I want to eat the Muppets because they are delicious.
November 25, 2015 7:08 AM Subscribe
Jim Henson's early journals reveal some surprising back stories.
"Beneath Rowlf's fur, his skin is pockmarked with a hundred frantic eyes."
I love this
posted by Ziggy500 at 7:14 AM on November 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
I love this
posted by Ziggy500 at 7:14 AM on November 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
clickhole is satire, right?
*nods with a smile* No.
posted by xedrik at 7:25 AM on November 25, 2015 [6 favorites]
*nods with a smile* No.
posted by xedrik at 7:25 AM on November 25, 2015 [6 favorites]
The earliest Muppet projects, like the skits on SNL, are downright weird and gonzo. Henson was pretty out there.
posted by Miko at 7:28 AM on November 25, 2015
posted by Miko at 7:28 AM on November 25, 2015
Cooked with DRAGON FIRE
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:37 AM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:37 AM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
clickhole is satire, right?
Well, the top right corner does say "Onion, Inc. sites".
Should have a satire tag.
posted by Melismata at 7:40 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Well, the top right corner does say "Onion, Inc. sites".
Should have a satire tag.
posted by Melismata at 7:40 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Confession: I got all the way to the bit about stapling pig legs to one's torso before I said HEY WAIT A MINUTE.
posted by mochapickle at 7:44 AM on November 25, 2015
posted by mochapickle at 7:44 AM on November 25, 2015
I got disturbingly far into that before I realized it was Clickhole.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:45 AM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Rock Steady at 7:45 AM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
"The word "Muppets" is a combination of the words "Muppets" and "Pets," because they are muppets, and I own them as pets."
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 8:14 AM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 8:14 AM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
ClickHole is missives from a better world than the one we live in, that kindly lets us borrow from its reality from time to time.
I was going to make an FPP on its ISIS series before the Paris stuff happened, but I'm sharing it here because it's one of my favorite things on the Internet:
Latest Attack: ISIS Just Put The Pentagon On eBay
Horrible: ISIS Fished Up All The Catfish Out Of The Old Creek
Latest Attack: ISIS Just Changed Its Name To ‘Google’
Disgusting: ISIS Just Released A 2-Star Review Of ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’
Latest Attack: ISIS Just Replaced The ‘Friends’ Laugh Track With Someone Making Negative Comments About Ross
And if you like series bibles like this Muppets one, their Breaking Bad series bible is pretty freaking fantastic.
Clickhole is a treasure.
posted by rorgy at 8:18 AM on November 25, 2015 [10 favorites]
I was going to make an FPP on its ISIS series before the Paris stuff happened, but I'm sharing it here because it's one of my favorite things on the Internet:
Latest Attack: ISIS Just Put The Pentagon On eBay
Horrible: ISIS Fished Up All The Catfish Out Of The Old Creek
Latest Attack: ISIS Just Changed Its Name To ‘Google’
Disgusting: ISIS Just Released A 2-Star Review Of ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’
Latest Attack: ISIS Just Replaced The ‘Friends’ Laugh Track With Someone Making Negative Comments About Ross
And if you like series bibles like this Muppets one, their Breaking Bad series bible is pretty freaking fantastic.
Clickhole is a treasure.
posted by rorgy at 8:18 AM on November 25, 2015 [10 favorites]
Is Nice Pete a staff writer for Clickhole? Sometimes I wonder.
posted by prize bull octorok at 8:52 AM on November 25, 2015 [14 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 8:52 AM on November 25, 2015 [14 favorites]
Obligatory "Clickhole is the best thing the Onion has done since Sex House and Lake Dredge Appraisal" comment, since I think this every time.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:28 AM on November 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:28 AM on November 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
Disgusting: ISIS Just Released A 2-Star Review Of ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’
I'm pretty sure I shared this on all social media and tried to mention it in person as often as possible when it first came out.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:09 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm pretty sure I shared this on all social media and tried to mention it in person as often as possible when it first came out.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:09 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I was actually kind of disappointed that this was Clickhole, I wanted to imagine an extremely high Jim Henson attempting to make The Muppets Take Bat Country and having to be gently walked back by network executives.
