Accidental Innuendo: Rowlf and Sam sing a song from The Mikado titled "Tit Willow", about a "dicky-bird" that sings before plunging himself to his death. The song is full of Have a Gay Old Time.
Is Professor Honeydew really as absent-minded as all that, or does he know full well he's hurting people (Beaker especially) and just doesn't care? The fact he often follows his actions with that little giggle isn't in his favor.
Similarly, Scooter's Nepotism in early episodes is kept fairly ambiguous, with it usually unclear if he's tacitly blackmailing the staff into hiring him, or genuinely just totally naive to their fear of his uncle (their boss).
The theme song, of course! It's an incredibly catchy, jaunty and upbeat big band piece that is truly sensational, inspirational, celebrational and especially, Muppetational. It's no wonder that the theme would become the theme song of The Muppets as a whole.
If a song was on it more than once, chances are it's this, such as "The Entertainer" or "In the Summertime".
Floyd's cover of "Big Noise from Winnetka", shown here.
Bizarro Episode: As much as the general weirdness would seem to defy the concept, there's still a few that stand out:
Steve Martin: Kermit accidentally booked Martin for the night the show is cancelled to audition new acts, and he just hangs out while they're going on.
Cloris Leachman: The pigs take over the show, resulting in pig versions of all the characters.
Loretta Lynn: The theater is being fumigated so the show is done at the railroad station.
Glenda Jackson: A pirate crew, led by Jackson, take over the theater and sail it out to the ocean.
Roger Miller: The cast come down with cluckitis, which turns them into chickens.
Common Knowledge: The Disney+ release got a ton of accusations of "banning" the numerous episodes featuring bits that are now considered to fall into Values Dissonance. In fact, while there were several edits to the episodes, they're all due to songs that Disney (yes, even Disney!) is unable to secure the rights to. The only change to the offensive material is putting an unskippable disclaimer at the start.
As mentioned above, "Mahna Mahna", first written and recorded by Piero Umiliani for the Mondo documentary Svezia, inferno e paradiso (Sweden: Heaven and Hell) in 1968. While the original wasn't as obscure as it's sometimes made out to have been (Umiliani's version got a lot of radio airplay in 1969 and reached #55 on the Billboard Hot 100, getting into the Top 40 on the competing Record World chart), the Muppet version is much more famous now. In fact, the Muppet Show version covers up earlier versions that Henson did on Sesame Street and The Ed Sullivan Show. And The Muppet Show led to Revival by Commercialization for Umiliani's version, which made the UK Top 10 in 1977.
Fozzie making a joke about the Titanic? Terrible. Waldorf mentioning that Statler still has the dress he wore so he could sneak into a lifeboat? Hilarious.
Some of the Swedish Chef sketches when he's trying to kill live food in over-the-top ways. Or the sketches where the food fights back.
In one sketch, he tries to make frog legs... from Robin the frog, who screams out in help before Kermit intervenes.
Miss Piggy fighting and attacking guests, particularly the females, in jealous rages. Including one instance where she actually tries biting a guest. Now imagine if that were a real person doing that. But since it's a Muppet attacking a person...
There are a few bits where Wayne and Wanda sing (the duo can be counted for a lot of these moments.)
They're singing "Goody Goody", and Wayne punches Wanda in the face after singing about someone who knocks you off your feet. The curtains close as she stands up and gives him a murderous Death Glare.
In another, she sings while he performs the "saw-a-woman-in-half" trick. Just as he reaches her middle, she stops singing to scream because he botched the trick.
Vincent Price's visit features "Bewitched, Bewildered and Bothered", with Wanda actually starting out well...only for smoke to appear and replace her with a monster. Wayne's reaction, to say, "Bewildered and bothered," indicates that it wasn't part of the show.
"You Are Always Welcome at Our House" boasts this attitude when Marisa Berenson dresses as a little girl and romps around a house set. She explains how she and her family treated guests coming for various reasons by inviting them inside, knocking them out, and tying them up in various rooms all around the home. This should be Nightmare Fuel and you can hear the audience giving nervous laughter, but then the kidnapped victims sing along while tied up! Then it goes straight back to ridiculous, especially when viewers realize Shel Silverstein wrote the song.
