Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1937 Porky's Hero Agency, directed by Bob Clampett.
Bob Clampett and members of his animation unit (Chuck Jones, Lu Guarnier, Robert "Bobe" Cannon, John Carey and Ernest Gee), appear as statues placed together to form a human picket fence.
The staff ofThe ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour is back from their summer vacations (I can not attest to whether or not they are happy about that fact.) Monty Python is never far from our thoughts We happily quote from them, time and again. This time we were excited to see an early precursor of Python, At Last the 1948 Show, starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman, and Aimi MacDonald floating around the intraweb. We thought we'd love to watch the first episode with you:
The series featured sketches and gags which the Monty Python team would go on to adopt, including the Hearing Aid and Contact Lens Show performed on Flying Circus, the Four Yorkshiremen routine and the Bookshop sketch ("Darles Chickens by Edmund Wells"), both of which were first done by the Pythons on Flying Circus record albums, as well as the line "And now for something completely different..." used in Flying Circus.
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1979 musical comedy The Muppet Movie, directed by James Frawley and starring the voices and puppetry talents of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, and Dave Goelz. The human cast features Charles Durning and Austin Pendleton, along with a dazzling array of cameos from Hollywood stars too numerous to count, including Orson Welles, Steve Martin, and Mel Brooks. The Muppet Movie serves as a whimsical origin story, chronicling how Kermit the Frog first sets out on his journey from a Florida swamp to Hollywood, meeting the rest of the Muppet gang along the way. The road trip narrative provides a loose but charming framework for musical numbers, comedy sketches, and the signature mix of sweetness and satire that made the Muppets a cultural phenomenon.
Upon its release, the film received glowing reviews from critics and audiences alike, praised for its clever writing, heartfelt performances, and infectious soundtrack, highlighted by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher’s Oscar-nominated song Rainbow Connection. For decades, the film stood as the highest-grossing puppet-based feature, a record it held until The Muppets (2011) brought the franchise back to the big screen. In recognition of its enduring cultural and historical significance, The Muppet Movie was selected in 2009 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. Please join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour and watch this fun family movie - The Muppet Movie.
The closing reprise of Rainbow Connection featured a crowd of more than 250 Muppet characters, virtually every Muppet that had been created up to that point in time. According to Jim Henson archivist Karen Falk: "One hundred thirty-seven puppeteers were enlisted from the Puppeteers of America (along with the regular Muppet performers) to perform every Muppet extant. Prior to the day-long filming of the shot, Henson gave the enthusiastic participants a lesson in the art of cinematic puppetry. Amazingly, it did take just one day." The Muppet Show Fan Club newsletter answered the question of "How did they do it?" The response was "There are 250 puppets in the last shot of the film, and they're all moving. How? One hundred fifty puppeteers in a six foot deep, 17-foot wide pit, that's how. They were recruited through the Los Angeles Guild of The Puppeteers of America and almost every puppeteer west of the Rockies reported for pit duty.".
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