All but two episodes without any edits is pretty good. If one is just rights issues they might be able to get that too eventually. The other one... we might have to do without.
Musician/Composer
Of course. The series is also subtitled in German, French, Spanish (European and Latin American), Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Portuguese and Italian, while the only available audio option is the original English-language track.
Edited by gjjones on Feb 19th 2021 at 5:30:45 AM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.
Best Ogre
Man, that article is seriously overreacting IMO.
SoundCloud
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I'm not surprised the Chris Langham episode would be unavailable to be honest.
With all the memes about women choosing a bear over a man, Hollywood might wanna get on an 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon' adaptation
The Dishonorable
They ruined the presentation by pleasing the "make-everything-HD" crowd with de-interlacing. So instead of 60 fps as originally shown we get 24 fps. Fuck.
"The devil's got all the good gear. What's God got? The Inspiral Carpets and nuns. Fuck that." - Liam Gallagher
Musician/Composer
They didn’t lower the audio pitch at least.
Edited by gjjones on Feb 19th 2021 at 3:34:38 PM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.
The Brooke Shields episode is mostly Alice in Wonderland with Brooke as Alice and Miss Piggy as the Red Queen. However it swerves into The Wizard of Oz with "We're Off To See the Wizard". I'm guessing that's the license bomb. A lot of musical numbers are stand-alone but this one really isn't — it's the big finale to the show's plot.
It has appeared on home video before, but on the Time-Life set which is part of the same media megalith, now WarnerMedia (AT&T/Time/Warner/AOL/Turner/MGM/etc.), that owns Wizard of Oz. They're not going to play nice with Disney and no way are they going to let them touch Oz again. I wonder if the other cuts are also Warner-owned songs.
Edited by alanh on Feb 19th 2021 at 4:34:30 AM
They might just decide to wait 14 years for The Wizard of Oz to become public domain in the United States.
As for the Chris Langham episode, it's not the episode itself. It's Langham's Role Ending Felony (caught with child porn in 2007).
If you're wondering who he was to begin with, he was a British comedian that was a writer for the show. He filled in when Richard Pryor cancelled.
The Dishonorable
The absence of the Kaye Ballard episode in the US Disney+ feed is perplexing. It was cleared for DVD.
"The devil's got all the good gear. What's God got? The Inspiral Carpets and nuns. Fuck that." - Liam Gallagher
Musician/Composer
According to the details in the ToughPigs article:
Here in the US, we’re missing the Kaye Ballard episode, which has been previously cleared for release on The Muppet Show‘s season 1 release. Our friends in Europe have reporting missing the John Denver and Spike Milligan episodes. Again, we’re hoping this is just a mistake and will be remedied.
In addition to the episode cuts, we’re already hearing reports of missing segments. Despite being assured that the episodes will be presented in-full, there have been various cuts throughout the series. Thanks to eagle-eyed Reddit user Itachilshtar, here’s a seemingly complete list of edits:
- Bernadette Peters: “They Call the Wind Maria” and “I’m Five” missing
- Don Knots: “Lullaby of Birdland” missing and all scenes referencing it
- Cheryl Ladd: UK Spot “There’s A New Sound” missing
- Danny Kaye: UK Spot “Jogging” missing
- Roger Miller: UK Spot “Down at the Old Bull and Bush” missing
- Anne Murray: “Dancing on the Ceiling” missing
- James Coburn: UK Spot “Bird Walk” missing
- Tony Randall: “Ti-Pi-Tin” missing
- Hal Linden: “If I Ruled the World” missing
- Wally Boag: “The Ying Tong Song” missing
- Buddy Rich: UK Spot “A Transport of Delight” missing
- Marty Feldman: “Sesame Street Theme” missing
The good thing about streaming is that these episodes can always be updated. Unlike the DVDs (which were also missing a handful of segments), Disney has the opportunity to amend this mistake.
Disney may implement those segments in later on depending on whether they would secure the requisite rights.
By the way, what were your favorite guests on The Muppet Show?
