Rainbow Connections
Today marks the 35th anniversary of the passing of Jim Henson. This year also marks the 70th birthday of Kermit the Frog and the rest of The Muppets. Sam and Friends premiered on May 9, 1955. Henson created the show with his eventual wife, Jane Nebel. Not much of the show was preserved due to budget cuts, but it was like a prototype of The Muppet Show in terms of sensibility. Some episodes still exist at the Paley Center for Media. The 2024 documentary, Jim Henson Idea Man, covers his life story and the origins of his beloved characters and gives an overview of his working life and features rare footage from his personal archives.
Generally speaking, I can trace many of my interests to an inciting incident. A moment of discovery. If I can’t pinpoint that, I can at least narrow it down to a span of time. That’s the blessing and curse of my memory. I remember things I don’t necessarily want to. Some of it is harmless cultural ephemera. I know a shameful amount about the history of the McDonaldland characters, for example—the legal grey area of its similarity in conceit to H.R. Pufnstuf. Sometimes what I retain is more painful. I bite my lip and the taste of my own flesh and blood provokes a Proustian reverie: middle school humiliations and worse.
But for other things, I have no recall of when I first encountered it. Dinosaurs are one of those things. Did my parents introduce it to me because that was the sort of thing that young kids, boys especially, liked? I know there was a time when I had no concept of them, but for my life, I couldn’t tell you when that was.
My parents curated a videotape collection for me from a young age. There were Disney films in their white clamshells, collections of cartoons, and more educational fare, like videos about dinosaurs and episodes of Sesame Street. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t know of Jim Henson's works. The Muppets were always there.
The inability to recall where you learned something is known as source amnesia. I find it simultaneously frustrating and comforting.
Frustrating because I like that for many interests, I can point to one moment and see all the ripple effects so far. It’s as if I can pinpoint the landing spot of a stone that’s skipped over water and know precisely how the ripples will form and how they will fan out from the points of impact. I know how the speed of the water, its depth, contents, and the weather will affect them.
The comforting side is having a rough idea of what will happen when the stone is tossed. I know about the ripples, but have no idea where and when they will form.
I have no idea what the first Henson-related piece of media would have been. Logic says it was probably Sesame Street. It might not necessarily have been a film or television show; it could easily have been a book. By that token, perhaps I was read a book starring The Muppets.
I don’t recall any of those, just several Sesame Street ones, such as the classic The Monster At The End of This Book.
The one I remember most, Vegetable Soup, involved Cookie Monster being given the wrong grocery delivery. Instead of cookies, his order is filled with vegetables, and he attempts to make the best of it by using the vegetables as toys, cleaning supplies, and so on. When Bert and Ernie arrive to swap orders, they invite Cookie Monster to make vegetable soup with them. And that’s where the book gets its title. The illustrations may have had something to do with it. The drawings capture the warmth and bright colors of The Muppets and make a robust case for the deliciousness of vegetable soup.
Another way Henson’s body of work touched my life early was in two interests: dinosaurs and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and both for the same reason: The Creature Shop. Dinosaurs was a sitcom on ABC’s TGIF. Plots were typical of sitcoms of that era, including episodes that dealt with issues of the day.
There’s an episode that features a plant that, when consumed, makes the characters happy. It’s called “A New Leaf” and was on a VHS I owned that also featured an episode where Robbie Sinclair creates a project for a school science fair involving alternative power. This causes him to run afoul of the large corporation in which his father is but a cog. That episode, “Power Erupts,” went above my head then, but maybe it planted seeds for later on in terms of my political thought.
In a later episode, “Network Genius,” there’s a gag about a cop show where the officers speak in Marxist theory. An overcorrection from an earlier version of the show featured loose cannon cops who go their own way but get results. I found what I had enjoyed as a child more rewarding and interesting as an adult because I had more cultural literacy and could appreciate more of the jokes and writing.
The Turtle suits for the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a creation of the Creature Shop, and the Turtles were my first obsession. It was also one of the last projects Henson worked on in his lifetime. His final project was Jim Henson's Muppet*Vision 3D, an attraction at MGM Studios that will close on June 7. The attraction was taped on May 14 as part of the preservation of the project. I liked them so much that I refused to wear any shirt but my TMNT shirt and my poor parents had to wash it every day to keep me appeased. Then my maternal grandfather gifted me several more and lightened my parents’ burden a lot.
