As I said in my post about the excellent film The Muppets, I missed out on most of The Muppet Show. The series started off and ended before I was born and wasn’t on in reruns that I remember as a kid. I did, however, love The Muppet Babies, but that series focused on a much smaller group of characters. Between The Muppets and Being Elmo, though my curiosity was piqued, so I moved the first disc of the first season of The Muppet Show to the top of my Netflix DVD queue and watched it with my wife and daughter last week.

The amount of creativity and humor that went into the series is mind blowing. It actually reminds me a lot of the early seasons of Saturday Night Live, which only kicked off a year before the Muppets finally made it to air in 1976. Note that SNL actually featured Jim Henson Muppets as well for the first season or two.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with the first disc even if I didn’t recognize many of the celebrity guest hosts or the Muppets themselves. There’s just so much pure creative force coming across from Henson, Frank Oz and the rest of the gang. The sketches are funny on their own and would be even with human actors, but when you take into account the fact that these guys were literally creating these characters on the spot, giving them voices and personalities and make a show every week, that’s even more impressive. I’m inspired by that kind of creativity.

Like I said, I’m still new to The Muppet Show, but I’m excited about slowly making my way through it. I’m looking at it like any other sketch comedy show, which is an area of television that I’m looking to explore more fully outside of SNL. Should be a fun journey.