Bunsen Honeydew and his perpetually terrified assistant Beaker ("Now your family can be protected from the heartbreak of gorilla invasion!") cooking segments with the game-but-goofy Swedish Chef and the disaster-prone Muppet News Flash. Recurring sketches included Veterinarian's Hospital, starring Rowlf ("the continuing stoooooooory of a quack who's gone to the dogs") Pigs in Space ( yep, pretty much) Muppet Labs, with Dr. Each week, technical flubs, talent crises, rampaging egos and financial issues (when the pigs weren't rebelling, or angry clones weren't on the loose, or the Star Wars cast wasn't rampaging through in search of Chewbacca) would bring the show teetering to the brink of disaster each week, the show somehow managed to go on. Eventually American network CBS, or rather their owned-and-operated station group, joined once it was clear the Muppets were also a sure bet.Ī different human entertainer was featured as each episode's Special Guest, and the show's cachet quickly became such that they were frequently A-list talent-often uniquely so (ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev, anyone?). As it happened he very well knew what puppets can do on TV, considering he financed Gerry Anderson's classic Supermarionation series like Thunderbirds. networks rejected their ( frankly awesome ) pitch for a weekly series, they instead finagled a distribution deal with Britain's ITC Entertainment, under the auspices of Lord Lew Grade. note A series of less family-friendly Muppet sketches appeared on the first season of Saturday Night Live, but the cast hated them.ĪBC aired a pair of pilot specials, The Muppets Valentine Show (1974) and The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975), but when all the U.S. Thus the impetus for creating a new series featuring the Muppets alone, still family-friendly but with a distinctly adult edge. However, it also threatened to pigeonhole the Henson crew as mere children's entertainers. In the early '70s, the immense popularity of the Muppets they created for Sesame Street gave Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Richard Hunt, Jerry Nelson, and the rest of the Muppet Performers plenty of valuable exposure.
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