OK, then was the K-9 I had in mind the one from the one-episode "K-9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend"?
Need help putting my TNG Novel together
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OK, then was the K-9 I had in mind the one from the one-episode "K-9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend"?
Lucille Ricardo = Lucille Carter = Lucille Barker.
Except some Muppets in "The Muppet Movie" were from "The Muppet Show", but some still had their roots in "Sesame Street". And Kermit predated them all. Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the Children's Television Workshop and Lew Grade all..., umm, had a hand in there somewhere.
Except some Muppets in "The Muppet Movie" were from "The Muppet Show", but some still had their roots in "Sesame Street". And Kermit predated them all. Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the Children's Television Workshop and Lew Grade all..., umm, had a hand in there somewhere.
No, he means the central conceit behind the Muppet Movies is that the Muppets are literally actors, and in the movies they're just playing parts. Even the movies seemingly set in the "reality" the Muppets inhabit as opposed to the remakes of classic stories like Muppet Christmas Carol. The movies aren't supposed to have "actually" happened in any sense from the perspective of the Muppets, they're fiction within fiction, performances put on by the Muppet troupe.
It is so weird to talk in these sorts of terms on the subject of the Muppets.
Edit: Just because I'm not entirely sure I have this straight, and I'd like someone to check for me (why do I care so much about Muppets canon all of a sudden): In what I'll call the "Muppetverse" for the sake of this, as far as I understand the Muppet Show and Sesame Street are "real". All the Muppet movies are productions put on by the Muppet players with occasional guest roles from their friends on Sesame Street and elsewhere. The Sesame Street movies are "real". Just for the sake of completeness, as far as I know Muppet Babies is not. Did I miss anything, and is this all about right?
Must be. But that's not an example of the sort of thing we're talking about, i.e. the creators of a TV show character using him independently of the producers of the show. K9 and Company was a BBC production, had the same producer that Doctor Who did at the time, and featured former DW companion Sarah Jane Smith and explicit references to the Doctor.
So kinda like the Muppets in Muppet Treasure Island and Muppet Christmas Carol, then.[/QUOTE]
Yes. Or Daffy Duck "playing" Duck Dodgers or Robin Hood or the Scarlet Pumpernickel in various cartoons.
I don't see it as being much different than talking about, say, Marilyn Monroe playing various characters in her films, considering that "Marilyn Monroe" was an entirely artificial persona adopted by Norma Jeane Baker. Or Gilbert Gottfried playing various characters based on his loudmouthed "default" persona, which is itself an assumed voice and personality unlike who he really is off-camera. Sometimes human actors are playing artificial roles even when supposedly being themselves. So I have no trouble accepting Kermit the Frog or Bugs Bunny or Robbie the Robot as an actor who can play other roles.
Yeah, but it got me back to the earlier premise, thinking that some of the Muppets were created (and voiced) by individual members of the team, and yet Steve Whitmire wouldn't be free to do an independent "Rizzo the Rat" movie or novel.
Isn't the first use of "Muppet Babies" a segment in one of the movies, when someone says, "Imagine if we'd all known each other as children?", and there's a dream/flashback.
It's not that systematic. The Muppets are characters. Sometimes they're characters playing other characters. Sometimes they're characters "being themselves," but those are still works of fiction for the entertainment of the audience. And different productions handle the characters in different and contradictory ways. For instance, after Muppets from Space came out, for a few years the "official" biography of Gonzo was that he was "really" an alien, but in more recent years MfS has come to be treated as just a story and Gonzo is "really" a "whatever" again.
Where the Muppets are concerned, the line between reality and fantasy has always been hair-thin and extremely porous. Just look at the behind-the-scenes specials where they show the human performers working the Muppets -- but the Muppets are still acting like separate "living" characters staring down in shock at the people beneath them, going "Where did they come from?" and the like. Which, really, is part of the nature of puppetry, the way the puppet can be simultaneously an obvious contrivance operated by the performer and a separate, independent personality from the performer. There's no effort to define a clear dividing line between reality and fiction.
Yes, the Muppet Babies cartoon was a spinoff of a musical daydream sequence in The Muppets Take Manhattan, the third Muppet movie.
It's not that it's weird talking about the concept. It's that it's weird talking about the likes of Fozzie Bear so seriously and metafictionally.
But...my nerdy need to have everything categorized in a black-and-white manner!
Nah though, that makes sense. Honestly, as weird as I said it is, this is a neat area to me to look into metafictionally, because I've always been interested in the blurry line between fiction and fiction-within-fiction, how it's not really nearly as strict a layering of fictionalness as it seems on the surface.
It's not that it's weird talking about the concept. It's that it's weird talking about the likes of Fozzie Bear so seriously and metafictionally.
