Before The Muppet Show, the now-iconic Muppets had an unsuccessful run on Saturday Night Live, but Jim Henson was able to apply the sketch’s ideas toward future works like The Dark Crystal. Henson spent years developing his puppet characters before their breakout success on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Beginning with commercials and local television in the 1950s, Henson experimented with how puppets could be represented on camera. He built the original Muppets with flexible faces and limbs on rods to allow for a greater range of expression and movement. Henson’s creations were more lifelike and engaging to watch than the marionettes and ventriloquist’s dummies typically seen on television at the time. The energetic nature of early Muppet performances clearly struck a chord with audiences, and they became familiar guests on programs like The Ed Sullivan Show.
By 1969, Jim Henson was already making waves in the entertainment world. He was approached by the Children’s Television Workshop to work on Sesame Street and eagerly took on the opportunity to leave commercial production behind. Conceptualized as a children’s television show that would entertain kids as much as it educated them, Sesame Street introduced the world to Big Bird, Grover, Oscar the Grouch, and a multitude of new Muppet characters. Sesame Street was a success, but Henson was still not satisfied. He initially set out to make “entertainment for everybody,” but became increasingly concerned he was being pigeonholed as solely a children’s entertainer. As such, he conceived The Land of Gorch, a Muppet cast built for adults-only humor. He pitched it to Saturday Night Live producer and established Henson fan Lorne Michaels, and the sketch debuted on the first episode of SNL in 1975.
Despite Henson’s best efforts, The Land of Gorch simply did not work. SNL’s writers were not a good fit for the cartoonish Muppets, and the incongruence was obvious. The sketches were set on a far-away planet and centered on its hedonistic royal family, headed by the greedy King Ploobis. Unlike Sesame Street’s colorful characters, The Land of Gorch’s Muppets were grotesque, profane, and too uncannily adult for Saturday Night Live‘s audience to latch onto. The sketches leaned heavily on jokes about sex, drugs, and alcohol, which often fell flat as the writers’ hearts were simply not in it. The characters puttered through 11 sketches before being dropped from SNL completely, never to be seen again.
After The Land of Gorch’s failure, Henson was already hard at work on his next creative venture, but some of the Gorch concepts were not completely dead in the water. He still wanted to fulfill his “entertainment for everybody” mission, and working on SNL provided valuable lessons for navigating the fast-paced world of television. Undeterred by the misfire, Henson retooled his vision into something that wasn’t strictly for kids or adults. The following year, he produced The Muppet Show. It had its fair share of the esoteric humor Henson loved but had more in common with classic Vaudeville skits than the comedic stylings of Saturday Night Live. The colorful characters blended well with the ageless humor, and when combined with its regular celebrity guest stars, The Muppet Show became a hit.
The Land of Gorch’s legacy did not end with The Muppet Show. It represented Jim Henson’s first foray into designing more realistic puppet characters, like the creatures who appeared in projects like Dinosaurs and Labyrinth. The Land of Gorch was particularly influential on The Dark Crystal in its depiction of an off-putting yet spiritual royal family, who would later inspire the villainous Skeksis. Henson’s perseverance and willingness to learn from his mistakes were what made him such an entertainment innovator, and this is especially apparent in the journey from The Land of Gorch to The Muppet Show.
