she look like. She gives Alice and ear full, and he turns her back. After she slams the door in a huff, Alice goes to a radio and sys something like, Boss? Yeah - we lost another contract."
Odd. I never found any of it particularly creepy or upsetting as a kid. Looking back on The Muppets as an adult, I’ve come to appreciate the subversiveness of a lot of the humor. I have the first three seasons of The Muppet Show on DVD and I watch it with my 10 year-old daughter all the time.
I don’t know where we’ve gotten the notion that childhood is all sweetness and light. Face it, kids are morbid. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales are filled with death and torture and other horrors. Shel Silverstein’s beloved books have poems about murder and cannibalism. Halloween is one of the biggest holidays of the year. Henson and company were not of the opinion that kids had to be protected from knowing that there were monsters in the world.
As GuanoLad rightly pointed out, the Muppets lost their edge for quite a while, and watching these clips really brings it home. The satire, the absurdity, and the bows to darker humor took a back seat to saccharine cuteness. I realized to my delight that they’d gotten some of it back when Kizarvexilla and I sat down to watch Muppet Wizard of Oz. Kermit as the Scarecrow, while hanging on his pole, makes a wisecrack about being reminded of The Passion of the Christ. A corn-thieving crow snaps back that he hasn’t seen the movie and doesn’t want the ending spoiled. Now if that’s not the Muppets returning to their roots, I don’t know what is.
Going by Maus Magill saying “he turns her back,” I’m presuming Alice somehow turned Piggy into a monster without her knowing. Or something. I really ought to track that episode down, it sounds like fun, and I’m sure it makes more sense on screen (as much sense as the Muppets usually make, anyway).
Oh, gimme a break. On the drive home today, I was toying with a lesson plan in which I’d reinforce the idea of place value by teaching my second-graders about Genghis Khan’s brutally efficient hierarchy. I regularly counsel kids on their writing about the death of pets or their parents’ arrests. I’m sure I have a much better idea about the traumas of childhood than you do.
I don’t know where you get the idea that recognizing the dark side of childhood necessitates pretending that it’s not traumatic for kids. Yeah, childhood is dark; yeah, that darkness is traumatic.
Except for Pepe the King Prawn, who I saw a couple of weeks ago on Craig Ferguson talking about his ex-fiancee, who is human, and how he’s into the interspecies thing. :eek: