Marvin Suggs



Marvin Suggs appeared many times on The Muppet Show playing the Muppaphone, an instrument made up of living balls of fluff. He apparently doesn't care that it's cruel to make music by hitting living things.

In the liner notes of the Muppet Show: 25th Anniversary Collection CD, Frank Oz says: "I don't recall where Marvin Suggs came from... probably from one of the writer's meetings. But the accent came from my French friend Phillippe Gentry—I just exaggerated it and made it really annoying. I've always felt Marvin lived in a scuzzy trailer park with his put-upon wife, and he kept the Muppaphones in a cage and would beat them regularly."

Marvin Suggs and the Muppaphone have performed "Lady of Spain" and "Witch Doctor". Marvin Suggs also had an All-Food Glee Club, which he conducted for the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas". Kermit the Frog once did an interview with Marvin Suggs and the Muppaphone in a UK Spot. Lesley Ann Warren once had a conversation with Marvin Suggs about hitting living creatures to make music.

In the Alice in Wonderland-themed Episode 506 of The Muppet Show, Marvin played the judge. At Alice's trial, he proceeded to strike the jurors on the head as if they were a Muppaphone.

Marvin was one of the few significant recurring characters, appearing in multiple films, including The Muppet Movie and Muppets From Space twenty years later, made from a Whatnot.

Trivia
A few other comedy shows have involved characters committing cruelty against living creatures for music's sake (a concept dating at least to 1928, when Mickey Mouse yanked piglets from their mother to create musical squeals), which in some ways predate Marvin Suggs. In 1957, in a sketch from his radio series (later released as a record), Stan Freberg, whose recordings were used in Sam and Friends, created Monsieur Toulier and his Tuned Sheep. The French-accented Toulier tied bells to his sheep, and when struck on the head with a shepherd's crook, the sheep would play music (a rendition of "Lullaby in Birdland"). Like Marvin, Toulier chided his sheep individually by name when they were out of synch or tempo. A similar sketch, with even closer parallels in some respects, occurred in a 1969 episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus (an episode titled "Sex & Violence"). "Arthur Ewing and His Musical Mice" features Mr. Ewing (played by Terry Jones) beating on tuned mice (in boxes so as to be unseen by the viewer) in his "Mousaphone" with two mallets, in a rendition of "The Bells of St. Mary". The sketch also appeared in the film "And Now For Something Completely Different" (1971) with the name changed to "Ken Ewing and His Musical Mice" playing "Three Blind Mice".