The Jim Henson Hour: Dog CIty Uncut (Muppets)

Here's an uncut Muppet classic for you. Jim Henson won a Primetime Emmy in 1989 for directing Dog City, and rightly so. This dog-filled parody of 30s and 40s film noir gangster films will have you howling with laughter! And here it is with 10 minutes of Kermit and company not available on DVD!

As Rowlf the Dog will tell you, there are a thousand tails tucked away in the mean streets of Dog City. It's a dog-eat-dog world where good mutts live in fear of murderous gangster Bugsy Them and his love of senseless violence. Ace Yu is a German ex-shepherd who inherits a saloon, The Doghouse, from his late Uncle Harry. Unwilling to pay protection money to Bugsy, Ace teams up with a runaway collie named Colleen to take on Bugsy and his gang.

The 40-minute special inspired a mediocre animated/puppet series on FOX in the 90s, in which Kevin Clash and Fran Brill reprised their roles - sort of.

Dog City has been released on DVD in the US and UK, but is missing 10 minutes of material from when it originally aired as part of NBC's wonderful but short-lived The Jim Henson Hour. Kermit, Digit, Bean Bunny and friends introduced the film as part of Muppet Night at the Movies, with Bean Bunny showing two trailers for his own feature films, and the All-Dog Network taking us behind the scenes to the unfortunate life of a Hollywood "stunt dog" (cat).

Arguably, The Jim Henson Hour showed the Muppet team at their creative peak, with remarkable live-action fantasy like The Storyteller sharing space with Kermit and the Muppet gang. However, the series failed in the ratings and was quickly cancelled. Although certain Jim Henson projects from this era have made it to DVD or VHS [The Storyteller, Song of the Cloud Forest, Monster Maker, Miss Piggy's Hollywood], no complete and uncut Jim Henson Hour episode has ever been released on DVD or any other format - with one exception.

KSS Films in Japan released a very rare laserdisc of Jim Henson's Dog City, which was dubbed in Japanese but otherwise contained the full Jim Henson Hour episode, including ten minutes with Kermit and company.

So here we are then, for the first time in DVD quality. The Jim Henson Hour: Dog City.

[Laserdiscs of Secrets of the Muppets and Living With Dinosaurs were planned but never released. Monster Maker was released on laserdisc and VHS, probably without Jim Henson Hour branding, and is also on Netflix instant viewing. Sesame Street: 20 Years and Still Counting is sometimes considered a Jim Henson Hour episode, and is on DVD in its entirety, minus a short credits roll.]

The classic corny Muppet Show type humor is fully on display here, with puns and jokes flying at a furious pace. The special doesn't entirely shy away from adult humor either, hinting slyly at the murder, sex and violence that any gangster film is full of.

The video for the MuppetTelevision sequences has been transferred from the laserdisc using composite MiniDV. Audio was taken from an off-air stereo VHS recording by Kermiclown. Some mono audio was edited in from the laserdisc, but the third audio channel features Kermiclown's unedited recording if you want it.

Japanese-dubbed audio is also included on the second audio channel.

Video for the main feature was taken from a US DVD with audio from a UK DVD, as the US DVD's audio is very bad for some reason [there is a strange sort of stereo phasing effect].

Japanese subtitles were removed from two shots in "Bean Bunny and the Cuteness Thief."

Dog City was written by Tim Burns and stars Kevin Clash, Jim Henson, Fran Brill, Camille Bonora, and Jerry Nelson. MuppetTelevision features Steve Whitmire and Dave Goelz and a top writing staff including Jerry Juhl, Chris Langham and Bill Prady.

Designed to look like a retail DVD, this disc is filled with great special features as a tribute to The Jim Henson Hour.

You'll see:

* Dog City Japanese dub
* Dog City restored NBC TV advertisement
* Dog City animated episode "The Big Squeak"
* Behind the Scenes Gallery
* Rare promo film for The Jim Henson Hour with Kermit and Ace Yu on the set of Dog City
* Jim Henson Hour clips: "Sweet Vacation," "Bobby McFerrin," "Secrets of the Muppets," "Lighthouse Island"
* Jim Henson Hour Lion Outtake
* World of Jim Henson "Jim Henson Hour" montage
* And two easter eggs!

