→ February 17, 2008
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Waitress.

Waitress is sort of a smart date movie, a romantic comedy with a heavy dose of realism (well, until the end), or a sad portrait of rural American life with some dark comedy and a positive outcome.

The film revolves around Jenna (Keri Russell), a waitress in a pie shop in a small Southern town, who discovers she’s pregnant and is not happy about it. Her husband, Earl – good luck watching the rejuvenated Law & Order after watching Jeremy Sisto in this movie – is a colossal jackass, abusive, controlling, and dumb as a post. (He’s the one real stock character in the film.) She ends up having an affair with the town’s new gynecologist (Nathan Fillion), a married transplant from Connecticut. Jenna is surrounded by characters at the pie shop, from her two waitress co-workers to the gruff head chef to the 80-year-old owner, Joe, played to the hilt by Andy Griffith as a grumpy old man, who gives everyone (including Jenna) a hard time about everything, but also fills the slightly hackneyed wise-old-man role.

The movie is alternately funny and painful. Jenna has a talent for making up new pie recipes, but gives some of them silly names based on what’s going on in her life, like “I Don’t Want to be Pregnant with Earl’s Baby Pie.” (Her co-worker Dawn: “I don’t think we can put that on the menu board, huh?”) Yet aside from the rare moments of pleasure she gets at the pie shop, Jenna is miserable. She’s trying to save up to leave her husband, but is repeatedly stymied. She’s afraid the baby will trap her in a bad marriage forever. She makes a connection with her doctor, but there’s no future in that while both are married. It’s a black comedy in the sense that the underlying life we see is so grim, with Jenna trying to find a way to start her life over but unable to create the opportunity; in fact, she gets her chance through an external source, which sort of makes up for the way that the opportunities she creates are stymied one by one.

Waitress succeeds because the droll humor and the film’s obvious sympathy for Jenna (and thus ours) overcome its flaws. The turning point at the film’s end is a bit too perfect, but writer Adrienne Shelly did set it up throughout the movie. Earl is a one-note character, perfectly defined by the fact that when he comes to the diner to pick Jenna up, he starts beeping his horn before he’s even pulled up to the front door; I found myself averting my eyes almost every time he came on screen because his treatment of his wife was so dated and misogynistic. I suppose such people exist, but Earl seemed too sharply defined and exaggerated. There was something a little too creepy about Dawn ending up dating her “stalker elf,” Okie, even if the point was to provide an example to Jenna. And perhaps the movie’s biggest sin in my mind is the pie-making -pouring cooked custards into unbaked pie shells (you have to blind-bake them), laying the horizontal strips of a lattice top over the vertical ones (they should be woven), and mashing fillings after they’ve been poured into the crust (the juices would turn the bottom crust into mush).

These hiccups don’t interrupt the movie’s undeniable charm, driven by some witty writing and a fantastic performance by Russell in the lead role. It’s a date movie with brains, or perhaps an indie take on the romantic comedy genre, or a film that just defies easy categorization. We could use a few more of those, come to think of it. I’ve been debating offering some sort of easy rating system, but if I had one, this would get my highest mark.

As an aside, no review of Waitress would be complete without a mention of its tragic backstory. After the movie was completed but before it was accepted to the 2007 Sundance festival, writer/director Adrienne Shelly, who also played Jenna’s unlucky-in-love co-worker Dawn, was murdered in her Manhattan office-apartment by an illegal immigrant construction worker whom she caught stealing money from her purse. It’s an artistic loss, as Shelly clearly had a lot of promise as a writer, and a terrible personal loss for her family: Waitress was written a few years earlier as a love-letter to her then-unborn daughter, who appears at the end of the film as Jenna’s daughter as a toddler.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , ,
→ February 13, 2008
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Ratatouille.

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.

So sayeth food critic Anton Ego, brilliantly voiced by acting great Peter O’Toole in Ratatouille , the latest in a string of amazing movies from Pixar, although the same could be said by, say, a scouting-oriented baseball analyst. Failure is easy to predict in a field where failure is the norm.

Ratatouille, however, is a success, although I wouldn’t put it quite at the level of The Incredibles , my favorite of the Pixar flicks. Ratatouille revolves around two main characters: Remy, a rat and gourmet who has detailed conversations with the late Chef Gusteau (a figment of Remy’s imagination), and Linguini, an American screw-up who arrives at Gusteau’s restaurant with a letter asking for a job. The two form a partnership built on teamwork – every Pixar movie comes down to teamwork – and food, and ultimately it’s up to the two of them to save the restaurant.

