It’s Time To Get Things Started

I watched some episodes of the original show (1976–1981) when I was a kid and it used to air on Nick at Night. When I rewatched them as a thirty-year-old, I was surprised how clearly I remembered entire songs or sketches that I hadn’t seen in at least twenty years. It was also interesting to see how many bits I remembered from episodes that I didn’t have any idea who the guest was, even now…

When I was six or seven, my cultural awareness of Elton John would have been great enough that seeing him play Crocodile Rock on The Muppet Show would have been something that made sense to remember, and I did. Got it. But just as clearly, I could completely recall Loretta Swit (still don’t know who she is) singing “I Feel The Earth Move” while Thog destroys the city and scenery around her like Godzilla (no clip available). It’s because of what Henson & Co. did to the context of the song, not vice versa. An adult would come to the scene already familiar with the song (and honestly, most kids in the 70s, but I was a kid in the 90s, watching a show from the 70s) and would see the video as an addition to the song. A child (me in the 90s or my daughter in the 10s) would absorb the two together as one package. I must have really liked Thog destroying the scenery or the song in particular, because it was like I had just watched it yesterday.

Some episodes led to ultra-thorough Wikipedia crawls, such as the episode featuring Paul Williams in the first season.

I knew the name Paul Williams from the most recent Daft Punk album, where his vocal and lyrical contribution to “Touch” make a stand out song on an album full of stand out songs. If you are only familiar with the hits on the album, I urge you to revisit it with a pair of headphones to better familiarize yourself with this song. I wrote it off at first, but my wife decided it was her favorite song on the album. I forced myself to listen to it through a few times, and then I started choosing to listen to it. Any time I throw the album on, there may be a song or two that I skip — “Touch” is never one of them. It is Daft Punk’s “Day in the Life.”

So when I watched the episode, I saw Paul Williams performing “An Old Fashioned Love Song.” At this point, I’m not even realizing that Paul Williams is the guy from the Daft Punk song, even though I should know that. And the thing about The Muppet Show’s guests is they all sing, even the ones who aren’t singers,* and sometimes they sing their own songs and sometimes they sing other people’s songs — it’s not like SNL where the musical guest is most likely promoting an album, and, nine times out of ten, playing two singles from the album. The Muppets would do anything. Lots and lots of show tunes from 1920s thru 40s that I was unfamiliar with — those are the songs they were most likely to give to people who were not singers per se, so that the cast could perform most of the work.

And I’m saying to myself… who does sing “An Old Fashioned Love Song”? I have no idea. And I find out it’s Three Dog Night, which makes sense because Three Dog Night is like Bob Seger or Supertramp or Neil Diamond — bands from before I was alive that aren’t The Beatles. But here’s the thing: Paul Williams wrote “An Old Fashioned Love Song.” And even better, he titled his version “(Just An) Old Fashioned Love Song” which is a total poetic nerdy touch that I completely adore.

This is the moment I realize that this Paul Williams is the Paul Williams from the Daft Punk record and of course, I’m pretty happy about this. Some may say stoked, some may use emojis. I tell my 10-month-old daughter, who probably did something unrelated, I don’t remember. She probably said “mmmmbababababbbammmm,” she was saying that a lot around that time. And I’m like cool, that’s a sweet modern connection. That’s something from now that I understand.

But then I clicked on something else, and I wound up on the Wikipedia page for Random Access Memories, reading the notes specifically about “Touch.” I note that the intro to the song, where the speaker of the lyrics repeats his words over and over, slowly become more clear every time, is apparently an homage to a sequence in the 1974 Brian De Palma film Phantom of the Paradise, which stars and features music by… (…all together now) Paul Williams.

To recap: I’m watching The Muppet Show from 1976. Paul Williams is on it. He sang a song on Daft Punks unanimously lauded Random Access Memories album in 2013. In the song, they reference an audio effect from a Brian De Palma 1974 film that he wrote the music for. If you’re like me, this is trivia gold. This is the good stuff.

But I’m saving the best part.

From a Daft Punk interview with The Guardian, 2007:

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter at the perfect cinema-going ages of 13 and 12… The one movie which they saw together more than 20 times was Phantom Of The Paradise, Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock musical, based loosely around Phantom of the Opera [which] features “a hero with a black leather outfit and a helmet.”

The Daft Punk guys wear helmets because Paul Williams starred in a weird musical horror film in the 70s with a character who wears a helmet and black leather. And then 40 years later, they cut a record with him.

I watched 120 episodes of The Muppet Show, googling all along the way. I can’t say that every episode of the show was quite so revelatory, but it was well worth the experience. It makes me all the more upset that The Jim Henson Hour and other projects from the Muppets’ past are completely missing from the home video market — I was able to find Muppets Tonight due to the ingenuity of Internet pirates. Muppet Pirates? Because that show wasn’t even ever released on VHS. Makes you wonder how in the world a copy is even floating around the Internet, when the show stopped airing in 1992…