SkekTober day 8: Come with us now from the bubbling tarpits, to the sulfurous wasteland, from the rotting forest, to the stagnant mud flats...to the Land of Gorch.
In 1975, Jim Henson was looking eagerly for an opportunity to bring his Muppet antics to more adult audiences than the usual "Sesame Street" demographic of beginning readers. That opportunity was found in the brand new sketch comedy program, "Saturday Night Live". Henson and his players eagerly created a concept and characters for a recurring segment, "The Land of Gorch". However.
For legal reasons, the Land of Gorch sketches could only be written by the hired Saturday Night Live writers, and not by the Muppeteers themselves. The results were...messy. The writers--hired for their laid-back Second City stylings--were at a loss as to how to write a puppet show, of all things, and looked at the assignment as an actual punishment. The performers were frustrated to be saddled with raunchy, textbook sitcom bits instead of the broad, madcap, commedia dell'arte segments they had envisioned.
(It...started getting kind of funny toward the end, there, when the humor turned entirely metatextual, about how no one liked these segments on the show? And there is a nice bit with Lily Tomlin that Jerry Nelson admitted many years later to have actually written.)
At the end of one season, the decision was unanimously made that the productions go their separate ways. But this story has a happy ending, because it paved the way for Henson to leave and immediately begin production on "The Muppet Show". And a little less than a decade later, he and his team took their unused ideas for a vapid and debauched royal family ruling over an otherworldly wasteland, and recycled them into...the Skeksis. ;D
India ink on Bristol board.