Ah, the food. The star of the movie is its amazing graphics, never better than when the subject is food. The coloring in the red onions, the shadows in the giant bowl of peas, the burnish on the copper pots – every bit of it looks so real as to distract you from the fact that the movie is animated. I’m just glad they didn’t show any desserts, because I would have salivated. The cityscapes of Paris and the detail in the hair of the one female character, Collette, were also astounding.

The plot was a little bit light, with some elements too predictable. You know from the start that Linguini will have to cook for Anton Ego. You know that Linguini and Remy will be separated towards the end, although I liked the way they turned that formula around and avoided the outcome I expected. You know that Remy’s family is going to turn up to help him at some point in the movie. But the setup was clever and the writing more mature than I can remember in any Pixar movie, including possibly the first Pixar sex joke (it’s very well done), a hilarious freak-out by the head chef Skinner, and some generally strong physical comedy.

The film also offers perhaps the best Proust allusion I’ve ever seen in a movie or read in a book, with the sequence that follows the first bite taken of the dish that gives the movie its title. Substitute a madeleine soaked in lime-scented tea and you’ll have the pivotal scene from In Search of Lost Time. I also thought the closing sequence was a nod to the opening sequence of Charade , a classic Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film set in Paris.

Ratatouille struck one very sour note with me, though, and it nearly undermined the film. Nearly all of the voice-actors portraying French characters were not, in fact, French, but most did a passable job, particularly Brad Garrett as the late Chef Gusteau (even briefly rocking accents from Texas, Mexico, and Scotland … seriously, microwavable haggis???) and Sir Ian Holm as Skinner (which I assume is a reference to B.F. Skinner, the psychologist known for his experiments on rats). But Collette was voiced by Janine Garaofalo, and her attempt at a French accent was roughly as successful as your typical French military offensive. Was there some reason the Pixar folks didn’t go for at least a few native speakers? Audrey Tautou wasn’t available? Not only is she cute, but her voice is every bit as cute, and would have changed Collette’s role from “Linguini falls for her because she’s the only girl in sight” to “Linguini falls for her because she’s irresistibly cute.” Had Collette’s role been smaller, it wouldn’t have mattered, but she’s pivotal to the film and Garaofalo sounds like she’s making fun of a French accent, not trying to master one.

The DVD also comes with a five-minute short film titled Lifted that must not be missed.

Filed Under: DVDs
→ February 7, 2008
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Mansfield Park adaptation.

So we just finished the Masterpiece Theatre showing of the new adaptation of Mansfield Park, and it was enjoyable as a trifle of a movie, but dreadful as an adaptation. I simply could not get past Billie Piper, in the lead role of Fanny Price, as a brunette who dyed her hair blonde in the early 1800s … and then couldn’t be bothered to do her eyebrows!

Mansfield Park is easily my least favorite of Austen’s novels due to its wimpy protagonist, despite all of Fanny’s defender’s claims of her “quiet strength,” which is revisionist bullshit – she’s a damned wimp and even in the one time when she stands up for herself, she’s sorry to have made others around her upset. There’s nice, and then there’s doormat. Fanny Price is a doormat.

The adaptation has turned this somewhat dark novel into a paper-thin romantic intrigue. All of the tension of the novel is gone. Mrs. Norris (yes, like the cat in the Harry Potter series, although here she is a live person) spends the novel tormenting Fanny at every turn; she’s scarcely in the movie at all. In the novel, when Fanny rejects the advances of Henry Crawford, the entire family (she’s staying with her aunt and uncle) turns on her in a relentless attempt to persuade her to accept his proposal, ultimately sending her back to her own poor family as a punishment. Here, she’s not invited on a day trip, and before we know it, Henry has run off with her sister – an event which, by the way, is a total shock in the novel and yet is foreshadowed in the first twenty minutes of the film. And so on. There is no tension in the movie, yet the book is wracked with it. At worst, couldn’t the screenwriters have found some middle ground.

I’m not the only Janeite who thinks so, for what it’s worth – the second of those links focuses on yet more unladylike behavior, as we saw in the new take on Persuasion. I admit that it’s a hard novel to adapt because a faithful version would be oppressive and bleak, but let’s at least stay true to the time period.

