"It's time to meet the Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight." - The Muppet Show theme
The Best of The Muppet Show with Peter Sellers, John Cleese, and Dudley Moore DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
For more information on the background of The Muppet Show, please read the review of The Best of The Muppet Show with Elton John, Julie Andrews, and Gene Kelly.
As with the other Muppet "best of" releases, three episodes are included in this collection. The first features The Pink Panther's Peter Sellers. Sellers was a gifted comedian who had the ability to create the weirdest imaginable characters while simultaneously making them seem perfectly natural. The writers and performers obviously rose to the occasion of having such a chameleon as a guest star, creating a show that is surreal even by Muppet standards.
The show starts off innocuously enough, with Sellers playing a supremely untalented gypsy violinist. Rowlf's "quiet" song follows. The strangeness factor then rises with a sketch in Sellers' dressing room, where the actor performs his Queen Victoria impression while wearing a long wig, a matching beard, and a horned Viking hat. This dissolves into the inspired silliness of his recitation of Shakespeare while playing "tuned chickens" under each arm. Gonzo's hypnotically morose "Down Memory Lane" number leads into another wild Sellers sketch. In this one, he plays a masseuse (imagine Floyd the Barber crossed with Hitler) who performs a torturous form of massage on Link Heartthrob, leaving the porcine actor in a knot. An exasperated Kermit slows things down with a rendition of "It's Not Easy Being Green" before being teleported to Africa in a Muppet Labs experiment gone awry. Finally, Sellers appears as a wild-eyed revival preacher who performs a song about "cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women" while pounding on a drum. Sellers, practically a human Muppet with his ability to inhabit any character that comes his way, is a good match for the show.
The second episode, featuring John Cleese, is less successful. The premise of the episode is that Cleese does not want to be on the show - he makes his first appearance tied up in a chair backstage. This conceit is dropped and picked up again a few too many times throughout the unfocused show, though. Cleese appears in a "Pigs in Space" sketch as a misguided pirate, Long John Silverstein. The sketch never really takes off. Sellers is funny because he inhabits his characters. Cleese can sometimes be grating because he wrestles his characters to the ground, beating them to submission. He does achieve a bit of daffy charm in a dressing room sketch that finds him "fixing" Gonzo's mismatched arms after a cannonball catching act gone awry. His reluctance to do a musical number is also exploited to great effect in the final sketch when a desperate Kermit forms a musical number around him - the chorus simply echoes in song his spoken protestations.
The other sketches in the show, including a song from the jug band, Rowlf performing an act with a chicken, a Laugh-In style montage of "Waiter, there's a fly in my soup." jokes at a party, Miss Piggy singing a song as a pregnant, jilted bride, Robin and Sweetums performing a duet, and Kermit interviewing a liquid alien, are also a mixed bag.
The final episode, which stars pint-sized actor Dudley Moore, is a return to form for the show. The show opens with a band of bugs performing "She Loves You" using themselves as instruments. This fun mix of smart and dumb leads into Fozzie's performance of several terrible jokes. Moore brings along M.A.M.M.A., the R2-D2-like Music and Mood Management Apparatus that he intends to use in place of the show's live performers. This, of course, does not sit well with the band members, and they ridicule the machine during Moore's first number. M.A.M.M.A. then takes over the show. "Pigs in Space" features a clever play on entrance music, an idea that continues in a dressing room scene with Miss Piggy and Kermit. After Moore performs a Bobby McFerrin-esque falsetto scat-singing number, Floyd and Animal attempt to convince him to dump M.A.M.M.A. Animal is especially funny in this scene. After Gonzo blows up half of the theater (and all of M.A.M.M.A) in a bomb diffusing bit, Moore and the reunited band perform a mellow version of "How High the Moon." Animal's too enthusiastic drumming, however, literally brings down the house.
These three episodes are included on a single DVD which is housed in a white keepcase. The opening menu allows the viewer to play all episodes or to choose individual episodes. Choosing an individual episode leads to a needlessly complicated scene selection screen.