Even the TMNT movie contained things that flew over my head, and I came to appreciate them as an older person. I accepted it as is then and didn’t feel the need for it to be explained. That tendency might have been ingrained by the culture I was taking in then. We had satellite fairly early on in my life, so I spent much time watching Looney Tunes and numerous other older cartoons. And again, in many of those, I came across references that were above my pay grade.
I’ve said it before, but I understand why Gen Xers latch on to certain cultural ephemera. Some of it’s the limited amount of television networks and the fact that they were more apt to be latchkey kids. It makes sense that they’d watch a fair amount of TV.
Their references become my references without knowing the origin point. It’s like bands being influenced by The Rolling Stones but having zero knowledge of Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson. A game of telephone, a copy of a copy.
It’s not normal for someone my age to know about Hazel the Maid. I never watched it, but I heard relatives say enough to think it was just common parlance. For all I know, Hazel the maid could have been a figure from folklore, and this was merely a common idiom.
For the life of me, I couldn’t pinpoint other early encounters with the work of The Jim Henson Company. It may have been reruns of Muppet Babies, The Frog Prince, or annual holiday broadcasts of Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, John Denver and The Muppets: Christmas Together, or A Muppet Family Christmas.
The latter was memorable for me because it featured a crossover with the mainline Muppets, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock.
Like many others, when watching Fraggle Rock, I found myself understanding why the Fraggles ate the Doozer’s constructions. The material used to construct it looked like rock candy, and the concept of eating a building appealed to me. I think more than a few people harbor similar fantasies. The appeal of Godzilla lies in something beyond breathing fire and fighting monsters of comparable size.
I believe I have The Muppets to thank for introducing me to The Beach Boys, because of a music video of the song “Kokomo.” In the 90s, the Disney Channel occasionally played that video between shows. At some point, it made the rotation on Nickelodeon as well. When I was in first grade, my family moved for the fourth time because of my dad’s job. My classmates made me goodbye cards and drawings. One of them depicted Kokomo, Indiana, as a tropical place with palm trees and the like, no doubt informed by that song and possibly that music video.
In grad school, I made The Beach Boys the subject of my thesis and The Muppets helped me on my comprehensive exam for grad school. Part of the exam involved identifying and explaining musical terms, and one of those was appoggiatura, an Italian word that translates to English as leaning.
An appoggiatura occurs in “Rainbow Connection” in the chorus, “Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection. The lovers, the dreamers and me,” specifically on -nec, which is a G-sharp, a bit of dissonance from the F-sharp major chord that came before that dissonance is resolved on the next syllable, the -tion in connection.
It’s a musical convention that, psychologically speaking, can tug at the heartstrings. And in some cases can be used as a form of word painting. Not that that song needs help, the lyrics are powerful enough to do that. The third verse, I find particularly stirring, “Have you been half asleep/And have you heard voices?/I've heard them calling my name/Is this the sweet sound/That calls the young sailors?/The voice might be one and the same,” it fills me with an emotion that I can’t quite articulate. It makes me feel both young and incredibly old.
In “We Can Work It Out,” appoggiatura occurs on “my way” and “your way,” illustrating the push-pull dynamic of human relationships. In grad school, my contribution to the Brooklyn Electroacoustic Ensemble’s piece on the five stages of grief was bargaining, and I based my composition on “We Can Work It Out.”
Of course, the Beatles can be found all over the Muppets, and there were attempts at getting them to appear on The Muppet Show, but budgets and scheduling precluded that. It makes sense that there would be such an affinity for that group.
Along with all the accolades the group received during their history as a band, I view them similar to The Muppets: something I loved when I was young that continues to resonate with me the older I get, sometimes for different reasons and more richly than before. They keep me in touch with my inner-child and the sort of excitement that comes with youth.
And of course at least one member of the group liked The Muppets. During “Hold On,” John says “Cookie!” like the Cookie Monster. In “Early 1970,” a song about his former bandmates, Ringo makes a similar interjection while singing his verse about John.
Because I’d read an article on it, I could cite an example when defining the term. I am sure I would have passed that exam even without that, but it gave me confidence and made me feel like I knew what I was talking about. I was able to grasp compound meter because of Fats Domino. Clave rhythm came to me because of the Bo Diddley beat.