The Complete Jane Austen series is continuing with the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice shown in three parts, starting this Sunday; it is well worth watching in its own right, but also stands as perhaps the supreme literary adaptation, period. The series then breaks, resuming on March 23rd with another old edition, this time of Emma, starring Kate Beckinsale.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 3, 2008
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Once.

My wife and I just watched the most wonderful little film. It stars nobody. It earned under $10 million at the U.S. box office. Its director/writer said you could fit a summary of its plot on “a postage stamp.” It clocked in at 81 minutes before the credits rolled. And it was fantastic.

It’s called Once, and I can’t recommend it enough.

I don’t mean to oversell the film – it’s not Citizen Kane, or, more to the point, My Fair Lady – but it’s a very sweet and honest movie. The plot revolves around an Irish busker who meets a Czech immigrant woman on the street; over the next several days, they form a quick bond around music and end up forming an impromptu band and recording a demo of the busker’s own songs. Without giving away the ending, that’s about it for the plot. It’s much more about capturing little sentiments, often wordlessly, and other times via the movie’s original songs (the star and the director were both members of an Irish band called The Frames). Best of all, it avoids the forced plot twists that drive so many Hollywood films today, instead letting the characters drive the simple story.

You might have to like acoustic-based indie rock to fully get into the movie, but the songs themselves are deftly integrated into the storyline, and director John Carney manages to sneak in the occasional nod to music videos. Rent it or buy it, and then root for the song “Falling Slowly” at the Grammys and the Oscars over the next few weeks.

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→ January 26, 2008
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The Simpsons Movie.

I was cautiously excited to see The Simpsons Movie. I was a dedicated Simpsons watcher for most of the ’90s, but lost the habit some time during B-school as the show started to feel repetitive and the laughs became fewer. I hoped the movie would be a return to that style, since they’d have to pull out all the stops for the first feature film, right?

Didn’t happen.

I understand I’m in the minority on this one, but I didn’t find the movie to be all that funny. Early Simpsons episodes were packed with jokes, and often had a strong bit of social commentary. The movie felt like it had the same number of jokes – funny ones, that is – and degree of social commentary that you’d find in a 22-minute episode, spread out over 78 minutes. (I know the listed run time is 87 minutes, but that includes the credits, which had a few Easter eggs … but still, they’re credits. They don’t freaking count in the run time.) The humor was inconsistent, so I laughed hard a handful of times, although I had only one moment where I had to pause it (Ralph Wiggum’s sole line in the film), but it wasn’t as relentless as it should have been, and too much of what was funny was easy physical comedy – easy because you can draw a cartoon character hitting himself in the eye with the claw end of a hammer, but good luck getting an actor to do that on film.

The social commentary was just as disappointing as the humor. The target is the current Administration, but the line is dated – Cheney’s running the show, the government is incompetent, Halliburton, etc. In 2002 or 2003, it would have been funny. Now, we’ve heard these jokes for years, and they’re stale. And some of them are so incredibly forced that it’s painful to watch. When a government robot overhears Lisa saying that they’re fugitives, the scene cuts to a giant NSA room of agents listening in on private conversations. The agent listening to the Simpsons’ conversation jumps up and shouts, “The government actually found someone we’re looking for! YEAH, BABY, YEAH!” There was a good joke in there somewhere, but that wasn’t it. Besides, the government found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and dropped a bomb on his head while this movie was in production; I’d say that counts as finding someone they were looking for.

The bar for animated movies now is quite high. Pixar has churned out one brilliant movie after another based on strong writing, but the plot of this film was thin (of course, the show’s the same way) and the snarking missed its mark. The first two Shrek movies were dense with jokes (“Catnip.” “That’s … not mine.”) in a way that The Simpsons Movie wasn’t. And the fact that two of the funniest bits in this movie were in the commercial – the Spider-pig segment, and the ten-thousand-tough-guys rant – didn’t help matters either. If this is one of the funniest movies of 2007, we have let our standards for funny slip, because there just wasn’t enough of the funny in The Simpsons Movie, and there wasn’t enough of the other stuff to balance it out.

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→ January 25, 2008
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Knocked Up.

