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The Jim Henson Company Presents The Sam Plenty Cavalcade of Action Show Plus Singing! [1] is a live action web-series from the Jim Henson Company. The series was created and directed by Paul Rugg and Mitch Schauer. [1] [2]
The series is designed as a Western comedy musical with science-fiction and action adventure elements, starring cowboy hero Sam Plenty. Victor Yerrid described Sam Plenty in a 2007 interview as "a throwback to the old Gene Autry Show". [3] In particular, the premise recalls Autry's 1935 serial The Phantom Empire , in which Autry and friends must battle an evil queen, robots, and various sci-fi devices.
The show is an over-the-top tongue-in-cheek parody of classic television serials. The first serial in "The Sam Plenty Cavalcade of Action Show Plus Singing!" was titled "Sam Plenty in Underdoom". The first installment of the five-episode serial debuted on the web on March 10, 2008 (although adding the parody element, the episodes begin at "part 3").
The cast consists of a mixture of television and film actors. The Sam Plenty troupe also includes several veteran Henson puppeteers includes Yerrid (as Bob Choppy), Drew Massey (as Sam Plenty), and Allan Trautman (as the professor). [4] Emmy-winning composers Julie and Steve Bernstein (Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and many others) wrote the music for the series. A sample of the project was screened at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con. [2]
| Serial | Part | Title | Posted | Summary | # |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sam Plenty in Underdoom | Part 3 | "Test of Doom!" | March 10, 2008 | Queen Verbosa has ordered her doom riders to put Sam to a test to secretly evaluate his legendary abilities. The doom riders have captured Billy and thrown him off a cliff to see what Sam will do. Sam rescues Billy with his laso and pulls him to safety. Upon hearing this Queen Verbosa calls upon Sergeant Munch and his army of invisible doom riders to capture Sam Plenty and bring the cowboy to her. Back at the ranch the gang sings "Cow Pie Patty Serenade" when suddenly Sam finds himself attacked by a swarm of invisible doom riders. | 1 |
| Part 4 | "Explosion of Doom!" | March 17, 2008 | Queen Verbosa - ruler of all Underdoom - has ordered her Doom Riders to march invisibly to the Plenty Ranch. Using their concealment gyros, the Doom Riders have the ranch surrounded. Escape is impossible! Just as the Doom Riders are about to kill Sam Plenty, Sergeant Munch receives a communication from Queen Verbosa. She tells him not to kill Sam Plenty, but rather bring him to her alive. However Sam will not go without a fight, and he single-handedly begins to fight off the invisible invaders. But the Doom Riders outnumber Sam and soon have him restrained. Sergeant Munch is not amused by Sam's unwillingness to cooperate and decides to teach him a lesson. He pulls out his exploding gun, points it at Sam's friends and fires. Sam's friends (including Marion, Hanalei, Billy, Bob, Fetcheye, and the Professor) being to explode! | 2 | |
| Part 5 | "Purification of Doom" | April 7, 2008 | Queen Verbosa's Doom Riders have marched to Plenty Ranch to capture Sam. Sam's attitude has angered Sergeant Munch who has turned the Exploding Gun on Sam's friends. Sam kicks the gun out of Sergeant Munch's hands, saving his friends- but it causes his horse, Marzipan, to explode instead! Or perhaps not...Marzipan is safe and sound on the roof of Plenty Ranch- her tail just blewed off. Sam surrenders to Sergeant Munch, and the Doom Riders take him away, along with Marion and Billy. The rest of the gang is put to sleep. Queen Verbosa locks Sam away in the Purification Thing, and Sam emerges...dead! | 3 | |
| Part 6 | "March of Doom!" | April 21, 2008 | Sam, Marion and Billy have been captured and brought to the underground civilization of Underdoom. Queen Verbosa has ordered that Sam be purified in the often fatal Purification Chamber. It turns out that Sam is not dead after all- however, Queen Verbosa plans to make him one of her Doom Warriors. Meanwhile, back at Plenty Ranch, the rest of the gang reawakens, and the Professor constructs a machine to track the invisible Doom Riders to their underground lair. However, a Doom Warrior awaits them at the entrance, and is about to make them explode...again! | 4 | |
| Part 7 | "Hat of Doom!" | May 5, 2008 | Sam has been purified and Queen Verbosa has ordered that he wear the undergarments of Underdoom. Meanwhile, Hanalei, the Professor, Bob, and Fetcheye have been captured and are being exploded. Hanalei throws a pig at the Doom Warrior, takes his gun, and explodes him. When asked to entertain Queen Verbosa, Sam sings a song about how much he prefers living on the surface to living underground, angering the Queen. As Sam's friends arrive to save him, Queen Verbosa activates Sam's Hat of Control and orders him to capture and kill his friends. | 5 |
The Muppets are an American ensemble cast of puppet characters known for an absurdist, surrealist, burlesque, and self-referential style of variety-sketch comedy. Created by Jim Henson in 1955, they have become a media franchise encompassing children's films, television, music, and other media associated with the characters. Owned by the Jim Henson Company for nearly five decades, the characters of the Muppets franchise were acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2004.
