Muppets

Last week, Doug and I went to The Muppet Movie at the Bemidji Theatre. I enjoyed it and the kids in our neighborhood laughed a lot, too. It wasn’t a good movie for Doug because there are sight jokes about every 5 seconds, too fast for me to explain them.
But the movie reminded me of the Muppets on Sesame Street in the 1970s. When we lived in Five Mile River, Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy, the only TV station we could pull in was the French language channel from Moncton, New Brunswick. All the programming wasn’t in French. Some, like Mr. Dressup, were in English. But Sesame Street was in French, except for the Spanish lessons and, oddly, a brief segment in Ukranian about making pirogies.
So, the kids got used to Kermit and all the others speaking French. When we moved in 1979 to Brookings, S.D., the first time the kids watched Sesame Street, one of them said, “Kermit’s mouth is moving wrong.” They were turned off by the English-speaking Muppet.