Finally got around to seeing Knocked Up last night, two months after recording it off pay-per-view, and it was excellent, very funny with a sweet undertone that never turns sappy, and some excellent performances.

Knocked Up scores biggest by avoiding the Big Artificial Conflict that wrecks almost every relationship comedy. I’m going to demonstrate this by using one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, the positively fecal The Object of My Affection starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. Rudd, who is also in Knocked Up plays a gay man who is roommates with Aniston’s character. They become friends. She falls in love with him. He’s still gay, but there’s some chemistry happening. She becomes pregnant (not by Rudd’s character) and wants him to help her raise the kid. Then there’s a pivotal scene in his bedroom when they’re just seconds away from a kiss … and the phone rings, and hey, whaddya know, it’s an ex-boyfriend of his who wants to get together. And that’s it – they end up apart, him with a guy, her with a guy she meets a few minutes before the end of the movie. This is horrendous writing, first because it’s just lazy to end a difficult and important scene with a deus ex machina phone call, and second because there was a much more important reason why the characters couldn’t get together – because HE WAS GAY.

Where Object and so many movies fail, Knocked Up succeeds. Yes, Alison and Ben break up, but it is an inevitable occurrence, the result of a slow build of tension that explodes in a hilarious, foul-mouthed screaming match that starts in a car and ends in a gynecologist’s office. It also serves as a pivotal plot point that gets Ben to grow up, which, frankly, I’d been waiting the whole movie for him to start doing. And, most importantly, Apatow picks up the movie’s pace after the split, avoiding the typical slowdown in most relationship comedies that comes after the writer has forced the two people apart and now needs to spend a solid 45 minutes showing us how miserable they are without each other. We don’t see Alison or Ben miserable; we see both of them acting responsibly, and we see Ben doing something about his half of the problem. What a decidedly grown-up concept.

The main actors were all very good. I’ve been a Katherine Heigl (Alison) fan since “Roswell” – the season-three hairstyle sold me, since you can’t pull that look off if you’re not flat-out gorgeous – so I didn’t need much convincing on that one. Seth Rogan (Ben) was outstanding as a very unlikeable guy who, it turns out, is more clueless than jackass. (Speaking of which, I don’t get the criticism that the movie is “sexist,” which Heigl herself even intimated in a recent Vanity Fair interview. Ben starts out as a goofball and a ne’er-do-well, he’s depicted as reaching in the relationship until the very end of the film, and his friends are socially retarded. Alison’s successful, smart, and funny. This is sexist … how?) Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd are hilarious as a vaguely demented married couple whose relationship is slowly disintegrating under the weight of two kids and his busy job; Rudd’s scene in the Vegas hotel room with Rogan was one of the film’s highlights. And Harold Ramis has a great cameo as Ben’s father.

The movie does have some missed notes and unevenness. Joanna Kerns as Alison’s psychobitch-mom-from-hell was jarring, and she appears just once as a sort of comic foil and doesn’t resurface until the closing credits. The Asian doctor was just as one-dimensional before a jarring character change near the film’s end – it’s like he was there for the joke, but then Apatow needed him to be more normal, so he altered the character. In general, Apatow uses his one- and two-scene characters as sharply-defined props to create slightly forced comic moments, when his specialty is building comedy from real situations. I thought ending the movie with a scene where Alison sees the nursery Ben set up would have been perfect, but that’s just me being sentimental. And I wish that the idea that Ben is a skilled handler of people – he wins two interpersonal negotiations near the film’s end by using conciliatory tactics in one and firm tactics in the other – had been explored a little more earlier in the film. If it was a latent skill, fine, but show us a glimpse earlier on rather than having him emotionally tone-deaf in all of these situations where he’s with Alison and says the absolute worst possible thing.

If you can handle some vulgarity and don’t mind marijuana usage as a running gag, Knocked Up is worth the rental. But if you’re married with kids, it becomes a must-see, because there’s another layer of humor that you’ll get that the non-parents in the audience just won’t quite appreciate.

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→ January 22, 2008
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Northanger Abbey film.

Now that’s more like it. The new movie version of Austen’s Northanger Abbey was spot-on, very faithful to the original novel with some excellent performances.

