Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas: Classic or Dud?

http://www.muppetcentral.com/_images/muppets/emmet_ma.jpg

Today we lost Jerry Nelson (RIP), Muppet actor extraordinaire and the voice of Emmet Otter. I was just listening to the soundtrack yesterday and it's really one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. The movie is great too, amazingly well done on such a low budget, great characters, cool bluegrass stuff, a Christmas movie you can watch that may not even mention the word "Christmas" at all. I can't remember, it's been 8 months since I've seen it...

Anyways: CLASSIC, obviously.

What are your favorite songs/moments from this? I like "Ain't No Hole in the Washtub" the most, but "The Bathing Suit She Wore" is wonderful, and the Nightmare Band is of course a highlight.

Anyways, just a place to gush over how awesome this movie is!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6trGocstHI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1KKs3uVggI

Amazed we never had a separate thread on this but I know it's come up in various Muppet threads before. Utterly classic and of course:

"Look at the pretty birds in the trees."

"We're not birds, we're a jugband!"

Dig that trippy outro on "Washtub", with that jaw-droppingly beautiful deep red sky.

My favorite moment is when Ma says something reproving to Emmett and he bows his head slightly and says "yes'm'"

The tracking shots over the fake model landscape are soooo moving to me. Just love this show up and down.

Paul Williams is a mf pimp.

It really is an amazing work of puppetry, esp the opening tracking shots of Emmet & Ma paddling down the river.

Jim Henson - "Emmet Otter was the first time we had gotten into those kind of elaborate sets where we had floors in the interiors and we would take a wide-angle shot with characters coming up through holes in the floor. Or we'd cut into the set and remove the floor and have the characters moving through space in waist shots. That was the most elaborate production we had gotten into at that point. Frog Prince had been platformed-up and The Muppet Show was always platformed-up, but in Emmet Otter... we'd go right into a scene. We'd have the whole set in three dimensions... rigged so we could pop parts and come out through the openings, which is really time consuming..."

That river really is a technical marvel.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/563578/jim-henson-emmet-otters-jug-band-christmas-returning-to-theaters

Wow, that is great news.

P sure that anyone responding 'D' to the question posed itt is a soulless wraith. If anything, I think I love this more with the passage of time than I did even as a kid.

yeah, thanks for the heads up here. My lady will often shout out BROTHERS anytime she sees a group of roots musicians; she will want to go to this.

Henson knew his way around a Christmas special. This, A Muppet Family Christmas, and Christmas Eve on Sesame Street are all cream-of-the-crop mainstays.

Just seeing the title brought a tear to my eye, I fear open weeping should I view it again.

this is so good and sincere it breaks your heart. over time i have increasing weariness over narcissism and general self-absorption and arbitrary callousness and social media zinging and bad faith/worst case readings of anything anyone says and just find myself preferring the genial in life, admiring those wanting to live quietly w/out notice or fame or eyes on them, just being decent to others around you no matter what the world throws your way, so stuff like this truly affects due to it *not* trying to affect, just by depicting a better world.

the riverbottom nightmare band btw is insane, just absolutely scorching. true hoodlum rock.

I appreciate that even though the Riverbottom Nightmare Band members are a bunch of sociopathic troublemakers, the film correctly recognizes that they are the superior performers in the contest.

Everything in its right place. And it is a simple delight, that whole show, still.