Here's some restoration information:

* Dog City restored NBC TV advertisement - This is NBC's shorter version of the longer Dog City trailer that plays during the episode itself.

In the episode version, there are three shots which don't appear in the finished film. There's a long shot of an alley over which titles for "Platypus Junction" and "Cow World" roll. The end of this shot, a car chase clip, seems to be used in the finished film. Belle's line "Jump through a hoop for a quarter, sir? Catch a frisbee for a dime, ma'am?" is shown here in closeup, whereas in the finished film we only see her back. Bugsy Them's line "I love it! Makes no sense whatsowhoever!" is also delivered in closeup. In the film it's a wide shot [and both are different takes].

In the shorter version NBC aired as a TV ad, only Belle's alternate shot survives. There's no "Cow World" etc. We start with a quick car chase shot that's in the final film, and we end with Bugsy's line as it's delivered in the final film. The TV spot also begins and ends with the usual NBC / Disney announcer rather than Jerry Nelson's announcer.

* Dog City animated episode "The Big Squeak" - The first episode of the 1992 FOX animated/puppet series based loosely on Dog City, this was restored from two sources. One is a commercially sold VHS tape. The other is a recent Amazon Video on Demand copy, which is deinterlaced. The entire series is available on Amazon for cheap. Although the Amazon copy is quite clean and good, I wanted to restore the video look to the puppet sequences, and also felt that the deinterlacing hurts the detail in the animation.

I used the original VHS for the puppet sequences, and for the animated sequences I overlaid the VHS and VOD versions. This resulted in ghosting every five frames, whenever the VHS was interlaced and the VOD isn't. Since the animation is mostly on "twos" with each drawing shown twice, I painstakingly replaced the ghosted frames with clean frames when available, which worked for 90% of the show. Audio is from Amazon throughout.

The opening titles I restored much more painstakingly, inverse telecineing and editing the VHS to run at 24p and placing the correct Amazon frames over it.

Kevin Clash again plays the lead puppet role, reusing the Ace puppet but using a very different voice this time.

* Behind the Scenes Gallery - This is taken from the US DVD, with different audio.

* Rare promo film for The Jim Henson Hour with Kermit and Ace Yu on the set of Dog City - Here's a rarity, and the lowest quality material you're going to see on this DVD [multi-generation VHS here]. During the scene where Colleen gets dognapped, Kermit was actually onset to record a promotional film for The Jim Henson Hour. The camera dollies back to show the crew [it's a static shot in the final show], and Kermit talks to us about the exciting things in store in the upcoming TV series The Jim Henson Hour. I assume this was for the benefit of reporters and people in the industry. He then plays some rather badly-chosen clips from the series, taken from episodes like Food and Trash. Ace Yu (Kevin Clash) then banters with Kermit, who seems uninterested. Ace says "I'm a funny dog."

I restored this one by taking the appropriate clips from the Jim Henson Hour episodes they come from, and recreating the transitions and titles. I also darkened the Kermit/Ace Yu sections. I've darkened most of this DVD to make it look right on today's LCD monitors rather than the old CRTs.

Jim Henson Hour clips here were taken from copies of Canada's "The Jim Henson Show," a half-hour show which only showed the MuppetTelevision segments from The Jim Henson Hour. My copies of these are very clean but also very low-resolution, containing no video interlacing. However, the clean, deinterlaced video worked fine for this montage.

The clips begin with the Solid Foam band playing the blues before Kermit tells them "You're driving me crazy!" which they misinterpret as a song request. This very funny clip plays full-screen during this clips montage, but in the final Jim Henson Hour episode we don't see it full-frame at first. It grows out of one of the monitors.

So, as low quality as it is, this is actually Jim Henson Hour footage not seen in this form elsewhere.

* Easter Egg One - From an off-air VHS, unrestored.

* Jim Henson Hour Lion Outtake, Lighthouse Island Clip, Secrets of the Muppets clip, Easter Egg Two - These are all from the Jim Henson Company's Youtube channel, with a little extra added to the end of the Secrets of the Muppets clip.