The plot of the novel, well preserved in the movie, is the simplest of Austen’s canon. Catherine Mansfield is a teenaged girl living in an English country village who loves to read the Gothic romances popular at the time, and who uses those novels as a substitute for the life experience she lacks. A wealthy couple offers to bring her to Bath with them for a few months, where she meets two suitors, Mr. Tilney and Mr. Thorpe, and becomes fast friends with Mr. Thorpe’s sister, Isabella, who is in love with Catherine’s brother James. One of her suitors is good, and one is bad. There’s a misunderstanding over her relationship with the wealthy couple. And that’s almost all of it. It’s a trifle compared to the character studies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, but it’s witty and sweet.

This adaptation – I only know of one other, which I haven’t seen – hews quite closely to the plot of the novel, keeping the characters all true to Austen’s writing. Felicity Jones is excellent as Catherine and it doesn’t hurt that she looks like a cuter version of Natalie Portman. Carey Mulligan – also pretty darn cute, and someone had fun with her in wardrobe – was superb as the superficial and often condescending Isabella. And unlike last week’s version of Persuasion, this film allows its scenes to develop rather than rushing us from one spot to the next to try to cram the book into 90 minutes of air time.

Next up: A new take on Mansfield Park, my least favorite Austen novel, due in no small part to its priggish heroine, Fanny Price. There was a 1999 film version starring the underrated Frances O’Connor as Fanny, and while it was a good movie, it was only loosely based on the novel, incorporating some elements from Austen’s own life (using her letters as a basis) and also just flat-out changing some things around. This upcoming version is reported to be more faithful to the text – the screenplay was written by Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay for the new Northanger Abbey version and the screenplay for the definitive 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries – which strikes me as a mixed blessing.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 18, 2008
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Persuasion (2007).

When it comes to film adaptations of classic novels, I’m a purist – I want them to hew closely to the original text. The 2007 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (showing on and off this week on PBS) was a disappointment, although unlike a lot of Janeites, I don’t view the 1995 version as all that great either.

Anne Elliott is a 27-year-old maiden who, eight years previously, was talked out of accepting a marriage proposal from a young naval officer named Frederic Wentworth; Anne’s father is a baronet, while Wentworth was untitled and poor, and therefore her family and a close family friend all urged her to decline the proposal. Eight years later, Frederic returns to Anne’s life via a small coincidence, still unattached but now quite wealthy, and apparently harboring a little resentment over the earlier snubbing.

The problem both filmed versions have revolves around Anne. In the book, Anne has a quiet strength of character and an unhappy acceptance of her maiden status, which, given her age, is presumed to be permanent. In both films, however, she’s a terrified little mouse – the 1995 version has Amanda Root (as Anne) wandering around with her eyes wide open in terror the entire time, while the 2007 version has Sally Hawkins trembling her lips half the time and bursting into tears whenever she’s alone. Anne Elliott was based somewhat on Jane Austen herself, and it’s hard to accept the character as an über-effeminate weakling.

Because the 2007 version is so short (under 90 minutes), most of the secondary characters get short shrift and find their foibles sharpened to caricature status. Anne’s father goes from an oblivious snob to a wastrel bore. Her sister Mary goes from a self-centered invalid to a sniveling witch. Her other sister, Elizabeth, mistreats Anne in the book but is barely evident in the novel. Anne’s cousin, Henrietta, is promised to a young curate in their parish who appears in the book but doesn’t appear at all in the film.

And the ending … ah, the ending. Suffice to say that an English lady would not be found running all over Bath, half out of breath, in search of anyone, and certainly wouldn’t be caught playing tonsil hockey in the middle of the street with the man of her dreams.

If you’ve read Persuasion – and if you haven’t, you should – and want to see a film version, go with the ’95 version, which is at least faithful to the text and long enough to bring out some of the subtler characterizations of the secondary figures. The 2007 version, unfortunately, seems destined to be a curiosity as a misguided attempt to improve on the prior version by making everything shorter and more severe.

This Sunday, PBS’ “Complete Jane Austen” series continues with a new adaptation of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, probably the least well-known of her six completed novels, featuring the silliest of her heroines.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature
→ January 8, 2008
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Attention Janeites…

Starting this weekend, PBS’ Monsterpiece Masterpiece Theatre will be showing adaptations of all six of Jane Austen’s novels, including the definitive five-hour Pride and Prejudice adaptation starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. First up is a new take on Persuasion, the most overlooked of her novels, but one without a good film version; the most recent attempt prior to this one starred Amanda Root as Anne Elliott, who spent the entire film sporting a look of wide-eyed terror as if she was in permanent danger of having someone shove a twelve-inch carrot up her ass. Since the novel’s Anne Elliott is generally smart and independent, Ms. Root’s take didn’t quite work for me. The book is probably Austen’s wittiest, with some great characters and plenty of dry humor; the opening scene where Anne’s uncle decries the lack of attractive people about town is priceless.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature
→ June 30, 2007
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Sesame Street.

