Was I inspired to rush out and see the Muppets movie on the day of its release? No, despite my admiration for the troupe’s achievement at keeping an old-fashioned playhouse alive for so many decades.
I was inspired, strangely, to download four dozen episodes of an earlier comedy puppet extravanganza, The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, from archive.org.
Bergen was a ventriloquist whose voice-throwing was largely confined to the non-visual medium of Old Time Radio. (He did appear in a number of films, in which his ventriloquist skills are not very convincing.)
Bergen and his partner, the top-hatted and monocled dummy Charlie McCarthy, made their final screen appearance in the Muppet’s first movie, The Muppet Movie, in 1979. (Bergen died in the fall of ’78, months before the film was released.)
Bergen owes his showbiz success to Noel Coward, who caught his nightclub act and recommended him for a radio gig on Rudy Vallee’s Royal Gelatin Hour in 1936.
The Bergen/McCarthy show was a top-rated radio comedy show for years. It helped regular guest W.C. Fields gain some commercial cachet and was in part responsible for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds panic, since many switched over to that program late because they were listening to the end of the McCarthy show.
Oh. the Muppets are cool too.