Cheap The Muppet Show - Season One (Special Edition) (DVD) (Frank Oz, Jim Henson) (Peter Harris, Philip Casson) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Muppet Show - Season One (Special Edition)

Nostalgia at Its Finest
Ahh, yes... nostalgia. When I was a kid I would watch The Muppet Show and laugh and laugh and laugh. Now, as an adult, I find myself again laughing and laughing and laughing. The weirder part is, the stuff I'm laughing at doesn't seem to be the same things I remember laughing at as a kid. <
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>The Muppet Show Season One comes with twenty-four episodes, plus the original pilot, a pitch reel, a promo gag reel, and my personal favorite part, "Muppet Morsels" mode. Muppet Morsels mode is kind of like the old VH1 television show "Pop-Up Video" that gives you interesting facts and points out errors that a lot of people wouldn't otherwise have caught. I found myself a lot of times reading what a fact said, then having to go back just to see what it said. There's a lot of things like "Look! There's Jim Henson's head in the background. Oops!" or the running count of the number of times Miss Piggy karate chopped someone. It's really a cool feature. <
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>I think I actually prefer the on-screen commentary vs a separate audio track for commentary. When you have a secondary audio being played over top of the screen, a lot of the time it's hard for me to follow along with what's going on because it's hard to make out the dialogue sometimes. I'd always find myself watching commentaries with subtitles on, so this is an easier, more convenient way for me to do this. I am a fan of both methods of commentary, but I am thinking it is a better way to have it pop up onto the screen for you to read. <
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>Another feature I would have liked to have seen would be a separate video angle from the performers perspective. As an adult, I now realize that Muppets aren't actually real, which is something I didn't seem to get when I was five years old sitting in front of the TV watching Big Bird talk about Snuffy on Sesame Street. With that being said, it would really be cool that if any kind of video footage exists of the under the stage performers, they should try to integrate that into the releases of the remaining seasons of the show. <
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>When it came down to the actual shows, I found a lot of the performances by the guest stars to really be dated, but that's to be expected since the shows were originally aired almost thirty years prior. For the most part though, the Muppet-exclusive performances still stand the test of time. One of the things I learned after getting this set was there were skits created exclusively for the United Kingdom. I'm not sure why they actually did this, but it could be due to the requirement of having to fill time that would otherwise be filled with commercials here in the United States. <
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>My favorite skits out of the entire season were: Mahna Mahna (Episode 1), all of the Swedish Chef skits, as well as the facts I'd learned about them, the Fozzie Bear heckling. My favorite episode overall would probably be the Bruce Forsyth episode (#13). <
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>The Muppet Show Season One is a buy. I loved it all, despite the amount of time it took me to watch the entire four disc set.

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We are not amused
Maybe after I take some time to watch the whole set I'll feel better about this, but right now all I feel is ripped off. <
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>I watched this show with my daughter when it first aired. She was 6 at the time. I bought Season 1, looking forward to watching it with *her* daughter. I was especially looking forward to seeing the episode with Charles Aznavour. I had fond memories of him singing Dance In the Old Fashioned Way to Miss Piggy, although I could be wrong, because for some reason, that segment of the show seems to have been replaced by a band singing Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the Bedpost Over Night? <
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>*Not* what I was expecting, and if I'd known the sequence was going to be cut, (leaving me to wonder what else may have been cut) I'd have saved my money and bought King Kong in the fall. <
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>As far as I'm concerned, this was a disappointment.

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Content 5, packaging 3
First, the actual Muppet episodes are just as good as they were when first broadcast, almost thirty years ago now. And it is great to watch the first season and see the characters develop before your eyes (Miss Piggy, Gonzo and Fozzie were to look and behave considerably different before the show ended, five years later.) <
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>The video comments on the episodes are nice, but I am very sorry to hear that certain musical numbers have been deleted to save money on rights payments. <
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>But my biggest complaint is that the MS is basically a musical variety show and we all have certain numbers that we love and would want to watch over and over again. This set makes it very difficult, because the episodes have no chapter stops, none at all. The previous release by Time-Life of about a third of the episodes were far from ideal, but they did include about half a dozen chapter stops in each episode, so you could quickly access and watch your favorite bits. <
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>I am annoyed that they didn't bother to include chapter stops, the cost of which would have practically nothing, but they did see fit to put in an annoying "coming attractions" feature, which starts off the disc play and which you have to override every single time to go straight to the episodes.