For a Muppet that only appears once in a blue moon, Crazy Harry is real popular with fans.
UncleDeadly. He didn't appear much (only in a few episodes, musical numbers and the "Muppet Melodrama" sketches), but he became somewhat popular, especially after his major role in the 2011 film.
While on the subject of Muppets originally performed by Jerry Nelson, Lew Zealand, a clown-esque character whose main (and only) schtick is throwing boomerang fish. While such a concept is certainly odd and even tedious, Lew does his act with such goofy gusto that it's hard to hate him.
First Installment Wins: While it's certainly not the first Muppet TV show, it is the first one to feature the current Muppet ensemble cast we know and love now and as far as shows featuring them go, it's undeniably the most beloved and successful out of the bunch, with later series such as Muppets Tonight and The Muppets (2015) being less successful and having a more divisive reception.
Franchise Original Sin: One of the big complaints among fans is that Muppets Tonight had too much focus on new characters over the old characters. Some of the writers have defended this by pointing out that The Muppet Show introduced new characters all the time. The difference, however, is that while Muppets had been around for years, The Muppet Show is the show to establish and introduce a particular group of Muppets as The Muppets, many characters had appeared in earlier productions but aside from maybe the Sesame Street Muppets (who were rarely a part of this show), there weren't many characters the general public would expect to see. Contrast to Muppets Tonight, which came after the Muppets had not only done this series but also five feature films, another series (which also had more focus on new characters than old), and many specials and guest appearances, often with the same core cast.
Fridge Brilliance: Danny Kaye and Miss Piggy get into a huge argument right before they're supposed to perform "Cheek to Cheek", with the result that most of the performance is them singing this romantic duet with forced smiles and clenched teeth. What makes it brilliant is that "Cheek to Cheek" was originally a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers song, and the sketch not only plays off that pairing visually (with Kaye as the suave older man and Piggy as the younger blonde), it ALSO evokes the popular belief that Astaire and Rogers supposedly hated each other off camera, despite their great screen chemistry.
While Kermit and the rest of Henson's non-Sesame Street Muppets were successful early on, it was this show (Alongside The Muppet Movie later on) that would completely solidify Kermit and the Muppets into the beloved and iconic Household Names they are now.
The first season is a little slow, as mentioned on the main page under Early-Installment Weirdness. But the pacing and a lot of hallmarks of the show came about in the later seasons. Beaker, for example, didn't appear until season 2, so not only did Muppet Labs have a duller looking set, lack its introductory jingle, but it was Bunsen on the receiving end of all his inventions going wrong. It was also in the second season when Rudolf Nureyev made his appearance on the show, which changed the producers' job of finding willing guest stars into picking and choosing guest stars. Season 2 is also when Frank Oz and Dave Goelz really start getting a handle on Piggy, Fozzie and Gonzo, cementing them as the most important and popular Muppets after Kermit. Much of this can also be attributed to the replacement of season 1 head writer Jack Burns with Jerry Juhl, who would go on to act as head writer for the rest of the show (on top of writing most of the Muppet productions until 1999's Muppets from Space) and played a key role in refining the show, as well as its characters, humor and pacing.
One episode had Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge as co-guest stars. Miss Piggy drops hints to Kermit about how they're a example of a showbiz pair who are happily married. Too bad Kris and Rita would end up divorced less then two years after the episode aired...note In fact, of the three married couples that did the show, only Roy Rogers & Dale Evans stayed together; Shields & Yarnell divorced as well (although they did continue to tour together occasionally until the latter's death).
It's incredibly uncomfortable seeing staff writer Chris Langham as a guest, when he was arrested for possession of child pornography decades later. And now, even Disney+doesn't want you to see it.
