The Lost History of Jim Henson's Muppets on Saturday Night Live
Who is your favorite Muppet? Is it King Ploobis? Or are you more partial to Queen Peuta? Alternately, you might be a die-hard fan of the Mighty Favog although I know that there are a lot of Vazh and Scred obsessives out there as well.
Unless you are a Saturday Night Live super-fan, a Muppets obsessive, or are following my Every Episode Ever project over at Buttondown you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
That’s because the Muppets that I mentioned have all been forgotten despite the auspicious place where they were introduced: the legendary first season of Saturday Night Live.
Jim Henson felt that he was being pigeonholed as a children’s entertainer. So he had agent Bernie Brillstein land him and his Muppets a gig on Saturday Night Live, a show that was filthy with Brillstein’s clients, including Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Gilda Radner.
It was a mismatch from the start. The young, hip, stoned and rebellious Saturday Night Live writers resented having to write for puppet characters they did not create or perform. Michael O’Donoghue famously sneered that he did not write for felt.
Yet union rules dictated that outside writers could not work on the sketches. The inevitable creative differences ensued when Henson’s segments, which took place in the mythical Land of Gorch, debuted and almost instantly became the least popular aspect of the show.
To put things in rock and roll terms, when viewers in 1975 and, briefly, 1976 saw a Land of Gorch segment was coming they knew that it was time to go to the bathroom or head outside to smoke a joint.
The problem with The Land of Gorch as a comic conceit is that its tone and humor didn’t fit Saturday Night Live or The Muppets.
Just as Steven Spielberg was lost when he tried to make a Saturday Night Live-style wacky comedy with 1941 Jim Henson was defeated by a show that had no place for what was referred to as Jim Henson’s Muppets or the Land of Gorch.
Let’s just say that The Land of Gorch was more The Happytime Murders than The Muppet Movie. Jim Henson and his fiendishly gifted collaborators just weren’t working as a dud segment on the hippest show on television.
So Saturday Night Live did what television shows generally do when things aren’t working and the audience is alienated: they made big changes.
Segregating Jim Henson’s Muppets from the rest of the show was an intriguing idea in theory but a deadly one in practice. Having the puppets occupy their own realm within the show only underlined how removed the segment was from the rest of the action.
So the Muppets began interacting with the Not Ready for Prime Time Players and hosts. This proved a winning move, if not quite enough to save the Muppets or keep them on the show.
I suspect that it was easier and more fun to write bits involving a Muppet and cast members or hosts, particularly female hosts, than it was to write sketches that take place entirely in the Land of Gorch.
Something curious happened, however, when Scred started mixing it up with the Not Ready for Prime Time Players and hosts like Lily Tomlin, with whom he sang “I’ve Got You Babe.” The segment started to work. Scred emerged as simultaneously the most repulsive and likable Muppet. He has that E.T. thing going on where he’s so disgusting and hard to look at that he somehow becomes cute.
The show’s other innovation involved going meta and making the segments about the Muppets’ desperate attempts to stay on the show despite their unpopularity with writers and audiences.
A particularly bleak segment found the off-brand Muppets stashed away in filing cabinets, a metal grave for creatures that never lived.
The show found a way to integrate the Muppets in a way that was fun and fit the rest of the show but Saturday Night Live was eager to end the collaboration and a little program called The Muppet Show was being prepped in jolly Old England.
Jim Henson’s Muppets and Saturday Night Live parted ways and though the sketches themselves are mostly forgotten the character designs ended up having a profound impact on Dark Crystal while the idea of a puppet-based domestic comedy anticipated Dinosaurs.
Though the partnership lasted just over a season Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live stubbornly remained in the picture. Saturday Night Live will be fifty soon and on November 10 of this year Sesame Street will turn 55.
They both went on to have an enormous impact on pop culture and the culture as a whole, albeit not together.
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