Personally I've never had trouble adopting the mindset that the Muppets and Bugs Bunny and Robbie the Robot are distinct individuals with lives of their own. Heck, particularly the Muppets. I've played with puppets before, and it really does feel like there's a separate person there on your hand. The mind has many conflicting voices within it, like when you argue with yourself or are torn between two drives. Usually you have to filter through those drives and give them only one voice to express themselves with, but when you give yourself a second mouth, it lets that inner duality manifest more clearly.
Which isn't so different from what I do as a writer. The characters I write often feel like separate people with minds of their own, people who are more confident or wise or clever or foulmouthed or socially adept or whatever than I would be in a similar situation.
This can get really funny/weird in interviews, where (for example) Kevin Clash will be answering a question while operating Elmo sitting on the desk in front of him, and Elmo will interrupt with, "Elmo doesn't agree with Kevin on that one."
Kids also have no trouble incorporating the Muppeteers into that reality...Kevin Clash is just "the guy who holds Elmo up for the cameras."
To apply the Muppets to the previous point, though: No, a Muppeteer can't go off and create a standalone story about their Muppet(s), because their creations are works-for-hire which belong to the Jim Henson Company.
The UK approach to copyright is unusual (and I don't know of any franchise other than Doctor Who where character creators have taken advantage of it), but the closest ST equivalent I can think of is the funky licencing arragement around Star Fleet Battles.
^But isn't the Henson Company based in England?
And there is some "funky licensing" going on with Sesame Street, whose characters belong to the Children's Television Workshop. I believe that the Henson people needed CTW's permission to have cameos of Sesame Street characters (other than Kermit) in Muppet movies. Although that's different from what we're talking about here, because that's a case where CTW created the show and hired Henson to make Muppets for it.
And there is some "funky licensing" going on with Sesame Street, whose characters belong to the Children's Television Workshop. I believe that the Henson people needed CTW's permission to have cameos of Sesame Street characters (other than Kermit) in Muppet movies. Although that's different from what we're talking about here, because that's a case where CTW created the show and hired Henson to make Muppets for it.
Is it? I remember flying out to their offices in Burbank years ago, back during the Farscape days . . . .
They also have offices in NYC.
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^Okay, I guess the production is done in England but the business offices are in the US. (The Muppet Show was an English production, produced by Sir, later Lord, Lew Grade, and I distinctly remember it opening with the same "ITC" logo and music as The Prisoner; and the Jim Henson Creature Shop is in England.)
When the "Crucible" books came out, and in his subsequent "unpaid merchandising royalties" lawsuit, Harlan Ellison claimed he had control of elements originating in "City on the Edge of Forever," above and beyond the oft-referenced royalty payments for future on-screen use that turned T'Pau into T'Pol and Nick Locarno into Tom Paris.
That's pretty interesting actually. Christopher, was there any legal stuff related to this prior to Watching the Clock being published? I know that WTC contains references to the Guardian of Forever, does that mean the CBS would have to seek permission from Harlan Ellison?
Actually I think what he was objecting to with Crucible was not merely the use of elements from "City," but the quoting of actual dialogue from the script. The evidence for this is that the other thing his legal action targeted was a Hallmark ornament that played audio clips from the episode. Whereas earlier books that used elements such as the Guardian in new stories didn't get his dander up. As I understand it, his argument wasn't that he had control of elements from the script, but that he was entitled to royalties for the reuse of specific dialogue and scenes from the script -- in the same way that he'd be entitled to royalties if the episode were rerun in syndication or if a scene from that episode were included in a clip show.
(And this is important to stress, because lots of people get confused by this: There is a big difference between (a) being entitled to royalties for the use of a concept and (b) having creative control or ownership of a concept. A work-for-hire contract means that you give up (b) in exchange for (a). You're creating something that someone else will own and control, but your compensation for that effort is that you get money every time that thing is reused.)
So assuming I understand it correctly, there shouldn't be any legal problem with Watching the Clock or Forgotten History referencing the Guardian (even if Ellison's legal argument was sound, which I think is still an unresolved question), because I made a point not to quote any actual dialogue from "City on the Edge." Although to be on the safe side, in WTC I did my best to keep references to the Guardian to a bare minimum, although it was harder to avoid it in FH. But no, there were no legal issues brought to my attention prior to the publication of WTC.
IIRC, Ellison was claiming he'd signed a different contract to other ST screenwriters, and that gave him unique rights - and that other ST authors (DC Fontana, PAD, AC Crispin, etc) had supposedly approached him to seek "kind permission" to use the Guardian.
But how was Marco and the then-current CBS Consumer Products staff supposed to know this? Yeah, I agree with Christopher that the talking Hallmark ornament seems to have created much ire from Ellison, where the previous mute Franklin Mint diorama didn't.
I feel like that would be the job of CBS Consumer Products to know that kind of thing.
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