Muppet Monday

When these posts began their avowed purpose was to make sure the blog had some content while my focus was largely directed elsewhere, stoking my own and hopefully my readers’ enthusiasm for the new Muppet movie.



These past few months have ended up being among the busiest on the blog, however, not only in terms of posts posted but viewers viewing them — one big reason why I decided to keep fresh content flowing, Muppet Monday included, even after the movie opened. I’ll share an update on bloggy business down the road a bit; right now I’m wrapping up this feature with links to a half-dozen sites for Muppet lovers interested in further exploration, most official and most mentioned on the blog before.

1. The website for The Muppets itself has select character bios, games, a photo gallery, video clips, and more.

2. The official Muppets Studio YouTube channel, which has been bringing us the occasional golden viral video for a few years now — like Beaker’s multitracked version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and the Muppets’ take on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” — also has clips from the new film, trailers and TV spots promoting it, and other fun stuff.

3. The Muppet Wiki is an unofficial, astoundingly comprehensive information
depot spanning the Muppets’ history of over five decades — and beyond, in the case
of biographical information about key contributors to the Muppets legacy like Jim Henson, the man who started it all. The wiki’s 24,516 pages (at this writing) also cover non-Muppet aspects of Henson productions and collaborations, living up to its billing as “a collaborative encyclopedia for everything related to Jim Henson, The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and The Muppets Studio.”

4. The official Sesame Street website has games, classic and new video clips, and pages devoted to the Muppets from that show.

5. The website for The Jim Henson Legacy, founded after Henson’s passing by
his widow Jane Henson to keep his memory and creative perspective alive, has links, information on permanent and traveling exhibits about Henson’s work, and more. Its mission statement holds that the Legacy organization “is dedicated to preserving and perpetuating Jim Henson’s contributions to the worlds of puppetry, television, motion pictures, special effects and media technology.”

6. The online incarnation of Jim Henson’s Red Book shares excerpts from his eponymous journal, often annotated through contextual essays and related archival images.

7. The website of The Jim Henson Company is devoted to the puppetry, digital-effects, animatronics, and fabrication work still being done by the Creature Shop and related arms of the enterprise that sprang from the mind of Jim Henson. While the company transferred the rights to the Sesame Street Muppets to Sesame Workshop and sold the characters familiar from The Muppet Show (and its spinoffs) as well as the Muppets name to The Walt Disney Company, The Jim Henson Company still controls such properties as The Storyteller, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth, along with theatrical productions from The Jim Henson Company’s adult-oriented Henson Alternative division.

I might revisit the Muppet Monday experiment at some point. Previous inspirational, celebrational, Muppetational posts are easily browsable by clicking the Muppets label.


Related: Muppet Monday (Oct. 3rd) • 7 for 007 • Minutes
to Midnight • NCC-1701-DVD • Muppet Monday (Dec. 5th)