Covering popular tunes has been and continues to be a feature of Muppet performances. Kermit the Frog was a lip syncher long before launching into his own singing career with "Bein' Green." Muppet covers were often simply wacky as having pig Eskimos, walruses, and penguins sing "Lullaby of Broadway" in Episode 4 of Season Three to an all pig motorcycle gang singing the Beach Boys' hit "I Get Around" in Episode 15 of Season Four. Other musical numbers were more message driven like "I'm a Woman," a duet featuring Raquel Welch and Miss Piggy from Episode 11 of Season Three, and "For What It's Worth" in Episode 21 of Season Two. While the Welch/Piggy duet follows the tone of the original release fairly closely (Piggy is all about female empowerment, after all), the Buffalo Springfield cover takes a Vietnam War era protest song and uses it to comment on American gun culture and hunting.
The Muppet cover alters the original in some interesting ways. First off, there are no live actors in the sketch at all; all the actors from the human hunters to the forest animals they attempt to stalk are Muppets. The setting differs from the original as well -- moved out of the 1967 protest movement and into an idyllic sylvan setting. The vocals are not by a human singer but instead by a chorus of forest creatures lead by a opossum. Finally, two verses were altered to fit the new message about hunting. With each alteration, the Muppets widen the focus on the then 10-year-old protest song, taking it from war protest to cultural critique.
Lest you think I'm reading too much into a three minute sketch, MuppetWiki, a site written by and for fans of the Muppets, reports in its entry for "For What It's Worth" that in 1978 an article appeared in Field and Stream calling for a letter writing campaign to protest the sketch's depiction of hunters.
But back to those changes and how they might affect a child viewer. When I first saw the sketch on The Muppet Show, I had no idea that "For What It's Worth" was anything more than a song that came on oldies radio. The Muppets gave me a way to interact with the song, and the context they created for it was one most children would have been familiar with thanks to years of fairy tales and Disney films. Disney films in particular made me comfortable with the notion of singing animals who were very often brighter and certainly more compassionate than people. After all, I'd seen Bambi and Dumbo, and those films make very clear the consequences of human/animal interaction.
And so for years, the song was for me about environmental stewardship. Then as I was putting together a unit for my composition students on protest songs, I stumbled upon "For What It's Worth." I did a little digging and learned of its past -- that the song had been written in part as a response to clashes between student protesters and police in Los Angeles.
The song suddenly grew and changed for me: it became something more than a protest against police brutality or a satirical look at hunting culture. It became emblematic of the power of popular culture to evolve and through its evolution change us. I'm grateful to the Muppets for planting a powerful audio-visual moment in my head that eventually grew into a pop culture learning moment.
For what it's worth, I think there are lots of such moments out there, and I hope to share some of them with you on this blog.
For more Muppet goodness, check out these sites:
For more about protest songs, check out these artists and songs:
- Muppet Wiki
- Tough Pigs
- Disney's home for the Muppets on the web
- And this irreverent take on "Why Can't We Be Friends"
- Simon and Garfunkel "Scarborough Fair"
- The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn"
- Woody Guthrie
- Pete Seeger
