Yeah, it seemed a little over the top. But maybe they were just having a really good time!

Did it seem to anyone else like Max took a leap toward puberty during the holiday hiatus? His voice sounded more change-y than ever.

How many times have you awakened at night in the dark and said to yourself, "Is there a gorilla in here?"

But the cat from The Muppet Musicians of Bremen is there too. Why is a cat singing to Lassie?

They probably thought of the first Talking Houses joke, and then immediately told the workshop to build the puppets. And then it wasn't until they had already been built at considerable expense that the writers realized they only had the one joke, so then they had to keep using them for the rest of the season.

Wasn't it because that Hendricks guy got there before the IMF team, and took them?

Just a few years back, there was a live stage musical of Emmett Otter produced by the Jim Henson Company at a theater in Connecticut.  The story opened with puppet versions of Emmett and Ma on the river before segueing to live actors in costumes… and the puppets they used were the very ones from the TV special, still…

Wow, I never even noticed that.  It must be great to have an acting gig that lets you play really good guys and really bad guys in the same production.

Have you guys seen the outtakes?

I've always liked the fact that the Riverbottom Nightmare Band wins the contest not by cheating, which would have been an easy but lazy development, but because they're actually good.  Also, I love the fish Muppet in the Riverbottom band, who doesn't play an instrument, but thrashes around in a tank of actual water…

Okay, the Gary Cahuenga episode sucks.  But the Daryl Hannah episode is mostly a story that takes place outside the variety show, focusing on Johnny Fiama and Sal, and I think it works pretty well, both at being funny and at making Sal a sympathetic character. Probably the only reason Daryl Hannah and her extremely…

Leno's probably the king of those "…as himself" fictional monologue-joke appearances. I think it would be fun to put together a bunch of those and make a Sporcle quiz challenging people to identify the movie from Leno's joke.

I'd love to see a new Muppet TV series, but not "The Muppet Show Again!"  A show taking place in the Muppet Theater with the same format would only draw comparisons to the original, and it would be almost impossible to live up to expectations.

Hmmm… I thought it was more like, "How did your parents happen to be living in Paris when you were born?" but she thinks he means "How were you born?" and answers "The usual way," meaning…. you know, the way most people come out when they're born.

Sandy Duncan is much more entertaining than you would expect her to be. Not that she's not talented… I just always thought of her as the Wheat Thins girl who replaced Valerie Harper on that show I didn't watch.

The only practical joke I recall was one where they put Dick Butkis into some kind of full-body cast under the pretense of it being some kind of fitting for an acting role, and then everyone just left.  It seemed more scary than funny to me at the time.

She's the only Muppet who ever got her own calendar.

I wasn't really moved by "Rainbow Connection" in the movie. We've heard it before, and it seemed like a really obvious choice for that scene.  So I didn't mind the cut to Animal and Floyd.

I'm pretty sure it was actual magic.

A few years into the run of this series, I heard on the radio that the moose from the opening credits had died.  It was sad.