His most memorable moment on The Muppet Show was when he performed a drumming contest with legendary jazz musician Buddy Rich. With that name, it goes without saying that Sam is ultra-patriotic, especially about all things American. The fact that he knows nothing about culture and never finds these types of acts on The Muppet Show does not seem to deter him. Donna R. Get the latest news from The Henry Ford.
As a nonprofit, we need your support now more than ever. Please consider making a donation today. Your contribution is greatly appreciated. June 21, Archive Insight. Facebook Comments. An equally wise bear once said: Wocka, wocka! Somewhere between these two quotes lies the magic of the Muppets. The Muppets, the troupe of musical felted friends created by Jim Henson, is one of those rare institutions that continuously finds cultural relevance. To make things simple, the characters in this list will only comprise of characters who appear in the Muppets franchise no Fraggle Rock , Dinosaurs , or Sesame Street characters and who came about under the creative direction of Jim Henson sorry Walter , Bobo , and Pepe the King Prawn.
This list is also by no means exhaustive, these are simply the Muppets without whom the show would not go on. TOTAL: 1. Link Hogthrob is a male chauvinist pig. TOTAL: 2. He does get some points for looking exactly how a Muppet named Crazy Harry should look.
TOTAL: 4. Lips is the most forgettable member of the Electric Mayhem. Poor Lips, but the Electric Mayhem rocks just as hard without him. TOTAL: 6. But again, the Muppet mastered the physics of boomeranging literal fish. That cannot be overstated. TOTAL: 7. Nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood, and the Muppets are no exception.
Rizzo the Rat. TOTAL: 8. TOTAL: Clifford is a cool, catfish-looking Muppet who did fine as the host of Muppets Tonight , but never really found his place among the rest of the Muppets crew. People trust him because he looks like a scientist and also a honeydew, but his experiments are constantly leading to the pain and suffering of his assistant, Beaker!
A classic example of how male-coded Muppets who look like honeydews just keep failing upward. For Big Bird, Bear, Sweetums, and others, a single performer plays the character, providing both voice and movements, and that performer is almost always consistent.
The performer uses their dominant usually right hand to operate the mouth, eyes, and other facial mechanisms, pushing the hand into the head area, while the puppeteer's other arm usually left inhabits the character's other arm. The right arm for such characters, though very occasionally allowed to hang free, is generally controlled by a special monofilament which causes it to move in opposition to the left arm. Other times, as with the hand puppets, special camera techniques and computer tricks are used to allow an assistant to operate the other limbs.
Someone such as Mr. Snuffleupagus is operated by two performers, in the manner of a masquerade or circus horse, one operating the front end and face, and the other the back legs and tail.
With the exceptions of recasts or occasional substitutions, full-bodied puppeteers are usually consistently cast as their character, and indeed sometimes come to specialize in this variety of puppetry, as exemplified by Caroll Spinney Big Bird , Noel MacNeal Bear , or Richard Hunt Sweetums , allowing for the development of a consistent, familiar, and complex personality. Others, like Doglion or Timmy Monster , have often been handed over to whoever was available and could fit in the suit, and thus have remained basically background characters as opposed to stars.
The operation of a full-bodied character is more purely physical and hazardous in many ways, as the weight of the suit itself has to be taken into consideration many full-bodied Muppets weigh in excess of forty to sixty pounds.
The oppressive heat is also an occupational hazard, mediated in some cases by periodically cooling the performer with an air hose inserted into an opening in the character suit, thus allowing the puppeteer to continue performing without either getting in and out or collapsing from exhaustion and overheating.
The occasional inconvenience of full-bodied puppeteering was openly parodied in Puppetman , as performer Gary doesn't have time to undo the harnesses of Clyde , a 9 foot tall dragon character, and must rush to the hospital still in costume. Beginning with the Gorgs in Fraggle Rock , advances in technology allowed for a different way to operate full-bodied characters.
One performer, usually trained in pantomime or physical action, would wear the suit and perform all of the physical movements, with monitors embedded and raised within the heavily wired head allowing the performer to see out and also have their line of vision be identical with that of the character, a method Jim Henson dubbed "Gorg Vision. This technique was used extensively in Labyrinth , with additional performers assisting with the radio controls for even more complex movements, and for Ghost of Christmas Present in Muppet Christmas Carol.
For Dinosaurs and other Creature Shop productions, a third performer was usually involved, a voice actor , whose dialogue would generally be recorded over the original scratch track by the facial puppeteer. Betsy Baytos , being fitted with the different elements of Betsy Bird. At times, the voice and face are minimal factors at best.
Though the designs of the characters are as detailed and expressive as any other Muppet, the mouths, while often open, are seldom moved, allowing the dancer to focus on fully operating the character and moving all four limbs at the same time. Performers such as Graham Fletcher , with backgrounds in dance and ballet rather than puppetry, were frequently cast in these roles. Indeed, rather than creating a character and then finding a performer, the characters, notably Betsy and Fletcher, were often conceived and tailored to fit the actor, to best express their movements and style an approach which was not always fully successful.
In some ways, this was also the forerunner of the full-bodied characters used in Sesame Street Live and ice show productions, detailed but designed for body movement rather than expressive facial operations. With the exception of the two person Snuffy, the previously discussed characters are all upright and their movements are essentially exaggerations or caricatures of human motion, while incorporating certain aspects of the animal or creature they represent.
Other characters are more fully animal, performed by a single puppeteer who must crouch or otherwise operate the character in an even more difficult manner than the upright performers. Barkley walks on all fours, and essentially moves in much the way that a lumbering Saint Bernard would. Alice Snuffleupagus is likewise on all fours, yet her movements are not that of an animal as much as they are of a toddler, tumbling and rolling about.
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