Click, Click, Click #2: Hensonmas
Mr. C has decided to grace us with 30 festive frames per second of animated (and puppetized) Christmas cheer. Enjoy!
Ah, Jim Henson. Where would our entertainment landscape be without you?
Jim Henson’s head, in Time Piece
You, Sesame Workshop (previously Children’s Television Workshop), and the Creature Shop brought us so much: Sesame Street, Muppets, Fraggles, The Storyteller, and more.
Most young TV Americans are, at a very young age, introduced to the Muppets via Sesame Street. When I was a wee babe, my first Christmas introduced not one, but two Sesame Street Christmas specials: Christmas Eve on Sesame Street and A Special Sesame Street Christmas. “Christmas Eve”? Awesome. “Special”? Not so much.
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, Part 1 of 9
“Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” has a storyline you could never get away with in 2009: Oscar tells Big Bird that Santa can’t fit down chimneys, so there will be no Christmas. A distraught Big Bird camps out on a roof, all night, to warn Santa, falling asleep on the roof. I cannot stress this enough: Oscar, a curmudgeonly old man monster who lives in a trash can, nearly causes Big Bird, a 6-year-old child, to die of hypothermia. Screw the B arc of Bert & Ernie re-enacting The Gift of the Magi. This is children’s entertainment.
A Special Sesame Street Christmas, Part 1 of 6. If you really want.
“A Special Sesame Street Christmas” has… well, it’s got Anne Murray, Ethel Merman, Leslie Uggams, Michael Jackson, … lots of bad music, nonsensical setups, and not a DVD release in sight. It’s just, well, not very good at all. Maybe the fact that CTW wasn’t directly involved had something to do with it.
Sesame Street gives way to the (more adult) Muppets, who have a host of their own specials. These start with John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together, one year later, in 1979. I hadn’t seen this one until two years ago, actually.
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas introduced us to poor Emmet, his poor ol’ Ma, his poor ol’ friends, and the River Bottom Nightmare Band. Oh yes. Even better than KISS on the Paul Lynde Halloween Special.
The Muppets, as all great franchises, tackled the Scrooge story, in The Muppet Christmas Carol, with Michael Caine as Scrooge, and, um, Gonzo and Rizzo as the narrator. They attempt to parody It’s a Wonderful Life in 2002’s It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie. Closest to my heart, though, is A Muppet Family Christmas, not only because of its convergence of the Muppets, Sesame Street, Fraggles, and even the juniorizing Muppet Babies, but because of the news voiceover during the credits of the airing I taped in central Florida in December 1987. (You will want to watch this one.) Oh, babies.
A dilemma. What would Animal do? Watch the Truman Capote movie?
Happy holidays!
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