* World of Jim Henson "Jim Henson Hour" montage - The World of Jim Henson is a documentary made after Jim's death, which was released on commercial VHS. The documentary contains several short clips from The Jim Henson Hour, including Secrets of the Muppets and the Innertube TV pilot, which never aired on television. I recreated some page-peel transitions and edited the montage down to the most interesting parts.

My two copies of this special are both less than ideal. A VHS to DVD transfer has very blown-out highlights and loses detail, but is otherwise clean with video interlacing still present. An AVI transfer has highlight detail still present but is lower resolution and deinterlaced. I combined the two, using the highlights from the AVI version over a darkened VHS version. This causes some subtle ghosting but otherwise looks much better.

* Jim Henson Hour clips: "Sweet Vacation," "Bobby McFerrin"

Three different VHS sources were used to restore the song sequence "Sweet Vacation" [From The Today Show/The Soldier and Death] to a much higher quality. Two decent-quality off-air VHSes were overlaid, along with a commercially sold Sing-Along VHS tape created and sold after Jim's death [which starred the Steve Whitmire Kermit in new footage]. The Sing-Along tape was very clean but had large onscreen lyrics which had to be carefully removed using various mattes, and was also missing some footage during the instrumental break. My copy also had blown-out highlights and not enough color.

Overlaid together, the three sources look much cleaner and more colorful, and much more like the song should look. Audio is mostly from the commercial Sing-Along VHS.

The Bobby McFerrin scene was restored using two off-air VHS sources. Neither source is very high quality and the results are not anything amazing, but overlaid together they at least look more pleasing than either source. I opted not to try to use the brief clips from The World of Jim Henson, or my deinterlaced clean copy from The Jim Henson Show, which would have introduced ghosting. I believe I used audio from The Jim Henson Show, however.

I'm surprised clean, interlaced copies of The Jim Henson Show haven't turned up rather than the probably AVI-sourced material that's circulating.


Dogs: There's a scene you've gotta catch, there's a plot about to hatch.
Put on your collar, sniff around, you gotta dig this crazy town.
Hucksters, hustlers, gamblers, fool, gangsters breaking all the rules.
Watch where you step, look out below, it's hip! Everybody wants to go.
Dog City, everybody wants to go.
Dog City, everybody wants to go.
Dog City, every crazy cat I know, and every lowdown so and so.
Dog City, everybody wants to go.
Dog City, everybody in the know.
Put your glad rags on, bring lots of dough.
Hurry up, everybody wants to go.


In a late 1989 interview with American Film magazine, Henson was asked if he would "try again" with The Jim Henson Hour. "I don't think so," Henson responded. "That was with NBC, and they cancelled us after the fifth show was on the air, so that was a bit of a frustration. Though we had six Emmy nominations from it, the ratings were quite bad. They put us in a time slot that they had been consistently not doing very well in, and we also did not do very well."

Episodes

* Episode 101 — Friday, April 14, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: "Science Fiction"
Guest star: Louie Anderson
The Storyteller: The Heartless Giant

* Episode 102 — Friday, April 21, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: "Aquatic Life"
Guest star: Ted Danson
Special: Lighthouse Island

* Episode 103 — Friday, April 28, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: "Monster Telethon"
Guest star: The Today Show
The Storyteller: The Soldier and Death

* Episode 104 — Friday, May 5, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: pre-film show
Special: Dog City

* Episode 105 — Sunday, May 14, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: "The Ratings Game"
Guest star: Bobby McFerrin
Special: Miss Piggy's Hollywood

* Episode 106 — Sunday, July 9, 1989 on NBC

Special: Monster Maker

* Episode 107 — Sunday, July 16, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: "Health and Fitness"
Guest star: Smokey Robinson
Special: Song of the Cloud Forest

* Episode 108 — Sunday, July 23, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: "Musicians"
Guest star: Buster Poindexter
The Storyteller: The True Bride

* Episode 109 — Sunday, July 30, 1989 on NBC

MuppeTelevision: "Garbage"
Guest star: k.d. lang
The Storyteller: Sapsorrow

* Episode 110 — 1992 on Nickelodeon

Special: Secrets of the Muppets

* Episode 111 — 1993 on Nickelodeon

Special: Living with Dinosaurs

* Episode 112 — aired in the UK in 1990; never aired in the U.S.

MuppeTelevision: "Food"
The Storyteller: The Three Ravens