So a grand total of two people have emailed me since Thursday’s chat to correctly identify the reference to the classic Sesame Street sketch, “The Ladybug Picnic.” I was referring to the line “They talked about the high price of furniture and rugs/And fire insurance for ladybugs,” which my wife is convinced is a reference to the incredibly cruel nursery rhyme, “Ladybug, Ladybug:”

Ladybug! Ladybug!
Fly away home.
Your house is on fire.
And your children all gone.

All except one,
And that’s little Ann,
For she crept under
The frying pan.

Lovely.

Anyway, I have had the song in my head for a few days because I picked up the new Sesame Street DVD, Sesame Street – Old School, Vol. 1 (1969-1974) , ostensibly for my daughter but really for me. The set includes the first episode of each of the first five seasons (meaning that it includes the first ever episode), as well as select sketches from each of those five seasons.

The set is phenomenal. I can’t say that it has every sketch I wanted, but man does it have a lot of great ones. There are several classic Bert & Ernie sketches (Ernie gets bored with counting sheep, so he counts fire engines; Bert & Ernie are at the movies and the lady with the tall hat sits in front of Ernie). Cookie Monster makes lots of appearances, including the Great Cookie Thief (all-time classic), and a sketch with Kermit in the first-ever episode where Cookie doesn’t speak but gradually eats the letter W and eventually goes for Kermit. There are several great songs, including the Ladybug Picnic, the Alligator King (which they still show on occasion), Bert’s “Doing the Pigeon,” and “Bein’ Green.” There’s a Mumford sketch and a couple of Guy Smileys (Beat the Time!); Jesse Jackson leading a group of kids in reciting his poem, “I Am Somebody;” Johnny Trash – I mean, Cash – singing “Nasty Dan” to Oscar; and Bill Cosby in a split-screen with himself reciting the alphabet. Jackie Robinson recites the alphabet in an extra from the first season, less than three years before he died. We get Simon Soundman singing about how his RUFF! RUFF! chased a MEOW up a tree. And best of all, the Martians – whom they never use or show any more – appear in a sketch where they mistake a telephone for an Earthling.

There are a few disappointments. Some of the Muppets are a little weird to see in their earlier forms; Oscar was yellow, Big Bird’s head originally had no tuft around it, and Snuffleupagus is a scary-looking mope who sounds like he’s talking into a tin can. The first episode introduces the “Anything Muppets,” who have no facial features but talk to Gordon as he puts eyes, hair, noses, or mustaches on them; I can imagine that would be a little creepy for a two- or three-year-old. It was also interesting to see that Bob’s problem of never actually talking to the Muppets dates back almost forty years; Susan wasn’t all that much better.

And I suppose a few things are missing that ought to be here. There’s no “I Love Trash,” which dates back to the first season. I didn’t catch “Rubber Duckie,” also from season one. “Mahna Mahna” is best known for the two versions sung on the Muppet Show, but it also appeared in season one. We only get one News Flash with Kermit (Rapunzel, who apparently is from Canarsie), and only one Count von Count (although it’s a good one, with Bert & Ernie in it). Herry Monster makes one brief appearance. The number of the day in the full episodes appears to be two in every episode on the DVDs, which gets a little annoying. (I did get a kick out of Jim Henson doing the voiceover for the clumsy chef – “Two chocolate cream pies!”) And we’re generally short on celebrity appearances, although we do get two short Carol Burnett cameos and the few I mentioned earlier.

Of course, they do call this “Volume 1,” so I’m hoping there will be more sets to come – why not? It’s free money for Sesame Workshop – and I can’t say I’m dissatisfied with this set, which has definitely brought back some memories, even if my daughter is far more enchanted by that shrill he-harpy, Elmo, than she is by any of the old stuff. Maybe she’ll appreciate it when she’s older – say, maybe, two or three.

Filed Under: DVDs