Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
This week’s quick rec is “Golden Lady”, track four from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 LP “Innervisions”. I’ve been listening to it loads recently. Just perfection, from that gently euphoric piano intro—the sound of slowly waking up in the morning, and knowing that you’re going to have a pretty good day—onwards. Treat yourself:
Regular readers of this letter will know that I sometimes use the space to resurface old pieces of mine that haven’t made it online. This week, I’m exhuming a piece from 2014 that I really enjoyed researching and writing: a short essay on Jim Henson’s early effort Sam and Friends, originally published in the Muppets Most Wanted print issue of Little White Lies magazine. Enjoy!
For the world of puppetry—and entertainment at large—it could have been so different. “In school I didn’t take puppetry seriously,” Jim Henson once told an interviewer, “It didn’t seem like the sort of thing a grown man works at for a living.” Fortunately that changed when Henson, then a university freshman, was offered the chance to create a 5-minute puppet show entitled Sam and Friends for WRC-TV, Washington, D.C.'s NBC affiliate.
It ran for six years between 1955 and 1961 and became hugely popular, winning an Emmy Award for Best Local Entertainment Program in 1959. Henson needn’t have worried about being taken seriously, either: by the late ‘50s, when the average college student was making minimum wage in menial jobs, Henson was raking in $5,200 a year to perform on TV. Most importantly, with Sam and Friends, Henson grasped a valuable opportunity to develop his skills and singular wit before becoming a major presence on the national stage.
Sam and Friends coincided with the rise in popularity of television, and Henson was fascinated by the possibilities offered by the still-fledgling medium. Though television puppetry existed in the mid-50s, it looked stuffy and stilted, consisting of little more than filmed puppet shows with blocky characters (consider Britain’s contemporaneous Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men for contrast).
With his first show, Henson wanted to dispense with visible strings, and elevate TV puppetry to an illusory art form. He twigged that there was no need to mask or hide the performers provided they were out of camera range, and pioneered the technique of simultaneously watching the action on a monitor and performing. This enabled the puppets to be filmed just like actors in films or live action TV (including close-ups), and meant that the frame could be rigorously controlled to complement the unfolding action.
Henson’s intelligent use of the frame—canny manipulation of depth of field; a surprise edit from a close-up to wide shot to reveal that a potential shootout between muppets is actually a harmless game of chess—can be seen clearly in the surviving episodes, a few of which are available on YouTube. When one considers the eventual formal diversity of the Hensonian empire (film, stage, live actor integration, 3D) such trailblazing hardly seems surprising.
In order to make visually attractive puppets with expressiveness and sensitivity, Henson crafted his Sam and Friends characters from flexible, fabric-covered foam rubber. It’s clear that these characters were forerunners of Henson’s now-beloved Muppets. The eponymous Sam (a bald humanoid with a boxer’s nose) is something of an outlier, but others are easier to pinpoint. The rotund creature Mushmellon bears a striking resemblance to Oscar the Grouch, while the consumptive growler Yorick is an obvious precursor to Cookie Monster. However, the most notable character is the only one who would graduate to full-time Muppethood: Kermit, then blue instead of green, and more of a lizard than a frog.
Also notable in Sam and Friends are early signs of Henson’s trademark brand of sweet, antic, and layered comedy, which would appeal equally to adults and children. Early episodes mainly featured the characters lip-synching to popular songs (often deliberately badly for comic effect), but later ones relied more on wordplay and the vocal talents of Henson and his future wife Jane. The jokes are often satirically referential of contemporary pop culture—one episode, “Powder Burn”, is a riff on TV western Gunsmoke—and this topical approach would one day be seen in the likes of Sesame Street, and non-Henson family shows like The Simpsons.
Sam and Friends’ humor could also be dazzlingly esoteric. The episode “Visual Thinking” features Kermit and Harry the Hipster, a black-polo-necked Beat poet creature, attempting “image visualization”—conjuring images by simply dreaming them up. The louche Harry uses jazz scatting to make scrawled, thought-bubble images appear on the screen, which he can only erase by scatting backwards (achieved here by tape backmasking, as heard on The Beatles’ trippy song “Tomorrow Never Knows”). But an increasingly panicked Harry can’t remember what he’s been scatting, and his frenzied attempts to backtrack only add to the scrawls on the screen, which eventually engulf the characters. The sketch is funny, but it’s also unexpectedly haunting: a satire of artistic pretension and, perhaps, the the deleterious effects of too many drugs?
It’s safe to say that despite its widespread popularity, this was daring stuff. And in Sam and Friends’ final episode in December 1961, Henson had his furry characters nihilistically blow up the set with dynamite. With a move to New York on the cards and the Muppets Inc. company by now established, this was the confident act of a man who knew he was only getting started. It was time for bigger, better and altogether Muppetier things.
Last but not least this week, I’d like to give a shout out to one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read all year: “Digital Rocks”, a long essay by Will Tavlin that was first published in issue 42 of n+1 magazine. Subtitled “How Hollywood killed celluloid”, Tavlin’s piece is a deeply-researched and -reported, and cogently argued account of the long, slow, and essentially now complete takeover of digital technology in the sphere of cinema exhibition in America, and that takeover’s troubling effect on myriad aspects of the cinema-going experience. It’s not an uplifting read, but it is sobering, thoughtful, and very informative. Here’s a brief excerpt from the top of the piece:
The digital revolution transformed nearly every aspect of filmmaking for Hollywood and independent filmmakers alike. Netflix’s rise from a fringe DVD rental service to dominant streamer — in whose steps studios like Warner Bros. are now desperate to follow — was just one of many outcomes that unfolded in DCI [Digital Cinema Initiatives]’s wake: archiving film assets became prohibitively expensive; independent theaters withered; thousands of projectionists lost their jobs.
This revolution was invisible, and it was designed to be that way. Its success depended on audiences never noticing at all.
Thanks, as always, for reading. Until next week!
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