As noted in the Tear Jerker page, the Lola Falana episode sees Gonzo leave the Muppets to become a Bollywood movie star, with his big exit song, "My Way", cut short when the weight of losing everyone finally hits him and he says a tearful goodbye to Kermit. This could be the forerunner to two events involving both Gonzo and his performer, Dave Goelz: the 1999 film Muppets from Space sees Gonzo nearly leave the Muppets to reunite with his family, while in the current day, in a cruel twist of irony, with Henson, Hunt and Nelson dead, Oz semi-retired and Whitmire fired, Goelz is the only original Muppet performer who remains active, with all of his closest friends having left him instead of Gonzo leaving his friends.
The episode hosted by Zero Mostel contains a skit where he recites a poem about his fears, ending with his greatest fear: something for which he himself is only a fear that can be erased by that realization, upon which he vanishes into thin air. Mostel died suddenly before the episode aired, which must have made the scene pretty eerie.
And then there's the scene in Peter Sellers' episode where Kermit finds him dressed in a bizarre mix of costume pieces in his dressing room. ("I was trying to do Queen Victoria, but I've forgotten what she looked like.") When Kermit responds that it's okay for him to be himself on the Muppet show, Sellers replies, "That would be impossible. There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed." The scene has since been quoted many times as summing up Sellers' view of himself as doomed to be seen only as his various characters and not his true self. In fact, he contributed to the sketch in lieu of the show's usual scene of the guest star out of character backstage, due to his discomfort at being seen out of character.
One of the show's best moments was Harry Belafonte singing "Turn the World Around" accompanied by Muppets inspired by African masks. The song is upbeat, but it's hard not to cry when you know that Belafonte performed the same song at Henson's memorial. The lead-in to the song—which talks about how life is very brief but we can change the world if we care about each other—only makes things worse.
Belafonte's own passing in April of 2023 makes the song that much more bittersweet, but also somewhat comforting. Even a life as long as Harry's (96 years) may not be very long in the grand scheme of things, but in that time, with his music and activism (especially with his being such a major player in the civil rights movement), he did indeed do his part to turn the world around.
In the Alice Cooper episode, Bunsen enlarges a virus to make it easier to study (Beaker, of course, gets overwhelmed by it.) The virus is specifically mentioned to be a streptococcus virus. Henson would die of a streptococcus infection a decade later.
A real-life example. When the series first started, it was a real struggle to obtain guests. The prospect of appearing with "puppets" seemed embarassing, so to get guests, personal favors had to be made/called in. Rudolf Nureyev's second season appearance reversed this. Now, it's hard to believe that any actor wouldn't want to be involved in a Muppet production, considering it's a clear sign you've hit the big time as a star to be invited to clown around with Kermit and the gang.
In one episode, a moose named Mickey becomes popular with most of the gang, even leading to them singing "M-I-C-K-E-Y" and wearing special hats. Kermit objects to this and wants nothing to do with Mickey Moose or friend Ronald Duck. Flash forward to 30 years later and, well...
One that crosses over a bit with Harsher in Hindsight: Before his performance of A. A. Milne's "Cottleston Pie" in the UK version of the Florence Henderson episode in Season 1, Rowlf compares Winnie the Pooh to Fozzie Bear. At Jim Henson's funeral, Frank Oz would perform "Cottleston Pie" as Fozzie.
In The Muppets' Valentine Show, the first pilot, it's mentioned that guest star Mia Farrow flew in from England. The Muppet Show would end up being produced in England, requiring most of its guest stars to fly to England.
The technique Henson and Oz used to operate the Swedish Chef was also a game on Whose Line Is It Anyway? called "Helping Hands", letting the audience see firsthand just how much dexterity was required. This technique predates both shows.
The name of the ship in the Pigs in Space segments, which spoofStar Trek, is the USS Swinetrek. Thirteen years later, Garfield and Friends had a Star Trek parody called "Swine Trek" that had Orson, a pig character, in the lead role.
One Swedish Chef sketch featured a turtle, in retaliation for Chef trying to make him into turtle soup, sprouting a pair of cannons out of his shell, and blasting Chef with them. Game Freak invented a similar turtle in the 90s.
Rich Little's visit features the "Glow-worm" sketch, which was performed on several variety shows with Kermitnote (see The Muppet Show for more information), only with Lenny the Lizard replacing him. Several episodes later, in the one hosted by Steve Martin, Lenny tries to replace Kermit again, this time by auditioning to be the new host of the show.
