Thread by @AlexandraErin

The Muppet Show: It's time to put on make-up! It's time to dress up right!

me: *glares in pandemic*

me: So now let's get things started!

my brain: Why don't you get things started?

me: It's time to get things started!

my brain: How about no.

Early Gonzo calling the audience yokels and rubes is me internally every time I make a joke tweet that gets eight likes and no retweets.

Thinking about @guysmiley22 tweets about Muppet evolution and different versions of each Muppet being the same character: Gonzo's journey from a fragile artiste with iffy self-esteem to a resplendently self-assured daredevil whatever is a great example.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1362861478139879426

I'm not a huge fan of Muppets From Space for diverting from Gonzo's satisfaction with being unique, but on the other hand there is value in showing that you can be happy with yourself and with found family and still long for community and greater self-understanding.

And Gonzo searching for his roots has precedence in Muppet Babies.

(No, Muppet Babies is not "canonical" to Gonzo's story, any more or less than Muppets From Space is. But it's canonical to his character.)

Gonzo's backstage storyline in the Charles Aznavour episode is another great aspect of the experimentation that led to the character's evolution.

There's only so much you can do with a character when his whole bit is that his bit doesn't work.

I've contrasted Gonzo with Wayne & Wanda before, as both having the same basic bit of an act that invariably ends early in disaster. Gonzo became a main cast Muppet (and in the first batch of post-Jim movies was more of a leading man than Kermit), but W&W remained bit players.

As I've observed in this space before, the thing that distinguishes characters who broke out of the ensemble and became main cast Muppets through the Muppet Show is that they had personalities that caused problems for Kermit backstage.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1290735979163267078

Wayne & Wanda mainly caused headaches for Sam by frustrating his attempt to raise the tone of the show by turning relatively highbrow musical standards into lowbrow slapstick.

So they serve only to reinforce Sam's personality of the show's moral guardian/standards & practice, and he went on to Muppet immortality while they largely remain relics of the Muppet Show.

But ironically, because their one-note act at least has a different punchline each time, it got repeated more times in season 1 than Gonzo's avant-garde absurdist schtick. But rather than abandoning Gonzo, they decided to acknowledge in-universe that Kermit stopped putting him on

So we get this meta episode in Gonzo's career where the a-plot, such as it is, of the backstage segments is that he's trying to reinvent his act. And it doesn't directly lead into daredevil/masochist personality but it shows that the creators knew he needed something else...

...and that they saw the potential in trying new things with him, and found him entertaining and engaging in his weirdness.

(That they gave him a "chalkboard gag" style bit in the opening credits was a clue in that direction, too.)

I think that fight would be shorter than a Wayne & Wanda sketch.

https://twitter.com/ConanOfLibraria/status/1363179279597658113

Anyway, though. Gonzo's character went through a few different vocal choices, physical designs, and directions even in the Muppet Show itself, which is very fitting for a character whose original concept was "experimental artist".

I think I've said this before, but I think Gonzo is probably the Muppet most representative of Jim Henson himself, even though he didn't perform him or create his characterization. I think they're kindred spirits.

https://twitter.com/twothickscoops/status/1363009267142447107

To repeat myself again: I wish Jim Henson could have lived to see the episode of the Dark Crystal Netflix show where puppets put on an elaborate puppet show using multiple forms of puppetry, because that was exactly the kind of thing he loved.