Who the Heck Is Sam Plenty?

Ah, the Jim Henson Company. In these past few, non-Muppet-owning years of their existence, they've given us a number of projects, but there really haven't been any that I've... what's the word I'm looking for?... ah, yes. "Liked."

Sure, I tried my best to muster up some enthusiasm for Puppet Up, but in the end I was unable to convince myself that it was entertaining. (Nor was TBS.com, despite its desperate video clip descriptions: "When a funny orangutan and some funny aliens do a funny thing, the funny stuff that happens is FUNNY! Really! PLEASE WATCH THIS!")

The Skrumps held some promise, but we haven't heard a peep from them in a year. And the 15 minutes I spent watching that Tinseltown pilot... well, I wish I had used that time to floss, or clip my nails, or glue my socks to the wall.

But now there's a new Henson Company production I actually, actually like... and the crazy thing is? There are no puppets. "No puppets?!" you might ask, as your eyes bug out and your jaw drops. It's true. The Sam Plenty Cavalcade of Action Show Plus Singing has no puppets, no cartoon characters -- just humans acting like fools. (This is not the first non-puppet Henson production... in 1999, JHC produced a UPN family sitcom called Family Rules that absolutely nobody in the universe has ever heard of, including you, me, or Brian Henson. But that's neither here nor there.)

What IS either here or there is Sam Plenty's Cavalcade of Action. The whole thing is actually pretty difficult to describe... I guess I'd call it a "serialized singing cowboy sci-fi low-budget adventure parody with songs." Huh. Well, I guess that wasn't difficult, just long-winded.

I first encountered it on the Henson.com podcast, where the host moderated a roundtable interview with the "cast" and "crew" of the exciting new movie Sam Plenty in Underdoom. It had a very Christopher-Guest-movie vibe to it... the "actors" like Dolores del Norte and Rex Argo discuss their careers and working on the project, and while that elicited more grins than guffaws, they've obviously put a lot of thought into it and they're really committed to the characters.

Hearing the audio-only podcast, I assumed it was a puppet thing -- I could even imagine what the puppets would look like, including director Sanso Pantopuntaquenia. But when I went to SamPlenty.com, I was surprised to find that, while there are a number of Henson puppeteers involved (Drew Massey, Alan Trautman, Victor Yerrid), there's not a puppet to be seen.

The videos available on the website are episodes of the movie serial that was discussed on the podcast, so you're actually seeing fictional movie characters played by fictional actors. Is that confusing enough for you? Unfortunately, you don't get to see Sanso Pontapuntaquenia, but you do get to see episodes of Underdoom (starting with... Part 3?), and they're pretty dang entertaining.

It's completely silly, but the actors play it straight -- there are never any snarky winks at the camera or conscious acknowledgments that this is anything other than a serious adventure film. It appears to me they had a pretty low budget for this project, but they use it to their advantage: highlights in the two episodes posted so far include an army of invisible men, and one sequence seems to have been filmed in the employee parking lot at Henson. Perhaps my favorite thing on the site so far is the "Sing-Along," whose lyrics suggest that the songwriting budget was as limited as the production budget.

I don't think I would pay to see this stuff, and it wouldn't translate well to a format longer than than the webisode, but what they're doing now works pretty well for the medium.

Anytime the Henson Company does something new with puppets in it, I always feel a sad little twinge of "Gee, remember when these were Muppets?" I'm not suggesting that Henson should abandon puppets, but you know what? Sam Plenty is better than any of that recent puppet stuff. So if that's a direction that works, maybe that's the direction they should keep exploring.

But maybe with fewer songs about horse poop.

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