User:MuppetArchives/Today on Muppet Wiki

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June 2008

• July 1 • Stars & Stripes FOREVER! is a YouTube video starring Sam the Eagle, a penguin, the Swedish Chef, Bobo the Bear, Beaker and Animal. The video was posted on June 27, 2008, as the Muppets' celebration of the Fourth of July. The clip was posted by "Patrioticeagle", Sam's YouTube account.

• June 30 • The Elmo & Friends House is a portable children's playhouse made by PlayHut. The playhouse features images of Elmo and his Sesame Street friends -- Zoe, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, Ernie and Super Grover.

• June 29 • Splash is a 1984 movie about a boy who falls in love with the mermaid who saved him from drowning. Muppet Magazine spoofed the story in a comic called "Splatt!" whereupon Baby Piggy falls in love with Baby Kermit in the swamp. As adults, the two seek each other out and decide their fate after a brief encounter with Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker.

• June 21 • The Sesame Street laundromat is a place on Sesame Street where its residents can do their laundry. The location features prominently at the beginning of The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland during the last half of the song "Together Forever." At this time, the laundromat was located across the street from 123 Sesame Street. Beginning with Season 39, the laundormat has been moved next to Hooper's Store, where Leela serves as its proprietor.

• June 20 • The Incredible Hulk is a Marvel Comics superhero created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1962. The last issue of the first volume of comic books featured a character from alter-ego Bruce Banner's subconscious mind, that closely resembles Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch, while the latest Hollywood movie includes footage of Grover singing "Over, Under, Around and Through." The Hulk himself even appeared in a sixth season episode of Muppet Babies to greet Baby Rowlf on the elevator.

• June 19 • Marvin Suggs is an abusive percussionist who made several appearances on The Muppet Show with his Muppaphone. Performer Frank Oz recalls that he'd "always felt Marvin lived in a scuzzy trailer park with his put-upon wife, and he kept the Muppaphones in a cage and would beat them regularly."

• June 15 • Today's Secret Drawing was a recurring animated segment on Sesame Street. The inserts, in which a drawing would gradually form a recognizable letter, object, or person, debuted in Season 2.

• June 14 • Arthur Fiedler 1894 - 1979) was conductor of the Boston Pops from 1930 until his death in 1979. During his time with the ensemble, he made many popular orchestral recordings as well as family and children's records, some of which featured music from Sesame Street.

• June 13 • Which is your favorite Murray: Murray the Minstrel, Murray Monster, Murray the Mediocre, Murray Beethoven, Little Murray Sparkles, or just plain Murray?

• June 12 • An oubliette is a dark pit, a dungeon with no doors, featured in the movie Labyrinth. The only obvious way in or out of an oubliette is through a hole in the ceiling, which is also the only source of light for any of its occupants.

• June 11 • Styles Silverbark is the pitbull who owns station WFIDO, as seen in the Dog City episode "Radio Daze." A budget conscious dog, Silverbark hires Ace Hart because of his low rates.

• June 10 • Music Maker is a Sesame Street CD-ROM game for home computers developed by Encore Software and Sesame Workshop. Elmo, Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Grover host a musical activity center with 8 activities to introduce music concepts including tempo, pitch, and unusual instruments.

• June 9 • Billy Crystal (b. 1947), is an Emmy Award winning comedian, and actor. He was also the guest-star on episode 103 of Muppets Tonight.

• June 8 • The Rocks of the Labyrinth seemingly come alive when Ludo calls for them, and they were largely responsible for the defeat of the Goblin Army.

• June 7 • Sesame Street coloring books There's nothing like a fresh box of crayons and a new (or old!) coloring book to make your inner-5-yr-old happy.

• June 6 • Bo Diddley was an influential rock and roll singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He appeared in a 1991 Sesame Street sketch spoofing Bo Jackson's "Bo Knows" commercial. He also appeared in that season's celebrity version of "Monster in the Mirror."

• June 5 • The Addams Family was a television sitcom based on recurring, but previously nameless, characters in the works of cartoonist Charles Addams. In the mid-90's, the Sesame Street human cast starred in a sitcom sketch featuring an addition-loving family known as the Add-ems Family.

• June 4 • John Williams is a film composer who appeared in a Boston Pops special to introduce the Sesame Street characters as featured in an Evening at Pops performance. Williams is famous for his movies themes from Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and Superman.

