How "Real" Are They?

I'll admit that this post is on the borderline between "this could be helpful" and "this is just freakin' cool," but.

Back when Jim Henson was developing the first Muppet Movie, one of the things they wanted to check out was how the Muppets would look on camera "in the real world," outside of a studio. The only way to check that out was...to do some live-action "screen tests.

Like this.





Kermit and Fozzie get downright existential in part two.

Now, no one was ever supposed to see these other than the filmmakers. But you can tell that Henson and Oz are having an absolute ball with this. I found out about these clips from an online forum I belong to, and the discussion prompted by these clips was especially lively -- and someone made an especially telling comment:

What always blows me away in the unscripted muppets things is that they never break character. NEVER. There's no swearing or anything. It's just...Kermit and Fozzie, hanging out.

Another person said this:

There's something about a puppet that requires suspension of disbelief from the audience. The puppet is clearly a real, physical object that exists in the actual world, but it is also an imaginary creature, and when we treat it as alive we enter into a sort of conspiracy with the puppeteer that's very childlike in its way. For children it's easy to go back and forth between a play world where teddy bears and stuffed frogs can talk and the real world of rules and obligations, and for the rest of us believing in puppets (if only for the length of a youtube clip) is a reminder of that time.

Another commenter reported that he was watching the clips on an iPod on commuter train on the way home from work, using headphones, and halfway through the second clip burst out laughing -- and had to explain to his startled seatmate, a stranger to him, what he'd been laughing at. "Here, let me show you, he said, showing him the clips. And then the second guy started laughing, which attracted even more attention. And by the time the train finally pulled into the station, he was playing the clips through a third time for a small audience of eight total strangers all huddled around his iPod window, all of them laughing. They stood on the platform for a good three minutes in lively conversation about "what was that and where did you find it?"

The clips, and the thread, were a wonderful testimony to what Henson just got about what puppets could do, and why they work. The comment about how kids just sort of accept that stuffed bears and dogs and staplers or what-not can sometimes talk is dead-on, I think.

One last clip -- okay, now I'm verging into "I just want to post something cool" territory, but it also has a good statement about Henson's legacy. At his memorial Harry Belafonte first spoke a bit about Henson's legacy worldwide, and then sang a version of his song "Turn The World Around," which was apparently Jim Henson's absolute favorite Muppet Show sequence.