The Muppet Movie

Happy Thanksgiving week, all you yanks.

But more important than that... it's just two days until The Muppets opens. YAAAAYYYY!!!!!!



One of my favorite children's book bloggers is here today, Ariel S. Winter, author of the fab We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie and the forthcoming picture book, One of a Kind. A man after my own heart, he's here to talk Muppets, TWICE, so sit back and enjoy.

The Muppet Movie
Steven Crist ~ Abrams, 1979

Burgin has me beat (has all of us beat, really) with her story of getting pulled out of class by her mother the day that Jim Henson died and then going on to work at the Henson Company, but the Muppets (and all of Henson's work) have been extremely important in my life.

That is why perhaps the only children's book that I have from my own childhood is the Abrams photographic adaptation of The Muppet Movie.

I have memories of this book at both my mother's house and my father's house, which means that I treasured it enough to carry it between their homes on visits (and I don't think I did that with anything else other than my He-Man toys and comic books).

I stamped the front flyleaf with a Raggedy Ann/Raggedy Andy "This Book Belongs To" rubber stamp with my rainbow ink pad. The pages, starting with Chapter 2 through the beginning of Chapter 4, are completely loose from the binding. I cut out a corner of one of the pages, but I can't remember why. (I vaguely feel that I used the photo for a school project.) And there was a "Bazooka Joe" comic in Hebrew folded in the middle. (I have no idea why.) Now, with DVD, it seems unlikely that anyone would have interest in a book like this, but at the time, there was no way to rewatch a movie unless you were lucky enough to catch it on TV.

Of course, only a few years later, we were able to record it on VHS from the television, so I saw the movie many times, but I must have paged through this volume even more.

Afterthought by Burgin: I know exactly how you feel, Ariel. Back in '79, I had to special order the LP at our local record shop, and it felt like it took months to come in. Every week before my gymnastics lesson, my mother would swing me by the record shop to see if it was in, and all the cool guys who worked there would laugh at me, and say "Not yet."

When it finally arrived, I remember being so jacked that I slept with the thing. It was the same album I listened to the day Jim died, and the same one I listened to the day I got the job.

I still have it, though I have extra back up copies now for the boy to play.

In a total 180, it took me about three seconds to download The Muppets soundtrack, just now.

Technology. Ha!

Other Muppet books:
Muppets at Sea
Muppet Madness

—————

Read along on Facebook, tumblr, Twitter and Etsy