The Muppet Show

Jon Gutierrez lays out the 10 weirdest moments in Muppet Show history. And he gets the utterly bizarre nature of the show right:

How the hell did The Muppet Show ever get on the air? Imagine it from a TV executive's point of view: a weekly variety show, in an old vaudeville theater, featuring puppets, and a mix of A, B and C-list celebrities that catered to both kids and adults. That's not a pitch... it's a just list of random words that don't go together

You should check out the top 10, but here's a few of my favorites.

Here's Miss Piggy sexually harassing Rudolf Nureyev:



Vincent Price covers James Taylor:



Peter Sellers musing on identity and the comedian before reciting Richard III and squeezing chickens at the same time:



And Alice Cooper trying to get Kermit to enter into a Faustian bargain:



I can't imagine any show assuming knowledge of Faust in 2009, not to mention a show ostensibly for kids. It's my feeling though that no one knew what that meant in the 1970s either, but TV writers engaged in sort of cultural uplift during this period until executives told them to knock it off.

Via Edge of the American West