Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The Letter W


Oh, what is the letter we love?/What sound are we extra fond of?/It's not any trouble you/Know it's a W/When you say "wuh, wuh, wuh"

Wayne and Wanda

Sometimes to make me laugh, you just have to have someone get hurt. And essentially that was the entire gist of Wayne and Wanda. Sam Eagle introduces them as a wholesome act, they start singing a song, then some shit happens. They'll sing "Trees" and a tree will fall on Wayne, they'll sing "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever" and a factory in the distance will cause a fuckload of smoke to cloud the scene.

It's not really that good and they were only ever in the first season before The Muppet Show found its ground, but you know what? It was still funny. Schadenfreude is a funny thing.

Waldo C. Graphic

Waldo is an interesting Muppet. Billed as the "spirit of 3D," Waldo is a fully-CGI Muppet, controlled by a motion-capture device that sort of looks like a mitten.

This might easily sound like some soulless Muppet created last year by Disney(the same one that closed the traditional 2D animation department) for the Muppet company, but it was actually designed back in the mid-80s when Jim Henson was experimenting with creating digital characters.

Waldo was handy since, in addition to being able to interact with other Muppets thanks to the magic of digitally inserting characters, he was able to transform into anything the situation called for. While serving as demographics expert on the short-lived Jim Henson Hour, he transformed into, among other things, a hat, a powersaw and a teenage girl.

If you've been to Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, he serves as the antagonist for Muppetvision 3D, where he messes up the presentation of the new 3D technology by destroying Sam's glorious 3 hour finale(whittled down to a minute and a half) named "A Salute To All Nations But Mostly America."

No comments:

Post a Comment