he thought of a prime-time variety show hosted by puppets seems a bit silly today. It's not exactly like the TV market is knocking down the doors of puppeteers and asking them to create a show for a wide audience that stars puppets with top-of-the-line guest stars doing comedy sketches and playing the straight man to fluffy monsters and weird creatures with hands up their backs.
But 1977 was a strange time. Jim Henson's Muppets, internationally famous for their childrens' show Sesame Street, took the world by storm in what was one of the most popular variety shows in television history. Actors, singers, the famous, all lined up to star on this series, in which Kermit the Frog, fresh from Sesame Street, tried to maintain a run-down theater and provide gainful employment for his freaky friends while providing entertainment for the masses.
And it worked. Bizarre as it all sounds, it actually worked. For five seasons.
Besides the amazing pool of talented guest stars, from Avery Schreiber and Ben Vereen to Lena Horne, Vincent Price, Steve Martin and John Cleese, a veritable who's who of Hollywood in the late 1970s, the show had charming regulars such as Miss Piggy, Sam the Eagle, Fozzy Bear and, of course, bizarre experimental scientist Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his hapless assistant, Beaker. (The scientists are also the lead characters in the MGM Disney theme park's 3-D film "Muppet-Vision 3-D.")
So wildly popular were these characters that just recently, in the late summer of 2004, Honeydew and Beaker took top honors in the BBC web site poll for the U.K.'s Top Screen Scientist, with a vote of 33 percent among more than 43,000 voters. The competition included Dr. Frankenstein, Mister Spock, Doctor Who and Dr. Strangelove, among prominent others.
Palisades Toys has been producing toys based on The Muppet Show for a few years now. Considering the result of the BBC's contest, it is worth looking at one of their early sets, "Muppets Labs."
Packaged in a large window box, the set includes a "pressure chamber," working levers, a swivel experiment table with straps, an electrode helmet, a gorilla detector and, exclusive to this set—Beaker, faithful assistant to Bunsen Honeydew. Honeydew himself is not included with the set but is sold separately with a robotic bunny in the very first wave of figures from Palisades.
It's time to get things started
Palisades hit the mark with the look of this set. The floor is made of dull-colored tiles in drab green and grungy gold, with grimy green walls and frosted glass windows. Retro-styled equipment is molded into the walls and attached to the floor, including two panels that have working levers. Everything seems to be designed in metal with bolts. The lab table at the front of the set shows dials and gadgets and features a complex set of beakers, test tubes and "glass" tubing—an experiment in progress.
Painted in aged copper, the "metal" parts include piping and electrodes and levers. The pressure chamber resembles something from Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Ray Harryhausen's design of the capsule in the 1964 film The First Men in the Moon—almost bathyspheric, an octagonal half-shell also molded with plates and bolts and featuring a hemispheric bubble window at front.
The lab table that comes with the set resembles nothing less than the famed table used by Dr. Frankenstein to bring to life his monstrous creation. Built of stressed wooden boards on a bolted-metal frame with gears at the hinging point, the table has "leather straps" to hold the victim—I mean experiment subject—in place while he's being experimented on. Rubber tubes run from what appears to be a generator or power supply at the back to a metal helmet that fits over the head of the unfortunate subject.
Also with the set comes a rotocast gorilla detector. To quote Bunsen: "Think of the safety! Think of the sense of well-being! At last your family can be protected from the heartbreak of gorilla invasion!"
Finally comes the piece de la resistance of this set—hapless and eager assistant Beaker. The resemblance this figure holds to the original muppet is quite impressive. A tall, thin, geeky nerd with pale green lab coat and saddle shoes, Beaker has the characteristic upturned mouth, googly eyes and shock of bright red hair.
Beaker's head turns, his shoulders and elbows are jointed, his wrists and legs rotate. He fits well on the experimental table, and he has that delightful shocked and frightened look on his face that we so often see as Dr. Honeydew reveals his experimental plans. He also can be fitted into the pressure chamber, where his desperate expression can be seen in the glass bubble window (if inserted upside down.)
This set has no electronics, no gimmicks. It is what it is—a simple playset with figure and accessories that will be a delight to anyone who happened to catch this phenomenon when it first aired.
Not as fully featured as their later "Swedish Chef's Kitchen" or the "Pigs in Space" playset, it is also less expensive. And with this first effort, you can see that Palisades started out of the gate strong and only proceeded to got stronger.
Bunsen Honeydew, sold separately, is also a must-have for this playset.