• June 3 • "Cuanto Le Gusta" was performed by Miss Piggy and a chorus of Spanish-themed pigs in a second season episode of The Muppet Show. Miss Piggy is upstaged midsong by a trumpeter who performs upside down. At the end of the number, she is lifted into the air by the other pigs, who promptly drop her as they take their bows.

• June 2 • Harvey Korman (1927-2008) was a popular TV actor who specialized in broad comic characterizations. He guest starred on the first season of The Muppet Show in a circus act with Thog, and later voiced the Dictabird in the Creature Shop effects movie The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.

• June 1 • Miss Piggy in a carrot was released as a plush toy by Nanco. The vegetable is equipped with a steering wheel implying that the object can be driven, although it lacks wheels. Piggy wears a purple dress, hat and gloves as she drives about. The plush stands approximately 1' high and omits a mouth for its driver.

May 2008

• May 31 • Jim Henson's Muppets for GameBoy was released in 2000. Kermit and Animal have to rescue their friends, who are transferred back in time by Bunsen's time machine.

• May 30 • Ethyl Phillips neé Hinkleman, is the cranky mother of Fran Sinclair on Dinosaurs. Seventy-two-year-old Ethyl is wheelchair-bound, but still takes regular swipes at son-in-law Earl Sinclair with her cane.

• May 29 • Sesame Street Cast in Other Roles Were you ever watching a movie or tv show and thought you saw a familiar face from Sesame Street?? You just might have!

• May 28 • Uncle Slim is Big Bird's uncle, a "cowbird" from Wyoming.

• May 27 • Stargate SG-1 is a science-fiction television series. In its later seasons, two cast members from Farscape were part of the regular cast, and its 200th episode featured an elaborate spoof of that show.

• May 26 • Freddy, is Telly Monster's doll. He even has his own superhero persona!

• May 25 • SkekZok is the court Ritual Master for the race of Skeksis in The Dark Crystal. His Mystic counter-part is urZah, the Ritual-Guardian. His status ammong the Skeksis was gained through lies and invented prophecies.

• May 24 • Little Bird first appeared on Sesame Street in Season 1, and was often used as a foil to Big Bird, due to their contrasting sizes. Although Little Bird appeared on Sesame Street most often during the 1970s, the character continued to appear frequently in books and merchandise throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

• May 23 • "In the Navy" was sung by a group of Viking Pigs who took several animals from a small village to their ships in episode 524 of The Muppet Show.

• May 22 • Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a television game show which offers a maximum cash prize of one million dollars for correctly answering successive multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty. On November 14, 2000, Kermit the Frog appeared in the audience as a guest of Jon Stewart.

• May 21 • Whose Line Is It Anyway?, is an improvisational game show which has frequently referenced the Muppets.

• May 20 • The Muppet Show: Season Three was released on DVD today. All 24 episodes of The Muppet Show in its third year, featuring Cheryl Ladd, Jean Stapleton's team-up with Crazy Harry, the debut of Lew Zealand, the Muppet version of Robin Hood, and more. If that's not enough, the DVD includes Rowlf's commercials for Purina and The Muppets on Puppets. Yaaaaay!

• May 19 • "Sing" is Joe Raposo's famous exhortation to sing a song (a simple one to last your whole life long, even). The song has been performed countless times on Sesame Street and related specials, including several celebrity rounds. It's been adapted for Spanish and American Sign Language and was famously covered by the Carpenters.

• May 18 • Ed Grimley: Flash back yet again to the 1980s, when Martin Short's Ed Grimley character was a beloved icon and popped up all over the air-waves, from SCTV to Saturday Night Live to his own Saturday morning cartoon. Naturally, he dropped by Sesame Street during this time. In 1996, in his last known television appearance to date, Ed Grimley surfaced on Muppets Tonight, in which he weds Miss Piggy in a quicky marriage (performed by Ed's goldfish).

• May 17 • Law & Order, the long-running police procedural franchise set in New York City, shares studio space at Kaufman-Astoria with Sesame Street. As a result, many Sesame cast members have appeared in tertiary episodic roles on the various L&O shows. In reruns, keep an eye out for Sonia Manzano on the witness stand, Roscoe Orman as a judge, Emilio Delgado an attorney, Alison Bartlett a police officer, and Fran Brill as the defendant's mother (twice!) To return the favor, Sesame Street spoofed Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as "Special Letters Unit," with particular emphasis on the show's infamous transition sound. Chung-chung!

