jim henson

Chris Knight's avatar

Goodness gracious… it’s been ages since I’ve posted a clip from Sesame Street on this blog, or anything else having to do with the Muppets! I’ll try to do better from now on gang.

This is one that I remember seeing a few times in my childhood: Kermit the Frog doing a report for Sesame Street News on what makes people angry. I laughed when I watched it then but now that I’m older…

…Well, is there anyone else who sees Kermit honked-off and thinking that he’s a lot like Howard Beale from the movie Network?

The more I think about it I could totally see Muppets Network happening, with Kermit screaming “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In his reporter gig he even looks a lot like Howard Beale, right down to the raincoat. Yup, “Kermit the Frog, the Mad Prophet of ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Look gang, the next few days I’m gonna be swamped with stuff. Especially with the lead-up to opening night for Theatre Guild of Rockingham County‘s production of Gypsy. I’m not gonna have much time to entertain you, enlighten you and otherwise play around with your heads like I usually do.

So here’s something to tide you over until The Knight Shift resumes regular blogging. It’s a YouTube clip that blurs the line between reality and imagination… well, more than most things that readily come to mind. From 1982’s The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, it’s Tony Clifton!

Depending on how old you are, this video will either make you laugh… or confuse the heck out of you. Ironically it’s the older viewers who are likely to be scratching their heads in wonder.

“If you believed they put a man on the moon…”...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Yesterday this blog reported the passing of Kermit Love, longtime Muppet designer and operator. His work on commercials led me to look around YouTube for any other examples of Muppets used in advertising.

That’s what led me to re-discover the spots that Jim Henson made in the late 1950s for Wilkins Coffee.

Over fifty years ago, Henson was hired by Wilkins Coffee to create some commercials for their product. The result was a series of clips starring Wilkins and Wontkins. These are not only some of the earliest examples of the Muppets on television, they are also the longest-running campaign to feature the Muppets and certainly the most violent! Poor Wontkins dies by cannon, by point-blank shot from a pistol, run over by a bandwagon, not to mention threatened with a guillotine! In one of the commercials he’s also shown smoking a cigarette (try doing that nowadays!). ...

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