posted by babelfish at 10:13 AM on November 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by babelfish at 10:13 AM on November 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
Literally Unbelievable: Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:28 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:28 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure this really surpasses "Meet the Feebles"...
posted by ennui.bz at 1:24 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by ennui.bz at 1:24 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Whatever the writer's talents, it kind of failed for me because Henson was such a genuinely odd, wonderfully creative mind and his work in the early days of the Muppets WAS sometimes quite surreal, violent and adult. The Muppets did eat each other, a lot, and the original Muppet pilot that aired on ABC was subtitled Sex and Violence. He had all kinds of wacky ideas in the 1960s, and it's not too hard for me to picture him in 1966 writing some weird free-associative thing in his journal like this. I did figure out pretty early on that it was probably fake, but it was kind of like a fake article about the time Salvador Dali did a commercial for Spam where he made a whole crazy sculpture out spam. Dali didn't really do that, but did enough stuff like that that the idea wouldn't really work as parody.
I'm assuming the author isn't terribly familiar with Henson's darker, weirder stuff (like The Cube, or his SNL bits, or a lot of the fascinating false starts seen in Imagination Illustrated) and they thought this would be like a naughty, subversive article about Walt Disney's secret fetish for cartoon mice or something. But Henson didn't shy away from his dark side, and the author didn't really out-weird him.
This probably will get passed around online a lot though, and it may well be that in five years it's become this big stupid Thing where there's an urban legend about how Jim Henson was a nut who wanted to eat the Muppets and have sex with them.
(Read Imagination Illustrated. It's pretty great, and Amazon has it "new" starting at $6.74.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:45 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm assuming the author isn't terribly familiar with Henson's darker, weirder stuff (like The Cube, or his SNL bits, or a lot of the fascinating false starts seen in Imagination Illustrated) and they thought this would be like a naughty, subversive article about Walt Disney's secret fetish for cartoon mice or something. But Henson didn't shy away from his dark side, and the author didn't really out-weird him.
This probably will get passed around online a lot though, and it may well be that in five years it's become this big stupid Thing where there's an urban legend about how Jim Henson was a nut who wanted to eat the Muppets and have sex with them.
(Read Imagination Illustrated. It's pretty great, and Amazon has it "new" starting at $6.74.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:45 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I definitely got a Nice Pete vibe from this... but that was an unfair comparison to make, because as soon as I realized it, the Clickhole article seemed clumsily written and unfunny. Nice Pete speaks in a kind of poetry that it felt like this letter was aping, but it couldn't nail the cadence because it was too brutish and arbitrary.
posted by painquale at 7:25 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by painquale at 7:25 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
(For those who don't know Nice Pete, here's his fried chicken recipe.)
posted by painquale at 7:27 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by painquale at 7:27 PM on November 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
Yeah, they rushed it. It felt rushed.
I suppose they were going for as much over the top as possible, so they needed to rush.
Kermit felt wrong, but Piggy and Gonzo felt sort of on-point. But you can't do this right without nailing Kermit. And Scooter, actually.
I LOLed at Statdler and company.
posted by clvrmnky at 6:32 AM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
I suppose they were going for as much over the top as possible, so they needed to rush.
Kermit felt wrong, but Piggy and Gonzo felt sort of on-point. But you can't do this right without nailing Kermit. And Scooter, actually.
I LOLed at Statdler and company.
posted by clvrmnky at 6:32 AM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm assuming the author isn't terribly familiar with Henson's darker, weirder stuff (like The Cube, or his SNL bits, or a lot of the fascinating false starts seen in Imagination Illustrated) and they thought this would be like a naughty, subversive article about Walt Disney's secret fetish for cartoon mice or something.
I've seen this criticism leveled at multiple Clickhole articles here—"this isn't really an effective parody of the subject matter" etc etc. It never feels appropriate, but that's partly because I think that Clickhole's stated premise ("like Buzzfeed but fake") does nothing to indicate the seriously weird depths of this place. Just as Sex House was a "parody" of reality shows that very quickly detached itself entirely from its original subject matter, Clickhole's "parodic" elements serve to mask a deeper strangeness that has nothing, genuinely nothing, to do with how funny it would be if Jim Henson wasn't a boring ole square.
