The Muppet Show goofs

The creators of The Muppet Show were skilled at creating the illusion that the puppets were living characters. Still, occasional goofs slipped through, and made it onto the screen.

Occasional Goof

 * A 'continuity goof' occasionally occurred on The Muppet Show that involved the Muppet orchestra:
 * Musicians from the orchestra pit would be on stage during the goodnights until the beginning of the closing theme.
 * A wide shot of the audience would feature musicians in the pit that were not featured, or leave some musicians out.

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 three 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, Gonzo explains that 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.