I recently purchased The Muppet Show, Season One on DVD. This TV program holds a special place in my psyche, as I’m sure it does in the minds of many people. (The DVD cover proclaims The Muppet Show to be the most popular television show ever. I’m not sure how you verify something like that, but at the height of its popularity, The Muppet Show was seen by an estimated 250 million viewers in 102 countries.) I distinctly remember making sure not to take too long with my evening bath on whatever weeknight it came on—which also happened to be bath night—so that I would be allowed to stay up and watch the weekly 7:30 p.m. episode. I was six. For me, The Muppet Show is the definitive Muppet experience; I’m a bit too old to have seen Fraggle Rock, I don’t recall ever seeing a single episode of Muppets Tonight and I’m proud to say I missed Muppet Babies as well.

Of course, watching the same episodes I saw as a kid almost thirty years later, I’ve got a slightly different perspective. Here are some of my observations and impressions, interspersed with some facts I’ve gleaned from the DVD:

• The Muppet Show is properly understood in the context of the 1970s variety show. These shows are now extinct, but in 1976, when the show debuted, they were still all the rage, with Captain and Tennille, Sonny and Cher, and Donny and Marie all having shows in prime time. Although the show also borrowed from vaudeville and sketch comedy, the format was variety show.
• Within the variety show format, the early emphasis was song-and-dance numbers (a surprising number of which are played totally straight, such as Twiggy singing the Beatles’ “In My Life” with photos from her modeling career superimposed on one side of the screen.) This may explain why the first season’s guest star list had a heavy emphasis on singers, dancers and stage actors. It could also be that it was easier to get bigger stars to agree to go on prime time television with a bunch of puppets once the show had established itself as a hit. (Where later seasons would see big-time stars like Peter Sellers, Steve Martin and John Denver, season one settles for Harvey Korman, Valerie Harper and Paul Williams.)
• A lot of the sketches have a frenetic energy that I didn’t remember from when I was a kid. Sometimes they start and stop very quickly and often the sketches just sort of cut off in the middle (usually to cut to some backstage B-story). The pacing reminds me of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which preceded it by several years.

• The theme song remains one of the all-time great TV theme songs. It also bears more than a little in common with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band,” with both tunes having the same vaudevillian flavor and serving the same purpose. Bear with me, but try to hold the bridges of both songs in your mind at the same time (”It’s wonderful to be here/It’s certainly a thrill” and “Why do we always come here/I guess we’ll never know”—Statler and Waldorf’s inverted version of the Beatles’ bridge), and I think you’ll see that they’re really pretty similar. Also, consider this bit of trivia: the bass player in Dr. Teeth’s band is named Sgt. Floyd Pepper. Hardly a coincidence. (Oh yeah, and Floyd’s also pink.)
• The first sketch of the first show produced (though it actually aired later in the season) was the now-famous “Mah Na Mah Nah.” The Muppets had previously performed this routine on the Ed Sullivan Show. Even more trivia: thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that the pop-song “Mah Na Mah Nah” debuted on the soundtrack of an Italian softcore pornographic film “Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso” (Sweden, Heaven and Hell).
• Statler and Waldorf are a brilliant addition to the cast. Their segues and meta-criticism of the show keep everything flowing nicely. More trivia: Waldorf’s sister is named (of course), Astoria and is married to Statler. The two hecklers are easily one of the show’s most enduring features.

• Aside from a lot of cringe-worthy punning, the humor of The Muppet Show involves lots of conflict. Kermit yells at nearly everyone, Miss Piggy yells at (and fawns over) Kermit, and Sam the Eagle gets indignant at just about everything. Also, the Muppets get a lot of humor from things blowing up.
• Season one picks the show up with some of the elements not quite fully formed, though it’s fun to see the characters and various bits of shtick take shape. We have “Veterinarian’s Hospital” (instead of the “quack” that’s gone to the dogs, it starts out as the less-funny “former orthopedic surgeon”), but no “Pigs in Space.” Dr. Bunson Honeydew has some skits, but there’s no Beaker. By season two (not yet released on DVD) everything is pretty much rolling.

• The DVD has a few notable special features. “Muppet Morsels” is a Pop-Up Video style subtitled commentary that is at times interesting, but at other times almost painfully mundane, offering even unnecessary explanations. (For example one title explains what a “punchline” is. Really.) The Muppet Morsels could have also used a bit more in the way of production values—the graphics are plain and unappealing. There is also the short pitch reel that Henson used to try to convince TV execs to buy the show. There’s also a very odd original pilot, starring a stage manager character named Nigel. (Kermit isn’t the star at all and makes only a single cameo appearance in an early version of the “At the Dance” sketch, offering to get a young woman a role in “an educational children’s programming” show.
• Each episode also includes a segment that aired only on British television (presumably because the British version—the first season was actually filmed in England and imported to the States via syndication—were aired without commercials and needed to be a little longer than the U.S. versions. The U.K. segment is almost invariably a musical number involving only Muppets.

In all, the Season One DVD is a nice purchase if, like me, you have a strong sense of nostalgia for characters like Gonzo and Rowlf the Dog. It’s also worth getting for kids. My children all like it, even though none of them had ever seen the show before.