The Muppet Show goofs

There were many goofs during the run of The Muppet Show

Season One

 * Episode 101: Juliet Prowse: Dave Goelz' head can been seen under the pair of chickens when Piggy dives on Kermit at the end of the closing number. Fozzie Bear asks Kermit why he wasn't doing an act in this particular show even though he had just done an act a few minutes earlier.


 * Episode 103: Joel Grey: Dave's head can be seen under Zoot and Janice at the end of Joel's first number.


 * Episode 104: Ruth Buzzi: Jim's head can be seen bopping up and down performing Waldorf after the Talk Spot


 * Episode 105: Rita Moreno: Jim's hand can be seen performing Kermit after Rita Moreno shouts at him for reading the cue cards. Durring the Marvin Suggs number, Marvin hits a Muppaphone twice in a row and it speaks with a different voice the second time. Also, The black arm socks for the Muppaphones are occasionally visable.


 * Episode 106: Jim Nabors: Richard's hair can be seen when George is talking to Scooter.


 * Episode 107: Florence Henderson: Jim's arm can been seen performing Gloat during "So Happy Together".


 * Episode 108: Paul Williams: In Old Fashioned Love Song, when the jugband comes out of the radio, viewers can see the tip of Dave's head under the blue, jug-blowing whatnot.


 * Episode 111: Lena Horne: When Kermit tells the monsters to standby for the closing number on his intercom, the number had no monsters in it! It had Lena, Kermit, Fozzie, Rowlf, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Wanda, George, and Mildred.


 * Episode 120: Valerie Harper: When the Swedish Chef smashes the cake, the hole where it was performed from can been seen.


 * Episode 123: Kaye Ballard: Dave's hair can be seen under Zoot during One Note Samba. Eren's face can be seen in a reflection when the second lady puts a coin in during the Vendaface sketch. During the Talk Spot, while Animal is beating Kermit up, Frank Oz makes a rip in the Animal puppet near his neck.


 * Episode 124: Mummenschanz: Wanda's performer's head can be seen underneath her during the library sketch.

Season Two

 * Episode 207: Edgar Bergen: When Gonzo comes off stage beat-up from his brick-wrestling act, the original Season 1 puppet is used.


 * Episode 214: Elton John: In Any Old Iron, one of the Whatnots is missing an eye. The staff was aware of this while taping but it was the last piece of the day and they didn't have time to do a retake or an extensive search for the pupil so since it was just the UK sketch, they let it fly.


 * Episode 216: Cleo Laine: At the end of the opening scene, the first season Gonzo puppet is used there.

Season Three

 * Episode 304: Gilda Radner: Before The Witch Doctor shows up, while Marvin is pounding the Muppaphone, his moustache and goatee fly right off.


 * Episode 307: Alice Cooper: When Piggy shouts at Alice, "I wouldn't seel ya my soul if ya paid me!," the tip of Frank Oz's head can be seen in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

Season Four

 * Episode 407: Dudley Moore: When the bug band comes off stage, one of them is missing their hair.
 * Episode 419: Lynda Carter: In the last backstage sequence, they used the original Season 1 Gonzo puppet there.

Muppet Height Relations
One of the big errors people can nit-pick with the Muppet productions is continuity of the characters' heights. For example Rizzo and Pepe normally appear around (or even above) waist height compared to their human co-stars. However, a full-body look at proportions of the character would suggest they would barely reach a human's knee. Kermit, Fozzie, and the other Muppets also appear in a flexible height range in order to interact comfortably with humans and sets. Steve Whitmire said in a 1998 interview that "If a character like Rizzo only appeared at his true height next to a human actor, you’d only see the human actor’s feet when you saw Rizzo. That’s an extreme example, but the idea is true for most of the characters. Even so, we do know the relative heights of the characters to each other and make an effort to keep that in mind." The suspended belief that the audience has when watching the Muppets allows this flexible reality to exist without major distractions. So even though Pepe's feet would be floating 3-feet off the ground, the audience still goes along, not questioning, and usually not even perceiving.

Canonical Holes
Many people argue that the Muppet films and TV shows are non-canonical; that each production is a world unto itself - that the Muppets are timeless personalities and characters that carry throughout productions, and these characters are presenting a show. People continue to argue and debate over what is Muppet truth and what is just acting and plain entertainment. Muppet Babies undermines the whole notion of The Muppet Movie. And Scooter's role as The Electric Mayhem's road manager in The Muppet Movie undermines his back-story set up in the early run of The Muppet Show as the theater owner's nephew hired by Kermit as a go-fer. There have been many contradictions in Muppet canon and back-stories throughout the 50+ years of the Muppets. However writers and performers will overlook or circumvent them in order to create new compelling stories, new characters or character traits, or just deliver a humorous joke.

In Episode 210 of The Muppet Show Gonzo explains his mother died before he was born and left a note to his father regarding Gonzo's name. This is contradicted in the Jason Alexander episode of Muppets Tonight where Gonzo claims his mother liked his unique college interpretation of Death of a Salesman. However the whole notion of Gonzo remembering his parents is somewhat dispelled in the film Muppets From Space.

TV Overscan
A television image goes right to the very edges of the screen, however most TVs are not so precise as to fit the picture perfectly to its glass. As a result all televisions have what is called "overscan" - where portions of the actual picture area fall outside of the physical viewable area of a TV set, due to the picture being projected larger than the actual screen. About 5% of the picture area is missing from each edge, with some sets cutting off as much as 15% on one edge or another. Television creators are aware of the situation and are careful not to put anything critical too close to the edge of the picture, and will frame a shot accordingly. TV directors have what is called a "safe title zone", somewhat in from the edges, where it is considered safe to put text and titles. They also have a safe action zone within which it is considered safe to put the action you need to see. With the special effect illusions created by the Muppets, filming them sometimes results in a revealing mistake or puppeteer's head/arm. Since The Muppet Show was intended for television broadcast and viewing, sometimes "goofs" were allowed to stay in the edges of a shot assuming they were far enough at the bottom of a shot to be cut off by the viewer's TV (or were unnoticed on the film prints as they were cut off on the studio monitors themselves). Since that time the show has been transferred and released in digital – in the form of DVD. Playing such videos on screens without overscan (such as some computer monitors, digital screens, plasma monitors, etc.) will allow viewers to see things originally thought to be out of sight.