A while back, I found the first two seasons of The Muppet Show on DVD on sale at a Borders, so I bought them. There were five seasons of the show in total. Season Three just came out on DVD (and I picked it up right away), but it will probably be another year or so before all five seasons make it to DVD.

Since Charlott’e summer vacation started, she and I have been watching one or two episodes almost every evening after dinner. These shows were made back when a season’s worth of episodes ran 26-30 programs, so Season One took quite a while to get through, and we are just getting warmed up on Season Two — last night it was Judy Collins. At the rate we’re going, we probably won’t get all the way through Season Three before school starts back up and her bedtime has to revert to 8:00.

Charlotte was not a big Sesame Street watcher as a toddler, so she’s not as thoroughly exposed to the Muppets as some kids might be. She did have an Elmo phase, and we did listen to some Sesame Street CDs in the car when she was a baby, so she wasn’t totally in the dark, but the Muppet Show characters are largely new discoveries for her. Being a Muppet myself, I am well-acquainted with all of them and their many and varied adventures, so I end up answering a lot of questions. You might enjoy this pair of posts at Mental Floss that explains the origins of many favorite Muppet characters from both Sesame Street and the Muppet Show.

The Muppet Show hit the airwaves when I was in eighth grade and ran through my senior year of high school, but I was a hopeless nerd, so rare was the Saturday night when I was not at home in front of the TV at 7:00 p.m. to watch that week’s episode. As we’ve been going through them, I find that I am often able to remember everything from an episode — the sketches, the running gags, the guest spots, all of it. I have to say that the two most important influences on my entire sense of humor are the Muppet Show and Looney Tunes (with Monty Python a close third). Anyone who knows me in real life will absolutely be able to confirm this for you.

What has been more interesting for me as we’ve watched the shows is to see the guest stars as they were 30 years ago. With every episode, I have to explain to Charlotte who the celebrity is. Many of them are long since dead and gone, and such is the nature of fame that names like Paul Williams, Kaye Ballard, and Avery Schreiber have not lasted into the 21st century with us. But even some of the eternally-famous people who guested on the Muppet Show (Milton Berle, Ethel Merman) are figures my child has never heard of at her tender age and require explanation. In fact, after we watched the Ethel Merman episode, I realized I myself knew nothing about her other than that she was a Broadway legend with a loud voice, and had to go read about her on Wikipedia to fill in my own knowledge gaps (BTW, this is the Ethel Merman Centennial Year).

When the celebrity is someone who still has fame and recognition today, seeing them 30 years younger is often a little bittersweet. For example, Twiggy was a first-season guest in 1976. Charlotte actually knows who Twiggy is because she and Bridget watch “America’s Next Top Model”, where until recently Twiggy had been one of the judges. So Charlotte thinks of Twiggy as a middle-aged woman, but in 1976 Twiggy was only 27 years old and was at a lull in her career. On the Muppet Show she was trying to remake herself as a singer and did an awful version of the Beatles’ “In My Life”, accompanied by a photo montage of her modeling heyday. Her singing career wasn’t terribly successful, and Charlotte couldn’t figure that out at all.

It’s also interesting to see the Muppet characters and the form and style of the show evolve. The early episodes almost don’t even seem like the same program, since many of the best characters, like Miss Piggy and Gonzo are still minor (in fact, right up until Season Two, Miss Piggy was sometimes performed by Frank Oz and sometimes by Richard Hunt, with very different characterizations). The Season One bonus disc includes the pilot for the series, which ran as a special on ABC in 1975 (and which I remembered clearly when I saw it again), and the concept was a bit different. Many of the elements of the pilot made it into the series, but then faded away as the series took on its own unique personality.

All in all, I am mightily pleased to be able to share such an important element of my later childhood in such a direct way with Charlotte. Telling her about things from the past, or taking her to places that have changed a lot since I was 13 is very different than watching these TV programs which are exactly as they were when Jimmy Carter was president. I hope she comes to treasure them as much.