The Muppets

As a muppet orphaned nude Evil Meat Hand, I must point out also some yep-but-nope-but-yep “Muppets”:

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Aah! The Freggles!

Memories, memories…

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One of the most memorable music themes ever, with incredible deep mature lyrics for a “childish show”:

I Love It.

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I feel I also ought to mention the British kid’s TV show Pipkins (1973-1981) which was the stuff of nightmares. Here are three of the characters, Hartley Hare, Pig, and Topov the monkey, if indeed he was a monkey.

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Here’s another image of Hartley, who resembled something from the bad taxidermy website:

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Here’s my all-time favorite Muppet sketch. It’s hilarious and yet so wholesome; I love how encouraging Rowlf is of Fozzie’s new talent.

What JFK was for the Boomers, Jim Henson was for my generation. Everyone in arm’s reach of age 40 remembers exactly where they were when they heard Jim Henson had died.

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There’s a scene with the Muppets in the 1978 Swedish text adventure Stuga, which got a commercial release for PC several years later. The publisher didn’t dare to keep the Muppets in the game for the commercial release though.

The original game is available in Swedish (Stuga - Details ) and English ( Cottage - Details ).

The map is… evil, and you have to have an interpreter that supports timed input to use the lift (or the game locks up). I was going to include a quick path to get to the Muppets scene, but I can’t find the map I made. You can however, read the Clubfloyd transcript (linked from the Cottage page on IFDB) to see one of the ways the Muppets scene can play out.

Coming to think of it, having a sort of directed scene in a text adventure this early isn’t too common, I think.

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Is that the actual name of it? I’m sure this doesn’t even matter… When I was a kid (with my expectedly high vocabulary from text games) I always thought they were saying “phenomena” (doot doo doodoodoo) but then of course later in life everyone convinced me “it’s just ‘manamana’ like a nonsense word - 60’s lounge/jazz/scatting” However, seeing that Sandra Bullock clip, she sounds clearly like she’s saying “phenomena” also.

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The title is Mah Nà Mah Nà, apparently:

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Mah Nà Mah Nà as applied to the Philosophy of Science:

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Glad to know it’s not just me hearing “phenomena”! :thinking:

Jim Henson is brilliant and hilarious on this vocal. I always forget about the hippie Muppet with the circle eyes.

STATLER & WALDORF: “The question is what is a 'manomehna?” “The question is WHO CARES?” :joy:

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I was looking for another great puppet show I got to know in the Dutch version by watching early morning TV with my then-toddler son. Turns out it’s a Jim Henson show too!

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Also of interest is the musical Avenue Q which is “Sesame Street grown up” with adult problems. This is the Tony awards performance (one bleeped profanity; other songs in the show are very NSFW such as “The Internet is for Porn”.)

The jaw dropping nadir of the show is a puppet sex scene (the puppets totally have grown up issues and realistic needs) that occurs while Gary Coleman (who is a “Guest Star” character in the show) sings a song called “Loud as the Hell You Want”.

The composer is also responsible for Disney’s Frozen and The Book of Mormon (another hilariously raunchy and very NSFW Broadway show done in conjunction with the South Park creators.)

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“Do you hibernate?” “…Ah. Well. Only with friends.

CW: Muppeteers improvising between takes and potentially destroying the magic with meta-humor riffs.

“Kermit, run, there’s bulls all over the place here.”

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This unlocked a visceral memory of me being obsessed with that little blue rat as a child. I’m pretty sure I used to make my dad pretend to be the big bear when we were playing. I completely forgot that show even existed???

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I used to teach at the Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark. A good quarter of our students were Swedish. One day the students decided to watch the Muppet Show in the common room. I remember well the horrified expression on the face of one Swedish student as she witnessed the “Swedish Chef” for the first time. “Is that how the rest of the world see us?” she cried in dismay — to which one of the Danish students deadpanned: “yes.”

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I’m very excited about the implied overlap of Muppet fans and IF creators this thread represents. :star_struck:

We’re talking about Muppet video games and we’re talking about Muppet musical numbers. Does anyone remember the musical numbers in the Muppet Interactive Vision games?

ICYDK: Interactive Vision was a late 80s game console by View-Master that attached to your VCR and overlayed interactive elements onto VHS tapes. The system could change up the audio track or put pixel art on screen over linear footage from the tape. There were two Muppet tapes that are kind of like lost FMV episodes of The Muppet Show: Muppet Madness (directed by Jim Henson) and You’re the Director.

Here’s a musical clip from You’re the Director: a Pigs in Space rap battle (15:55). That’s right, the Muppets rapped. It happened! It can’t UN-happen!

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Am a muppet fan, too. I liked many of the characters:
That drummer, Kermit, the cook and very much the two old guys.

But I’m not a boomer, with birth year 1970 I think I’m categorized as a millenial? I’m not very well-versed in this categories.

I noticed some weeks ago that Jim Henson was much more active than I knew. He was a great person!

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No, you’re GenX.

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We didn’t have cable when I was a kid, so I only have a few memories of non-Sesame Street muppets.

First is the now-closed Disney Land MuppetVision 3D show. Second is this Swedish Chef translator for a very old version of Mozilla Firefox. Third is a vague memory of an episode of Dinosaurs that I saw on hotel cable.

Additionally, I live in Canada, so we didn’t have the main Sesame Street program prior to 2001. Instead we had a variant called Sesame Park with local wildlife puppets (a bear and otter). Apparently the standard Muppets — particularly Bert and Ernie — showed up sometimes as Canadian and American segments were mixed together. However, it’s hard to say who else was on the program, since a good portion of the show is now lost.

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Last month I watched this YouTube documentary about Jim Henson. I also watched a few episodes of the Muppet show…the Joan Baez episode is my favorite so far.

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There was a running joke on Tumblr a while back about Statler and Waldorf heckling any type of “performance”, like someone’s gender.

“Presenting female? I wish she’d present the end of the show!” “After an act like that, I’d change my name too!” “Dohohohohoho!”

And now that’s what I think of every time I see them.

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