I've been thinking about this for days now, trying to frame this post correctly. As I mentioned last week, The Jim Henson Hour is a pretty flawed show, and this is a deeply flawed episode of it. (A person whose opinion I respect a LOT says it's the worst episode of the series, and even though I disagree with him about some specifics, I hope he's right.) I dislike this episode as a whole, but it has a lot of good (or at least interesting) smaller parts, and I would like to talk about them.
To start the episode, Bean has oh-so-cutely borrowed the satellite dish from the studio, and the attempted repairs leave the studio in shambles. (I promise not to do this every week, but I can't help but be reminded of last night's episode of The Muppets., where poison ivy brings butter, which brings floods and blackouts and both freezing and boiling, to hilarious effect.) The Muppet Theater was always falling apart in one way or another, and even if most of our old friends from The Muppet Show aren't in evidence here, it's nice to feel that chaos will always attack Kermit's projects.
Jim introduces the second half of the show, and then throws it to Kermit, who announces there are a lot of fish on the show, so it's a "friends and relations" thing for him. Our guest Ted Danson admires Kermit's coolness under pressure, and then some folk dancers fall right through the floor. To keep us entertained during the rescue, Kermit cues up the first song. It's a fish, in an undersea bathtub, singing the obvious Bobby Darin hit, with a very familiar-looking duckie by his side.
Don't think too hard about why the fish has to use a bathtub, because his friends the seahorses somehow play dual saxophones down there too. This is a serviceable musical number, with a huge crowd of fish, octopi, clams, jellyfish, and even humans scuba diving.
Then Kermit speaks the first groaner pun of the show ("I think that went swimmingly"), which until now I didn't realize I really wanted as part of the Muppety DNA. That's followed up by a pun about the miners now coming up through the hole in the floor, and we get a sketch from the king of bad puns, Rowlf as Doctor Bob Merlin the Magician, who is trying to cure a man with a fish through his head. Muppet Wiki tells me there are only two Merlin sketches, which is probably good. I love Vet's Hospital, of course, but Merlin's assistant going "Ta-Da!" after every single pun gets annoying fast.
Sidebar: Unless you're a huge Muppet fan, you probably haven't seen "Hey, You're As Funny As Fozzie Bear!" It's a straight-to-video production, and Jim Lewis' first writing credit for Muppets. It attempts to teach kids how to be funny like Fozzie, which seems to completely miss the point. At one point, it teaches the kids that saying "Wocka Wocka!" at the end of every joke makes the joke funnier. I feel like maybe Merlin's assistant had recently seen that video. In a sketch this dense with puns, it's actually helpful to have someone make sure we don't miss one, but I'm also glad it only lasts a few minutes. (To use the most cogent analogy, if Kip Addotta had put a Ray Stevens-style laugh track on his masterpiece Wet Dream, I would hate it. And I wouldn't be the only one.)
Now Ted finally gets to do something, a sketch about a couple taking a cruise on - SURPRISE! - a pirate ship. I love his bone-dry delivery of the anachronistic jokes, and I really like his date. Is there another female Muppet with human hands? I can't think of one, and can only assume those are Fran Brill's.
The pirate jokes aren't terrible, and we get a quick appearance from a parrot with a nearly-famous name, and Link and Gonzo show up again. The joke at the end of the sketch is so inside that I can't imagine it even makes sense to kids. During a swordfight, of course the glasses had to be glued down to the tray, and the show points that out to us in what's probably the smartest joke here. (Knowing his Milligan-Python past, I naturally want to credit that joke to Chris Langham, but that way lies madness.)
Every year, I host a Pirate Movie Night for all of my friends, and this sketch will make a decent companion for Glenda Jackson's episode of The Muppet Show next year.
Then we see a trailer for "The Karate Squid" (no relation) and are regaled with a vaguely offensive (or offensively vague) dialect stereotype. Then the monitor springs a leak, and even more water is shooting onto the studio floor. Digit fixes it (kinda).
The Extremes, who sang "Neutron Dance" last week, sing another top hit of today, "Maneater," as a huge shark gobbles them up one by one. Just like puns, having characters eaten is part of the Muppets' DNA, and again I didn't realize I missed it in the first episode of TJHH. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, in the new ABC show. That show is feeling more Muppety every week, and this week's was the best episode yet. But I still would like, occasionally, to see Big Mean Carl eat someone.)
After another repair gone wrong drenches Kermit from an unlikely source, it's time for another stereotypical dialect sketch. This one, at least, I mostly like. I can't say why, but think it has so much to do with Jerry Nelson's straightforward performance as the sheep, and a lot to do with the sketch's logical construction. It's not easy to write a whole string of sentences that mean two things at once, and have them seem natural. The sheep's egocentric recontextualization of each sentence is on one level a comical misunderstanding, but on another level it's about comedic metaconflict. The sheep hears his species mentioned once (he thinks) and barges his way into the sketch uninvited, rewriting each line so it's about him.
For the second week in a row, we see a captain undergo mutiny (though last episode's mutinous lobsters are now the outside threat), and for some reason the sketch closes with an out-of-left-field homophobia joke.
But! After that, we see Kermit do the best thing in this episode. The studio floor is still all wet, from the various misadventures, and he wonders how he's supposed to entertain people in such adverse conditions. Using only the things around him, he improvises a quick song and dance, and the folk dancing troupe return and join him. It's a quick, joyful, fun moment.
This is the spirit of the Muppets -- making something (a dance, a joke, a simple lizardy-froggy puppet) out of nothing (a wet floor, a species of fish, your mom's old coat). No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, Jim felt that the secret to entertaining people had less to do with the tools and the medium, and more to do with the spirit and heart invested.
Unfortunately, that fun dance wasn't the end of the show. There's an allegory about oceanic pollution. Ted Danson is apparently VERY interested in protecting our oceans, and Jim was an environmentalist way back before that word even existed in the common parlance. I understand how both of them felt very deeply about this topic, and certainly agree with them. I know that Jim did a lot of work making unfunny things (pollution, business meetings) funny, but this is not an example of that. This is not entertaining. It's hectoring, and the show points its finger at me and you and all of us for not doing anything. But it doesn't give us a constructive solution. I can't find any evidence that, even in its original airing, the show gave us an 800 number to call, or a book to read, or a nonprofit, not even TED DANSON'S OWN, to contribute to.
It feels like the show is convicting us for not caring, no matter our personal actions, but can't be bothered to spend twenty seconds telling us an address to write for more info.
Later in the run of the show, Jim would present another environmental fable, which was much more entertaining. I'm looking forward to rewatching, and writing about, Song of the Cloud Forest in the near future. That was, in my recollection, a fun way to spend a half hour and think about the environment and all our animal friends.
And in the next day or two, I'll also write about the second half of this show, Lighthouse Island. Back soon.
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