Edited by gjjones on Feb 19th 2021 at 9:59:27 AM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.
I'm watching you!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Chris Langham also appeared in an episode of the original british Whose Line Is It, Anyway?.
I'm actually kinda surprised someone at Disney even knows who Chris Langham is, let alone that he was arrested for child porn. He was relatively unknown outside the UK.
Edited by Brandon on Feb 19th 2021 at 9:23:20 AM
With all the memes about women choosing a bear over a man, Hollywood might wanna get on an 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon' adaptation
It's possible that Disney US doesn't, but Disney UK does. Disney+ often omits epsidoes of shows that weren't necessarily removed in the US, but were removed internationally - presumably to avoid having to make different sets of series per region. IIRC, some series outright are the international releases.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Feb 19th 2021 at 9:53:11 AM
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
Disney's a huge company, so it's probably entirely reasonable for them to have someone look over everything for any potential issues. And if it's something people might complain about, doing so could be a reasonable opportunity cost.
I was actually surprised when White Wilderness was initially on the service. It's notorious for the lemmings sequence where they commit suicide, even though lemmings don't actually do that. It's not unusual for nature documentaries, particularly old ones, to stage scenes that would be hard to spontaneously catch on camera. But this is unique in showing animal behavior based on a myth.
It was removed after a few weeks. They could edit out the lemmings segment; the segments are stand-alone.
In regards to missing segments, in the original Muppet Show the episodes frequently had different segments depending on if they were to air in Great Britain or the US. Sometimes segments from one market would be later used in different episodes for the other. Perhaps fans noticing missing segments are getting the episode as it was cut for a different market (the DVD sets released in the US are all as they aired in the US).
The Muppets was originally filmed in England, too, with British backing, and has a number of British-specific celebrities, particularly in it's first season (it's also why the Muppet Theater looks like an old English music hall—and why English music hall numbers—like "Any Old Iron," and "Don't Dilly Dally on the Way"—were performed).
Edited by Robbery on Feb 21st 2021 at 2:06:23 AM
Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon
The DV Ds had all the UK Spots, and the second and third season DV Ds in particular had every segment included. I don't see any reason to not include them.
Edited by Aldo930 on Feb 21st 2021 at 2:23:08 AM
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
I'm curious. What are the segments that resulted in the content warnings?
The Swedish Chef has always been my favorite, and putting aside the Chef himself (I assume Swedes are Acceptable Targets), I could see some eyebrows raised at the "lobster banditos"
sketch as well as one (which I think was part of an entire episode) of a bunch of ethnic stereotype characters speaking gibberish.
I mean I think both are hilarious sketches, but yeah, I don't really see a modern Muppets having (for instance) the stereotypical Chinese characters in the latter sketch.
Were there other things?
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This doesn't answer your question (I don't have Disney Plus so I can't say), but who is the character in your profile pic?
Take a seat, young traveller, for you are surely soon to learn the ageless tale of Gritty...
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
I'm kind of surprised (though far from upset, in fact, the complete opposite) that they kept in the Schools Out performance in the Alice Cooper ep, considering the song is about blowing up a school, you'd think that would raise some eyebrows in this day and age (Calvin and Hobbes got flack way back in the 90s for a strip where Calvin fantasized doing the same).
The disclaimer seems to be applied to episodes with Hollywood Atlas depictions of Arabs, Native Americans, and Romani, among others. And the Confederate flag in the Johnny Cash episode.
Note that there are only advisories. There are no edits due to content, only copyright (apart from sorta kinda with Chris Langham).
Edited by alanh on Feb 23rd 2021 at 1:50:44 PM
The Muppet Show is now available at Disney+. I've discovered that all of the episodes are in the standard 4:3 format and are unedited.
Unfortunately, not every episode is available at launch. So far, there are only two episodes that are missing from the otherwise complete series: the Brooke Shields and Chris Langham episodes
.
So, we have 118 episodes available.
Edited by gjjones on Feb 19th 2021 at 3:47:18 PM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.