A cast of thousands
Henson create? JIM HENSON (1936-90) was a veritable font of ideas who created wonderful creatures and characters, stories, songs, and imagery.
His creativity is best celebrated in The Muppet Show, which ran for 120 episodes between 1976 and 1981. It was an amazing blend of vaudeville, musical comedy and slapstick in the form of a live action puppet show, featuring a remarkable roster of celebrity guests such as Elton John, Alice Cooper, Julie Andrews, Liza Minnelli, John Cleese, Steve Martin, Gene Kelly, Peter Sellers and Roger Moore, to name but a few.
Along with a host of regular characters such as Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, The Great Gonzo, Rowlf, Animal, Scooter, Statler and Waldorf etc., there was a whole host of incidental characters who would pop up in a single or just a few episodes.
Michael Dixon, an American Muppet fan who founded a now-defunct website called Kermitage, listed all the Muppets that appeared in the show. He counted 421 Muppet characters or groups of Muppets that appeared on the original series.
The ‘ groups’ include the likes of Abe and Bernie (a pair of pigs), Alfredo and Hildegard (The Mop Dancers), The Australians (who walk on the ceiling), The Babies, the Baby Koozebanian Creatures, the Bats, The Bouncing Borcellino Brothers (six acrobat pigs), the Bug band, Muppet Furniture and Singing Food, meaning that he actually created more than 500 individual Muppets for the show.
However, if you take all the shows from Henson’s Muppet Empire the number is much greater. The Count, webmaster of muppetcentral.com, collated a list of all the Muppets in the following Henson productions including: The Junior Morning Show (the very first Muppet characters, Longhorn, Shorthorn and Pierre the French Rat appeared on this show in 1954), Citykids, Tales Of The Tinkerdee and The Land Of Tinkerdee, Little Muppet Monsters, The Land of Gorch, The Hoobs, Panwapa, Telling Stories with Tomie Depaola, Puppetman, Dog City, Sam & Friends, The Great Santa Claus Switch, The Ghost Of Faffner Hall, Tales From Muppetland.
Also Mother Goose Stories, Bear In The Big Blue House, Jim Henson’s Animal Show, Muppets Tonight, The Jim Henson Hour, Mopatop’s Shop, Fraggle Rock, The Muppet Show, Sesame Street and various miscellaneous educational videos.
Totting all these up, we have an impressive 3,258 Muppets. This does not include the puppets featured in various Henson movies, such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, because Henson did not regard these characters as Muppets.
Jerry Talent, Los Angeles. Please settle a bet. I say The Waltons are based on a real family. My friend disagrees? THE Waltons are one of t he most famous television families of all time and viewed from today’s perspective they seem almost too good to be true.
But the God-fearing clan who we see struggling manfully through the Great Depression and The Second World War were inspired by real people.
Earl Hamner based the Walton grandparents, the avuncular Zeb and his devoted but irritable wife Esther, on his own maternal ItalianAmerican grandparents, Ora Lee and Colonel Anderson Gianniny. And the homely and moralistic tone of the shows are based on his own Virginian upbringing.
The Waltons, in truth, was a reworking of a film based on Hamner’s semi-autobiographical novel, Spencer’s Mountain, starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’hara from 1963.
Spencer’s Mountain which was based in Wyoming in the Sixties, was a lot harsher than The Waltons.
As the patriarch of a burgeoning family, Clay Spencer (Fonda) is fiercely independent, yet dedicated to his family. While he resists the influence of religion, he struggles to remain f aithful to wife Olivia (O’hara), to allow his son Clayboy (James Macarthur) to attend college, and to build a new home for his family.
The similarities are obvious. Hamner was heavily involved with The Waltons whose first run spanned the years 1971-1981 with spin-off television movies through the Eighties and the Nineties.
The name the Waltons was a hybrid mix of the Christian names of his forebears, Walter Clifton Hamner and great-grandfather Walter Leland Hamner.
Spencer is the maiden name of his paternal grandmother Susan Henry Spencer Hamner.
For any Waltons afficionado, Hamner’s voice is as much a part of the cult series as the recurring theme of the Walton children saying goodnight to each other as they turn the lights off at the end of each episode.
Hamner’s southern drawl is of course the voiceover we hear just before the closing credits of the elder John-boy Walton reflecting on his childhood and the episode we’ve just seen.
The Waltons set, unfortunately, was built in the rear area of the Warner Brothers Studios, and the mountain which gives the town its name was part of the range opposite the studios in Burbank, California.
Their house facade was built on the Here Come the Brides set on the Columbia Ranch studio, now one of the Warner Brothers studios.
It is still used as scenery for the company and served as the Dragonfly Inn on Gilmore Girls.
While Hamner became synonymous with The Waltons, he was by no means a one-trick pony. He contributed eight episodes to The Twilight Zone in the Sixties and was also involved with the Eighties soap Falcon Crest.
Hamner is 88 now and no doubt still reminiscing about his southern childhood.
For the rest of us who do not have the pleasure of his company we can still enjoy his soothing voice and homely tales in reruns of the classic Waltons which puts many of today’s television series to shame.
Colm Lynch, Dublin. How did Daniel Fahrenheit create a scale with 32 degrees for the freezing point of water and 212 for its boiling point? FURTHER to the earlier answer, although the French Jesuit Jean Leurechon (1593-1670) didn’t coin the term ‘thermometer’ until 1624, they had been around some years before — many consider Galileo’s open thermometer of 1592 to be the first.
From this period the hunt was on for a sensible calibration scale. Many of these were entertainingly arbitrary. For instance, Francesco Sagredo (1571-1620) designated the upper fixed point on his scale as that of ‘the greatest heat of a summer’s day’.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) went one better in 1701 when he suggested the temperature of melting ice as a zero point and as a second fixed point ‘the armpit temperature of a healthy Englishman’, which he labelled 12. On this ‘armpit scale’ the boiling point of water was 34c.
Towering genius though Newton was, there is no doubt that Fahren- heit’s scale was more rigorous. In 1742 Anders Celsius (1701-1744) proposed his 100-point scale, however he proposed that the boiling point of water be designated as 0 degrees Celsius.
This was sensibly inverted by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778, inventor of the binomial system of nomenclature) in 1745 to give us the universal scale of temperature used today.
Dr F. Singh, Groby, Leicestershire. What caused the World War I poets and good friends Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon to fall out later in life? WHILE t he previous answer correctly outlined some of the main grievances between the two men, namely a quarrel over money and the disclosure of private information, there was one other spanner in the works.
Graves’s literary muse and lover in the Twenties was American poet Laura Riding. In 1927, he was involved in an extraordinary menagea-quatre with her, Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs and his wife, Nancy. Despite his homosexuality, Sassoon was very conservative by nature and struggled to accept Graves’s chosen lifestyle.
Despite often entertaining Graves and Riding, Sassoon said he was ‘driven away by her intense egotism and eccentricity’.
He was unable to accept her extreme Modernist views, which left him feeling like a ‘ lumbering Pickford van’.
Don Mckay, Ullapool, Highlands.
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