The Gilda Radner episode, where Muppet Labs creates a permanently strong adhesive that gets everyone stuck to something, now may bring to mind the plight of Tessica Brown, aka Gorilla Glue Girl.
The Loretta Lynn episode, where the show is moved to a train station, seems quite prophetic of how the 2021 Oscars did the same thing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The sketch where the Swedish Chef encounters a bunch of Spanish lobsters. That’s right! The Muppets had Spanish crustaceans before they met Pepe!
In the episode with Johnny Cash, Big Tiny Tallsaddle mistakenly thinks Fozzie is named Kermit, and when Kermit says he'll go introduce Fozzie Bear, a confused Tallsaddle says "Fozzie and Kermit Bear? What is this, a brothers act?" In the next Muppet film, Kermit and Fozzie would play the role of identical twin brothers.
Florence Henderson guested in a Season 1 episode. As it turned out, a few months later she'd co-star in a much less successful comedy-variety show centering around a core group of characters, with celebrity guests, puppets and a Show Within a Show structure: The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.
In the Star Wars crossover episode, the "Rama Lama Lama Lama Ding Dong" number features a cream-coloured ship with purple eyelids, making them look uncannily like Latte.
One Muppet Labs sketch involves Bunsen's milking machine giving Beaker long, curly hair (somehow), with Bunsen's response being to call Beaker "hauntingly attractive" and put his head on his shoulder and sigh.
Rowlf and Fozzie make a pretty popular pairing, seeming to stem from their enjoyable onstage chemistry, particularly in the English Country Garden number.
In two obscure "Muppet Melodrama" skits, Wayne plays a hero who's supposed to rescue Miss Piggy from Uncle Deadly, but instead really hits it off with Deadly and forgets all about his damsel in distress. In fact, Piggy is doomed to die because Wayne decides to assist Uncle Deadly after the two share a series of heavy compliments.
Gonzo was also very appreciative when Scooter was turned into a chicken by the rare and bizarre disease cluckitis.
Magnificent Bastard: "Liza Minnelli": The unnamed critics, played by Statler and Waldorf, are a duo who absolutely despise the shows the nameless theatre troupe preform. Seeking to end their shows for good, they go about stealthily and systematically murdering the cast members with guns, knives and poison. The two are only foiled when Liza O'Shaughnessy fakes her death, causing them to reveal themselves since they had no intentions of killing her. When O'Shaughnessy reveals she tricked them and has the two arrested, the critics take their defeat well, genuinely applauding her acting skills and even cracking a joke about their own imprisonment.
Plenty of Swedish viewers love the Swedish Chef for just how over-the-top ridiculous of a stereotype he is. He even got a mention during an interval act when Sweden hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2013.
It's pretty much an accepted fact that no one loves Sam the Eagle more than his fellow Americans.
Narm Charm: "'Bein' Green" (AKA "It's Not Easy Bein' Green") is a deliberately awkward, disjointed little song in which Kermit reflects on the fact that, being a frog, he's quite literally green, and the troubles this causes him—but in the end, he decides that plenty of other nice things are green, so it's alright. It should, by all rights, be absurd, or at the very least comedic. Except Henson's delivery as Kermit is so incredibly heartfelt, it turned a silly little song about a frog's coloration into a beautiful message of self-love and accepting yourself and one of the the all-time classics of American folk pop.
Older Than They Think: Rowlf predates even the oldest of the regular Muppet cast by many years as a Henson solo act.
Only if you don't include Kermit, who's got seven years on Rowlf.
Most of the major characters came from earlier Muppet productions. Of the majors, only Fozzie, Scooter, Bunsen and Beaker were created specifically for the show.
Once Original, Now Common: The show was Henson's attempt to prove that his craft could be primetime adult entertainment, not just early morning children's programming. The Muppet Show was initially viewed as a raunchy, all ages show but time has caused many of the skits to seem less mature than when they first premiered and the Muppets themselves have become much more skewed towards younger audiences. As such, reruns and home video releases pretty much market the program as a children's show. Nickelodeon even went so far as to rerun the show on Nick Jr., their block for preschoolers.
