Muppet Thread: The Henson Legacy

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Hoorah!

[panmanthe2nd]

Below is a link to a rip of a official VHS release of The Frog Prince (so it doesn't have the Disney Channel logo in the corner).
https://mega.co.nz/#!iU1RWaiQ!TDIMlV1No ... uUM6XvvugI
I'd love to be able to buy and rip the LaserDisc releases of this and all the 'Tales from Muppetland' specials, but I don't have the needed hardware at the moment.

http://www.toughpigs.com/fraggles-hulu/

It's great that these have made it to Hulu. I wonder if anyone in the US (I live in the UK) could make these available for download (especially the ones that aren't on DVD, like The Secret Life of Toys, Mopatop’s Shop, Jim Henson’s Play Along Video: Peek A Boo)?

No problem. Wish I had better sources for the very-unreleased episodes.

Me too. For a few years now I've wanted to try and put together a better quality version of all the episodes using different sources. You've beat me to it with Dog City and Monster Maker. And thank you, again, because you've done a great job!

At some point I'll be converting my VHS collection to digital and I'll upload the "Secrets of the Muppets" recording I have. I've told you about it before - not sure how the quality is.

I'm looking forward to seeing this. Even if only a few seconds of it is better quality than my copy it will be worth it.

Although certain Jim Henson projects from this era have made it to DVD or VHS [The Storyteller, Song of the Cloud Forest, Monster Maker, Miss Piggy's Hollywood...

Am I right in saying that the only DVD release of Miss Piggy's Hollywood was on the Portuguese DVD A Fantástica Miss Piggy? Does anyone know where I can buy this DVD, or get a rip of it?

[Garrett Gilchrist]

I believe I have the laserdisc of The Frog Prince, and I believe Alex Taylor did a rip of it (not my copy!).

I have the PAL DVD of Miss Piggy's Hollywood somewhere (which also includes The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show with Tony Clifton et al) ....

Lighthouse Island is also available in good (albeit web-compressed) quality via iTunes.

I'd like to do more with the Jim Henson Hour material, but our copies of the actual Muppettelevision segments leave a lot to be desired ....

[panmanthe2nd]

I believe I have the laserdisc of The Frog Prince, and I believe Alex Taylor did a rip of it.

I have the PAL DVD of Miss Piggy's Hollywood somewhere (which also includes The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show with Tony Clifton et al) ....

Lighthouse Island is also available in good (albeit web-compressed) quality via iTunes.

I'd like to do more with the Jim Henson Hour material, but our copies of the actual Muppettelevision segments leave a lot to be desired ....

If you have the time to upload rips of the Frog Prince laserdisc and the DVD of Miss Piggy's Hollywood that would be amazing!

I'll have to have a look to see if Lighthouse Island is on the UK iTunes.

[Ozzel]

I'd like to do more with the Jim Henson Hour material, but our copies of the actual Muppettelevision segments leave a lot to be desired ....

I have many of these that I taped off Nickelodeon reruns back in the day. I plan to capture my tapes as soon as I get some new hardware for it.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

I'll PM you.

[panmanthe2nd]

I'd like to do more with the Jim Henson Hour material, but our copies of the actual Muppettelevision segments leave a lot to be desired ....

I have many of these that I taped off Nickelodeon reruns back in the day. I plan to capture my tapes as soon as I get some new hardware for it.

Excellent!

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Kendall Ozzel definitely has Secrets of the Muppets, The Muppets Go to Walt Disney World, and other specials. He may have the Bobby McFerrin episode and other JHH material, but in another state which will be hard to get to. I know the feeling.

Here's the first nine minutes of the Dog City episode of the Jim Henson Hour, sourced from laserdisc and from my recent restoration of the episode.

DogCityIntroFull.vob (317.1 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!MUdmUSBa!IhC2pi5gR ... kOgEQC9kU8

Here are some images from the Jim Henson Hour period.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/981 ... sheets.zip

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Episode 104 — Friday, May 5, 1989 on NBC
MuppeTelevision: Movie Trailer Parodies
Special: Dog City

I have fully restored and released Dog City, with lots of special features.