The Muppet Show is a variety sketch comedy television series created by Jim Henson and starring the Muppets. It is presented as a variety show, featuring recurring sketches and musical numbers interspersed with ongoing plot-lines with running gags taking place backstage and in other areas of the venue.
Greg the Bunny is an American television sitcom that originally aired on Fox in 2002. It starred Seth Green and a hand puppet named Greg the Bunny, originally invented by the team of Steven Levitan, Spencer Chinoy and Dan Milano. Milano and Chinoy wrote and co-produced the Fox show. The show was spun off from The Greg the Bunny Show, a series of short segments that aired on the Independent Film Channel, which were based on the Public-access television cable TV show Junktape. A show spin-off, called Warren the Ape, premiered on June 14, 2010, on MTV.
The Jim Henson Company, formerly known as Muppets, Inc., Henson Associates, Inc., and Jim Henson Productions, Inc., is an American entertainment company located in Los Angeles, California. The company is known for its innovations in the field of puppetry, particularly through the creation of Kermit the Frog and the Muppets characters.
Sam and Friends is an American live-action and puppet sketch comedy television series and a lead-in to The Tonight Show created by puppeteer Jim Henson and his eventual wife Jane Nebel. It was aired live twice daily as a local series in Washington, D.C., on WRC-TV in black and white, and later color, on weeknights from May 9, 1955, to December 15, 1961. However, most of the original episodes were never recorded, and are considered lost. A few surviving episodes can be viewed at the Paley Center for Media but many can also be found on video websites like YouTube, such as those digitally archived by The Jim Henson Company. Some have been documented by either the Henson Archives or newspaper articles published while the show was still on air.
Drew Massey is an American voice actor, puppeteer and director for Nickelodeon and the Jim Henson Company. He has worked extensively with the Muppets and has performed in many films, television series, and commercials. He has also lent his voice to many commercials and video games.
Mitchell Lee Schauer is an American animation professional who has been involved television programs and feature films since 1978. He is perhaps best known as the creator of the critically acclaimed Nickelodeon animated sitcom The Angry Beavers.
The Muppets' Wizard of Oz is a 2005 musical fantasy television film directed by Kirk R. Thatcher, and the third television film featuring the Muppets. The film stars Ashanti, Jeffrey Tambor, Quentin Tarantino, David Alan Grier, Queen Latifah, as well as Muppet performers Steve Whitmire, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, and Eric Jacobson. A contemporary adaptation of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, the story follows young Dorothy Gale, who works in her Aunt Em's diner, but dreams of becoming a singer somewhere beyond her small Kansas town. Swept up by a tornado, in her trailer home with pet prawn Toto, she lands in Oz and embarks on a journey to meet the Wizard who can help make her dreams come true.
The Phantom Empire is a 1935 American Western serial film directed by Otto Brower and B. Reeves Eason and starring Gene Autry, Frankie Darro, and Betsy King Ross. This 12-chapter Mascot Pictures serial combined the Western, musical and science-fiction genres. The duration of the first episode is 30 minutes, while that of the rest is about 20 minutes. The serial film is about a singing cowboy who stumbles upon an ancient subterranean civilization living beneath his own ranch that becomes corrupted by unscrupulous greedy speculators from the surface. In 1940, a 70-minute feature film edited from the serial was released under the titles Radio Ranch or Men with Steel Faces. This was Gene Autry's first starring role, playing himself as a singing cowboy. It is considered to be the first science-fiction Western.
A singing cowboy was a subtype of the archetypal cowboy hero of early Western films. It references real-world campfire side ballads in the American frontier. The original cowboys sang of life on the trail with all the challenges, hardships, and dangers encountered while pushing cattle for miles up the trails and across the prairies. This continues with modern vaquero traditions and within the genre of Western music, and its related New Mexico, Red Dirt, Tejano, and Texas country music styles. A number of songs have been written and made famous by groups like the Sons of the Pioneers and Riders in the Sky and individual performers such as Marty Robbins, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Bob Baker and other "singing cowboys". Singing in the wrangler style, these entertainers have served to preserve the cowboy as a unique American hero.
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