The Muppet Show
The Complete Third Season
Starring Jim Henson, Frank Oz
Walt Disney Home Video
Release Date: May 20, 2008

You’ve got to love The Muppet Show. You’ve got to, especially if you are of a certain age. After growing up with Kermit The Frog, Bert, Ernie, and Big Bird on old school Sesame Street in the 1970s, The Muppet Show is a more sophisticated entertainment that you can watch and re-watch for the rest of your life. Dealing in classic vaudeville and English music hall humor, and possessing a rich cast of characters, it is only the choice of some guest stars that make the show seem really dated. Otherwise, many elements of The Muppet Show are for the ages: the Swedish Chef, Pigs In Space, Statler and Waldorf, Muppet Labs, and Animal. These will make you laugh at age six and age sixty.

By its third season, The Muppet Show really had the formula down. Any problems the show had with getting guest stars had ended when Rudolf Nureyev appeared the previous season. His stature as a serious artist and the successful ability of the writers to fit him into the format created a calling card that ended the doubts of many celebrities about appearing on the show. So in Season Three, we get a mixture of the newly famous (Gilda Radner, Sylvester Stallone, Cheryl Ladd) with a lot of show biz “old hands” (Roy Rogers & Dale Evans, Danny Kaye, Pearl Bailey, and Harry Belafonte).

Season Three certainly has its share of really great moments. There is Jean Stapleton speaking “mock Swedish” with the Swedish Chef. Harry Belafonte performs the song “Turn The World Around” with Muppets shaped like African masks — Jim Henson loved this performance so much that Harry sang the song at his funeral. Danny Kaye hilariously improvises as the Swedish Chef’s Uncle. Gilda Radner did some of her Emily Litella “Never mind” shtick from Weekend Update on the original Saturday Night Live. Alice Cooper hams it up in an unexpectedly wonderful (and slightly ironic) appearance on the show.

There are also a series of moments that are pleasant surprises. Sylvester Stallone never quite fits into the comedy, song, and dance format, but you can see that he’s having loads of fun trying it out in an early attempt to broaden his appeal. Cheryl Ladd shows unexpected and significant musical theater chops given that her career currently centers around Lifetime-type movies made for television. Raquel Welch shows that she’s the consummate professional trouper with a lovely singing voice and strong comedic timing.

There are also a few misses. Liberace barely appears during the entire first half of his show, which really messes with the formula. Spike Milligan is a very funny man, but his humor is so very peculiarly British that it did not do much to warm even this Monty Python fanatic’s heart. And I don’t care what you say, but 1970’s hit-makers like Leo Sayer and Roger Miller leave me feeling a little flat thirty years on, no matter what.

The packaging of the 24 episodes on this 4-disc DVD is good, but not outstanding. On the plus side, you get to see the complete British versions of the episodes; the episodes were originally shot for commercial-free British television and skits had to be cut to make room for ads in America. There are also two extras: an hour-long National Educational Television (predecessor to PBS) documentary called “Muppets on Puppets” from 1970, and a behind-the-scenes featurette called “A Company Of Players.” The former is a fascinating look at puppetry in general and the Muppets in particular, featuring many of the key people who went on to do The Muppet Show. The latter meets the standard for DVD extras of this sort by interviewing many of the players from The Muppet Show, though Frank Oz is conspicuously absent. One of the real minuses is a lack of DVD chapters anywhere in the set; you can pick which episode to watch but navigation within an episode is non-existent.