Mahna Mahna: That one sole skit on the first episode of The Muppet Shownote Having been performed previously on various variety shows of the 1960s and 1970s, most notably The Ed Sullivan Show became so popular, all three characters made appearances on Muppets Tonight, and all the way into 2011's The Muppets!
Hugga Wugga's single skit is one of the most memorable ones on the show.
Angus McGonagle, the inexplicably Scottish gargoyle who is obsessed with showing off his Faux Horrific act of garrrrgling Gerrrrshwin gorrrrgeously (and uses it to torture Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca).
Out of the Ghetto: The Muppet Show is the puppet show most famous for catering to adults just as much as children, if not more. This was in fact Henson's entire motivation for creating the show, as he didn't want to be stereotyped as a children's performer thanks to Sesame Street. Despite this, the Muppets tend to dip in and out of their "only for kids" ghetto in other media.
Retroactive Recognition: Candice Bergen was much more a model than an actress at the time, and likely got onto the show largely due to being the daughter of one of Henson's greatest inspirations, Edgar Bergen (who made it on himself a year later, when it had actually become a prestige gig). Now she's best known as Murphy Brown.
Smurfette Breakout: Miss Piggy, one of the few female Muppets, was initially only a minor character, but her popularity skyrocketed and is now probably the most famous of them, alongside Kermit.
So Bad, It's Good: Much of the comedy comes from just how lousy is the variety show that the Muppets put on. Notably, Gonzo's stunts and Fozzie's jokes. The Muppet Show, like Monty Python's Flying Circus and the cartoons of Jay Ward, is a nigh perfect example of how it takes great intelligence and talent to create something so deliberately silly that it crosses the line into awesomeness.
Tough Act to Follow: This show was so well-made and so beloved that future attempts at a regular Muppet series (The Jim Henson Hour, Muppets Tonight, The Muppets) were all short-lived, with a strong They Changed It, Now It Sucks! reaction from the public (and mixed reaction from diehard Muppet fans). Screwed by the Network (for the last two) was also a factor.
Ugly Cute: It's most apparent in the "monster" characters—Sesame Street monsters such as Grover, Telly or Elmo tend to be more traditionally cute, but the monsters of The Muppet Show and related productions are usually designed to look more grotesque, and are still pretty adorable—but it's a widespread trope for the Muppets in general. In fact, any Muppet not specifically designed to be cute is likely to be Ugly Cute in some way. Animal and Gonzo are prime examples.
Unintentional Period Piece: Millennials and Gen Zers can learn a lot about late 1970s pop culture by watching this show. Although the show deserves some sort of award for managing to make the episode with "Mr. Topical Monologue" Bob Hope relatively timeless.
Values Dissonance: Due to the show being nearly half a century old, the Disney+ release prefaces eighteen episodes with a disclaimer warning viewers of outdated material that can be considered offensive. Gags involving ethnic stereotypes (particularly in the Spike Milligan episode) and sexist comments (primarily targeted at Piggy), as well as a few other questionable things (like the numerous Confederate flags seen in the Johnny Cash episode) can be found throughout the show's run. Thankfully, these aberrations are rare enough on the show that no episode or segment was deemed necessary to be cut (the Chris Langham episode was withheld due to unspeakably horrifying things he did decades after the show ended). Given its age, the jokes have held up admirably well for the most part; though viewers should be prepared for the occasional unpleasant gag.
Viewer Gender Confusion: Beaker is indeed a guy, despite being pink and having a high-pitched voice,
The Woobie: Gonzo. Almost every song he sings is a sad one. And he sings them so sadly.
Statler: It says we're ensemble darkhorses here? Waldorf: Yeah, we don't act and we're better than the rest of em! Both: DOOOOOOO-hohohohoho!
, of course! It's an incredibly catchy, jaunty and upbeat big band piece that is truly sensational, inspirational, celebrational and especially, Muppetational. It's no wonder that the theme would become the theme song of The Muppets as a whole.