One thing that gets lost in some contemporary discussions of The Muppets is that while there is a sentimental and deeply sincere side to them, there is also a deeply anarchic streak of humor that runs from their earliest days in the numerous TV commercials Henson and company produced in Washington, D.C.
I shudder when encountering media that focuses purely on the saccharine, avoids the thornier aspects of existence, and handles character and audience alike with kid gloves. To everything, there is a season, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.
It adds to the sincerity of things. You need a little edge to cut the schmaltz. I like The Simpsons for its balance of warm emotional beats and acidic humor. When you can be truly yourself with someone, being able to shift tones like that is crucial. I’m a very sentimental guy, but I also like making jokes. Sometimes the world can be so cruel that a little absurdity can cut the tension and help you keep moving on.
I was cracking jokes during the worst day of my life so far. It didn’t mean I wasn’t completely heartbroken and devastated by what happened to me on New Year’s Day 2019, but it was my way of forcing some agency on what had happened to me. I understand why some people may have treated me like a fragile thing. What are you supposed to say about something like that? But when you can cut through the bullshit, that’s when you can get to real stuff, true vulnerability, true connection.
The Muppets have been most powerful for me in the ways they have allowed me to connect with others and have special moments with them. Some of my fondest moviegoing memories are tied to them. My mother took me to see A Muppet Christmas Carol when it was released in theaters.
The Dickens story has always been near and dear to my heart, both due to me sharing a birthday with him, but also for its message: that it is possible to change, that even the most wicked man can find redemption, that it’s never too late to change. I’ve known many who have struggled with the Parable of the Prodigal Son, myself included. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense that the son who squanders everything would be so warmly received, while the righteous son receives no special treatment.
But it takes a certain level of character to admit your wrongs, turn away from a destructive path, and seek forgiveness. In my experience, people are far kinder than you expect, and admitting your faults and seeking help and absolution reveals a more profound love than you might expect. We all have times when we need to be received with grace and also when we can bestow that grace on others.
I can think of two fond memories of seeing a Muppets movie with my brother. We went as a family to see Muppet Treasure Island, which I believe may have been the first Muppet film my brother saw in the theater. I remember it as just a fun family experience and how exciting it was to get another new Muppet film on the big screen. Fifteen years later, I took him to see The Muppets, a lovely film that showed how well Jason Segel understood what makes the characters work.
When I was living in Los Angeles, I had many memorable moviegoing experiences. Some of it was due to the audience, the film, or the celebrities in attendance, but for my money, the best one was seeing The Muppet Movie on 35mm at The New Beverly. I was seeing it with a new friend who I had learned also had an affinity for The Muppets. After the film, we talked in a dive bar for four hours. Our conversation covered numerous subjects, but eventually we got to the real stuff, the things you can only talk about when you feel a certain sense of comfort with being vulnerable like that. I don’t know if that doesn’t happen without The Muppets.
I later learned that the parents of one of my dear friends went to see The Muppet Movie on their first date, which I think speaks to the ability of those characters to allow true connection to flourish.
When the wildfires happened earlier this year, that friend was kind enough to rescue me from the flames and smoke and give me a place to stay. During my time there, while I waited to see what would happen to what I’d left behind in my rental, if it would be consumed in flames or if I’d have something to return to besides ashes, we watched Muppets Mayhem and The Beatles: Get Back and I took so much joy in seeing their young child find joy in Animal and Ringo. The Muppet show even includes an episode that parodies the Peter Jackson documentary. Both shows are about how much better life is when we can rise above petty differences and come together to do something bigger and better than ourselves.
Ultimately, I had to leave Los Angeles, a place I’d called home for nearly three years, the first place that felt that way since I lost everything on that tragic New Year’s day. I left behind friends, a community, people, and places I dearly loved. Losing that put me on a dark path, and I felt I’d lost everything again. Returning last week to film an episode of a popular game show that has been a staple of my life since childhood made leaving again a little easier, I felt more hopeful, less defeated. I’m not done with Los Angeles. Not for good at least. And I’m certainly not done with The Muppets. “Close to my soul/And yet so far away/I'm going to go back there/Someday”