A lot of Onion material gets at what I perceive as an almost-Lovecraftian horror. The trivium of the subject matter isn't just banal and mindless, it's a skin stretched out over some shapeless, weird thing that's near-indifferent to humanity or civility, and which can only be filtered to our liking if it's revealed to us in the most tangential and fluffy of ways.
The last time this criticism came up was in an article about Elon Musk yelling his ideas at an old man named Notebook until he dies, and the remark was something like, "WELL THAT'S NOT A GOOD PARODY OF ELON MUSK. IT WOULD BE MUCH BETTER IF ELON HAD ALL THESE CRAZY IDEAS BUT HE WORKED REALLY HARD AT THEM AND THAT'S A LOT MORE OF WHAT ELON MUSK IS LIKE", which is a critique that stopped working the second Elon revealed that he kills four old men named Notebook a year by yelling his ideas at them because nothing about that joke can be construed as parodic in the sense that we generally undersand the word.
Likewise, the joke here isn't that Jim Henson is weird or something. It's hard to center and the writers at Clickhole are pretty damn subtle and good, but if there is a central conceit here, I think it's not that Henson wants to eat Muppets, it's that in the Clickhole universe, Henson wrote this in his journal and then made the Muppets the way they are, without there being any contradiction whatsoever between his initial thoughts and the show. No "but then he compromised and made this show"; no middle step whatsoever. We glance at surfaces and tell ourselves we understand the interior world that produced them, but we don't, not ever. The ongoing joke about Clickhole isn't that people there are any different, it's that these people are exactly the same as the ones who get ground up into Buzzfeed material. Clickhole is just showing us another, totally equivalent, equally revealing, facet to these people who most of us will never know.
posted by rorgy at 12:35 PM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
I've seen this criticism leveled at multiple Clickhole articles here—"this isn't really an effective parody of the subject matter" etc etc. It never feels appropriate, but that's partly because I think that Clickhole's stated premise ("like Buzzfeed but fake") does nothing to indicate the seriously weird depths of this place. Just as Sex House was a "parody" of reality shows that very quickly detached itself entirely from its original subject matter, Clickhole's "parodic" elements serve to mask a deeper strangeness that has nothing, genuinely nothing, to do with how funny it would be if Jim Henson wasn't a boring ole square.
A lot of Onion material gets at what I perceive as an almost-Lovecraftian horror. The trivium of the subject matter isn't just banal and mindless, it's a skin stretched out over some shapeless, weird thing that's near-indifferent to humanity or civility, and which can only be filtered to our liking if it's revealed to us in the most tangential and fluffy of ways.
The last time this criticism came up was in an article about Elon Musk yelling his ideas at an old man named Notebook until he dies, and the remark was something like, "WELL THAT'S NOT A GOOD PARODY OF ELON MUSK. IT WOULD BE MUCH BETTER IF ELON HAD ALL THESE CRAZY IDEAS BUT HE WORKED REALLY HARD AT THEM AND THAT'S A LOT MORE OF WHAT ELON MUSK IS LIKE", which is a critique that stopped working the second Elon revealed that he kills four old men named Notebook a year by yelling his ideas at them because nothing about that joke can be construed as parodic in the sense that we generally undersand the word.
Likewise, the joke here isn't that Jim Henson is weird or something. It's hard to center and the writers at Clickhole are pretty damn subtle and good, but if there is a central conceit here, I think it's not that Henson wants to eat Muppets, it's that in the Clickhole universe, Henson wrote this in his journal and then made the Muppets the way they are, without there being any contradiction whatsoever between his initial thoughts and the show. No "but then he compromised and made this show"; no middle step whatsoever. We glance at surfaces and tell ourselves we understand the interior world that produced them, but we don't, not ever. The ongoing joke about Clickhole isn't that people there are any different, it's that these people are exactly the same as the ones who get ground up into Buzzfeed material. Clickhole is just showing us another, totally equivalent, equally revealing, facet to these people who most of us will never know.
posted by rorgy at 12:35 PM on November 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
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posted by and they trembled before her fury at 7:12 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]