The format of “The Muppet Show,” which ran from 1976 to 1981, remained constant during the time that the show was on the air. There are some things that can be justified if the trade-off is being able to binge-watch a favorite childhood program. (The Walt Disney Company purchased the “Muppets” property from the Henson family in 2004.) For all I knew, Kermit’s appearance on “The Masked Singer” was an instance of clever product placement by Disney (which also owns Fox), to remind people that the Muppets exist, and, if this was indeed the case, it made the segment even more chilling.
Earlier this year, “The Muppet Show” began streaming, for the first time ever, on a digital platform all five seasons are available on Disney+. (“The Muppet Movie,” the franchise’s first theatrical release, with its wistful hit song, “Rainbow Connection,” was my first moviegoing experience, at age three, in the summer of 1979.) But now younger generations will be able to get their own taste of Henson’s brainchild. Whither childhood? Granted, others might not experience this shift so keenly: I realize that I am just about the exact right age to feel an acute nostalgia for the low-key pleasures of the Carter Administration, before the malevolent, seductive gleam of the Reagan years came into view. Now the frog had found himself in a vulgar reality jumble, his no-frills costume wedged inside one that was far flashier and more grotesque. The judges gasped, the crowd roared: the masked celebrity was not a man but a Muppet.īack in the late nineteen-seventies, when Jim Henson’s “The Muppet Show” ran, in syndication, on CBS, Kermit was the mild-mannered leader of his own troupe of performers, a ragtag gang of puppet characters who sang, danced, and told jokes in a quaint old playhouse. Seth MacFarlane? Jay Leno? Perhaps, even, Senator Ted Cruz? (This was not as outlandish a possibility as one might think: a couple of seasons ago, a pastel-colored bear had turned out to be the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.) Finally, to the audience’s rhythmic, strip-club-esque chants of “take it off,” the snail’s hat was removed, and out popped Kermit the Frog, his felted mouth open in a show of glee. Why would a snail need to wear a velvet top hat on its shell? What was the deal with the roses gyrating in the background? Would I ever be able to forget the assessment “snailed it!,” uttered by the judge and former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger? For the members of the panel, however, only one thing mattered: Who was doing the singing? They threw out some guesses. On a recent episode of “The Masked Singer”-the Fox reality-competition show in which a panel of judges tries to figure out the identity of a crooning celebrity who is dressed, mascot-style, in a head-to-toe costume-an enormous, spangled snail gave a plodding rendition of Hall & Oates’s “You Make My Dreams.” For me, the performance raised many questions.
#IM IN LOVE WITH A STRIPPER KEY TV#
To watch TV these days is to feel that the line separating a clever concept from a dystopian hallucination is growing worryingly thin.
0 kommentar(er)