"Dog City: The Movie" (with the 10 minutes of Muppettelevision removed) was released on DVD in the US, but it had bad sound, for some reason. It was released in the UK, but with PAL-converted video.

The obvious decision was to use the video from the US DVD and the audio from the UK DVD.

The entire Dog City episode was released on laserdisc in Japan (in Japanese, with Japanese subtitles during Bean Bunny and the Cuteness Thief, which had to be removed).

Two scenes were also released on Youtube by the Henson company, which I used for audio.

I edited these various sources together (with off-air audio from Kermiclown) for a full restoration.

I'm sure a video wizard could filter the laserdisc source and improve it further (I should have done some filtering myself), but the end result looks great.

Here are two clips:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/981 ... Dclip1.vob
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/981 ... rofull.vob

Here's the whole thing - the first nine minutes of the Dog City episode of the Jim Henson Hour in good quality, sourced from laserdisc and from my recent restoration of the episode.

DogCityIntroFull.vob (317.1 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!MUdmUSBa!IhC2pi5gR ... kOgEQC9kU8

And here's the two clips Henson released to Youtube ...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/981 ... Scenes.mp4
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/981 ... beClip.mp4

And here are some pictures.

















I created various special features for this DVD, including a bit of a restoration of a rare video promoting The Jim Henson Hour. It was shot on the set of Dog City and features Kermit and Ace Yu. The quality is very poor. I cut in various sketches from the CTS versions.



As a side note, this video shows a raw version of a scene of Kermit musically arguing with Beard and the bandmembers of Solid Foam, without a monitor effect at the beginning of the shot.

Dog City was adapted into an animated series (with some puppet scenes), viewable via Amazon On Demand. I restored the first episode for this release using off-air and Amazon sources, but unfortunately got the interlacing backward on the puppet scenes, something I didn't notice until later ...

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Episode 106 — Sunday, July 9, 1989 on NBC
Special: Monster Maker

I have restored and released Monster Maker as a laserdisc rip, with special features.

The complete Monster Maker episode was released on laserdisc in Japan, with Japanese audio and a subtitle over one shot of a credit card.

I had hoped to do a more fancy restoration, filtered by someone who's good with video, but in the absence of that I released a pretty straight laserdisc transfer.

Audio was from Netflix and Kermiclown's off-air copy. The credit card shot was replaced from Netflix.

MonsterMakerClip.vob (69.0 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!9B8l0JDS!Ag3EOkKQw ... UhcmUlAhvM













The film Monster Maker was converted from PAL to NTSC to be shown on The Jim Henson Hour, and it was not done particularly well. There is some ghosting on motion. Someone who is good with video filtering could probably fix this using the AVISynth SRestore function to attack blended fields. I am on OSX so can't use most of this technology.

Monster Maker, the film, without Jim Henson's intro, was released on Netflix and Amazon Watch on Demand. The quality on Netflix is very good, and I looked at a screencapture of the film for possible release. However, the frame refresh rate is a total mess. Frames are constantly tearing down the middle vertically, and there's tons of ghosting as well. If the Netflix version could be synced perfectly with the capture device, we might have something. Or if we could just get a PAL version! As it is, the Netflix version is unusable at this time. Here's a clip and some pics.

MonsterMakerNetflixClip2.vob (92.1 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!4cMQ2Jqa!fb3R6lgU6 ... h-Fm8-kZ04







A clip was also released to Youtube:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/981 ... beClip.mp4

Puppeteer Marcus Clarke filmed VHS home movie footage during the making of Monster Maker, and has uploaded it to Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onw5JWny07I

We've been unable to get a higher quality version of this so far. WBP had one but misplaced it and I didn't hear much from Marcus Clarke.

I included this on my DVD, along with a short, four-minute edit of the 1991 Docurama special "Hands Up For More," cutting it down to just the Creature Shop and Monster Maker footage. Here it is on Youtube in full …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N00QNhTk8to‎

The copy I was working from (from WBP) had lots of rolling dropouts. It looks like this version as posted to Youtube doesn't, so I'll have to ask them for their copy! Here's the version I was working from, in full …

Docurama-Puppets-PAL.vob (1.65 GB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!MI8zwQ7S!fVwhvVhLo ... ZLAAE_B9OE