The Land of Gorch

""Come with us now from the bubbling tarpits, to the sulfurous wasteland; from the rotting forest, to the stagnant mud flats, to the Land of Gorch."

The Land of Gorch was a recurring sketch on the first season of Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels, executive producer of the show, stated in a Tomorrow Show interview prior to the series' premiere that these sketches would feature "a whole new group of Muppets which are adult Muppets and who can stay up late." These new "adult" Muppet characters included King Ploobis, Queen Peuta, Scred, Vazh, Wisss and the Mighty Favog. Jim Henson, Jerry Nelson, and Frank Oz performed the roles of Ploobis, Scred, and the Mighty Favog respectively, while Alice Tweedie, Fran Brill, and Richard Hunt performed the roles of Peuta, Vazh, and Wisss. Opening narration for the sketches was supplied by Saturday Night Live staff announcer Don Pardo.

The series of sketches lasted from SNL's premiere in October 1975 to April 1976 (and became a recurring joke in the next season). The original proposals and scripts refer to the sketches as Gortch rather than Gorch; over time the spelling was changed, and both versions are found in the Henson files.

According to the Muppet Morsels on The Muppet Show: Season One DVD, only hired writers for Saturday Night Live, and not Henson employees, were allowed to write Gorch sketches. Other writing credits went to SNL contributors Chevy Chase and Al Franken. Despite this, Jim Henson did write one sketch, for the episode hosted by Raquel Welch.

The writing staff were generally less than pleased with the presence of the Muppets. Writer Alan Zweibel expressed his views on the topic: "Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch. The first time I met [Michael] O'Donoghue, I walked into Lorne's office... and I look in a corner of the room and there's a guy I learned was Michael O'Donoghue. What was he doing, you ask? He had taken Big Bird, a stuffed toy of Big Bird, and the cord from the venetian blinds, and he wrapped the cord around Big Bird's neck. He was lynching Big Bird. And that's how we all felt about the Muppets.

Franken and Davis and I were the rookie writers, and the others always rigged it so we were the ones who wrote the Muppet sketches. So I went over to Jim Henson's townhouse on like Sixty-eighth Street with a sketch I had written. There was one character named Skred [sic], and I remember we're reading the sketch, Jim Henson's reading the pages, and he gets to a line and says, 'Oh, Skred wouldn't say this.' And I look, and on a table over there is this cloth thing that is folded over like laundry, and it's Skred. 'Oh, but he wouldn't say this.' Oh, sorry."

During the middle of the season, after a deal to produce The Muppet Show in England had been made, the sets were destroyed, and the Muppets were officially "let go" from the show's regular cast. All of the Gorch sketches from the second half of the season revolved around the idea that the Muppets had been fired, and were trying desperately to get their jobs back. In 1983, Jim Henson commented on what happened behind the scenes at Saturday Night Live: "I saw what he (Lorne Michaels) was going for and I really liked it and wanted to be a part of it, but somehow what we were trying to do and what his writers could write for it never jelled. ... When they were writing for us, I had the feeling they were writing normal sitcom stuff, which is really boring and bland. ... Yeah, it just never jelled with the particular writers we were working with, but at no time did I ever lose my respect for the show. I always liked what they were doing."

In early 1999, Frank Oz also commented on the show:

"There was good and bad. The bad unfortunately was that I think we didn't really belong on Saturday Night Live. I think our very explosive, more cartoony comedy didn't jive with the kind of Second City casual laid-back comedy, so the writers had a lot of trouble writing for us. They weren't used to that kind of Muppet writing. But the good part was that every Saturday was very exciting - going through rehersal, then dress [rehersal], then air - and meeting and seeing the beginnings of Andy Kaufman, and the great little films of Albert Brooks, and seeing John [Belushi] and Chevy [Chase] and Danny [Aykroyd], the beginnings of all that. That was very, very exciting. A live show on Saturday night is always exciting. But it was good at the end of the year that The Muppet Show was there for us, because it was just too difficult for them. We didn't belong on that show anymore. But we had a great time."

The segments dealt with a number of racy issues: alcohol abuse, adultery, species extinction, drugs, and other "adult" topics, though each was treated with the expected SNL irreverence.

Skits were indeed performed live; the exception was the January 24, 1976 episode; that sketch was pre-taped on January 10th, during the pre-shoot of the Elliot Gould episode.

The Muppets were supposed to have appeared on the Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Gerald Ford's press secretary, Ron Nessen, as evidenced by a behind-the-scenes photo and Don Pardo's announcing the Muppet cast during that episode's credits. Nessen explained at the end of the episode that they could not be there due to "technical complications."

The Gorch sketches from the first season were included on the Saturday Night Live: The Complete First Season DVD set.

While the Gorch characters were never significantly utilized following their expulsion from SNL, they can be glimpsed in the crowd of Muppets during the "Rainbow Connection" finale in The Muppet Movie (1979).

Cast

 * Jim Henson as King Ploobis
 * Jerry Nelson as Scred
 * Frank Oz as the Mighty Favog
 * Alice Tweedie as Queen Peuta
 * Fran Brill as Vazh
 * Richard Hunt as Wisss