• May 16 • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first book in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series. In the 1990s, Jim Henson's Creature Shop worked on an aborted film adaptation, to be directed by John Boorman. The shop supplied animatronic puppets for Aslan and the beavers, costumes for fauns and the wolfman Fenris, and digital graphics for the centaurs. In 2005, Disney finally brought the Narnia books to the big screen, and the second film, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, opens today in the US.

• May 15 • Kookie Cookie is a Milton Bradley card game produced in 1980. The game follows a Cookie Monster theme, of course, and even the letter Os in the box name become Cookie's googly eyes. Google google!

• May 14 • Vincent Grass is a Belgian actor who voiced Gobo Fraggle in the French co-production of Fraggle Rock. In addition to dubbing the likes of Hugo Weaving and Stephen Fry into French, Grass has appeared in many English-language films and TV productions. Starting Friday, he can be seen as Doctor Cornelius in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

• May 13 • Walt Kelly was the animator and cartoonist who created the famed comic strip Pogo. He was a major influence on Jim Henson, and several Songs of the Pogo surfaced on The Muppet Show. Jim's early sketchbooks even include renderings of such Kelly characters as Grundoon and Sarcophagus MacAbre. If Pogo's for President, who's for vice?

• May 12 • "Halfway Down the Stairs" is sung by Robin the Frog in episode 110 of The Muppet Show. The lyrics are from an A. A. Milne poem, and the tune was written by Harold Fraser-Simpson, who put many of Milne's poems to music.

• May 11 • The Finger of Light is a natural phenomenon in Fraggle Rock which plays a key role in the traditional game/ceremony enacted on Ruler of the Rock Day.

• May 10 • Henson's Place: The Man Behind the Muppets is a 52-minute documentary that was made in 1984. It covers the career of Jim Henson and the Muppets, starting from its inception up to his planning of Labyrinth.

• May 9 • Muppet Show Musicians: Did you ever wonder exactly who was playing the instruments you heard on The Muppet Show?? Go find out!

• May 8 • Indiana Jones is a fictional professor of archaeology, adventurer, and the main protagonist of the "Indiana Jones" franchise. He has been referenced and spoofed repeatedly by the Muppets.

• May 7 • Ricardo Mendoza is a Mexican voice actor who has dubbed Oscar the Grouch and Baby Bear on Plaza Sésamo, Rosita's dad Ricardo in the resource video Talk, Listen, Connect: Changes, and Easy Pete in Los Muppets en la Isla del Tesoro (Muppet Treasure Island).

• May 6 • Mimsy is Elmo's cousin. She appears in Sesame Street Episode 3729 to attend the Monster Moon Watch, which is being held on Sesame Street this year in honor of Slimey's mission to the moon.

• May 5 • Hercules is Herry Monster's monster doll. He has been featured with Herry in "Guys and Dolls", "Song for Two", and "Moonshine".

• May 4 • Stu Rosen is an actor, voice artist, and voice director who voiced Storyteller Fraggle on the animated version of Fraggle Rock. Rosen also served as voice director for the series.

• May 3 • Henry Kissinger is a diplomat who has been referenced several times by the Muppets. For example, Gonzo and Rizzo come across his book "Diplomacy" in a trunk in Muppet Treasure Island.

• May 2 • Sesame Place Presidential Election: On May 7, 1988, visitors at Sesame Place got their first taste of the elective process as they used real voting machines to cast their vote for one of seven famous Sesame Street Muppet characters as "President".

• May 1 • Dwight Hemion, was a television director, working mostly on variety shows, who holds the all-time one-person record for most Emmy Award nominations, with 47, and winning 18 times. Hemion directed the 1973 special Julie on Sesame Street, and the 1974 special Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.

More "Today on Muppet Wiki"

• "Today on Muppet Wiki" nominations
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• Archive #7: May - June 2007
• Archive #8: July - August 2007
• Archive #9: September - October 2007
• Archive #10: November - December 2007
• Archive #11: January - February 2008
• Archive #12: March - April 2008