THE TRUTH ABOUT KERMIT [excerpt from Pinocchio's Dream}
I just think it would be good to get the past straight in an era when most viewers think puppets began with the Cookie Monster. It’s true that Muppets are traditionally constructed from the mouth out, and the breed was always voracious—but not always so cuddly, and in fact its early days were steeped in hideous violence, which is exactly why Kermit the Frog would later change his name, get foam rubber surgery, and affect a falsetto. And in the end it was easy as pie to make viewers forget those days when he would kill for a housefly. Easy because he knew how to wield the ADD he’d virtually created—aided and abetted by the caffeinated product he pushed and by which he made his first fortune. Those early TV spots made for a grim foundation of empire. This was way before the Muppets infested Sesame Street and holed up in Fraggle Rock. Back then Kermit was this pale, tadpole-like cretin operating under the name “Wilkins” in honor of his pimp, the Wilkins’ Coffee company. The frog had a dissenting gumdrop sidekick named Won’tkins, a loser type who bore the brunt of a century of post-industrial improvements on the slapstick, systematically deployed against him in order to demonstrate the humiliating perils of Choosing the Wrong Brand. Wilkins (“will kin us”), knowing the score, would never dream of sipping a jo other than his namesake’s. But Won’tkins, some kind of pre-Information Age dodo, was simply not able to keep up with the fast-talking pond-scum Hermes that was Kermit in prototype. The Wilkins/Won’tkins ads—over two hundred of them—comprised the earliest and most powerful imprinting of the Us/Them refrain that now dominates every channel on the air, and threatens that which Gandhi refused to call “civilization.” Who can forget Wilkins in the cockpit of a two-seat plane, scarf madly fluttering, yelling over to Won’tkins: Did you remember to bring your parachute? NO? Did you remember the Wilkins Coffee? NO? You’ll never forget THIS! After which he turns the plane upside down and Won’tkins plummets to his death. The next day Wilkins returns carrying a gigantic box-camera—With this camera I shoot people who don’t like Wilkins Coffee. BOOM!!! Won’tkins dies again. He’s smoking more now and enjoying it less. The one thing the First Frog held on to from his salad days was that hideous bob-headed cackle—delivered post facto to camera each time he dispatched the faithless, feckless Won’tkins—the same maniacal laugh & nod that the planet would later be hypnotized into enjoying. And, like a dumb lab rat, Won’tkins just can’t figure it out—no matter how many times his noncompliance results in his own violent death. Again and again he is magically reborn to make more commercials, having learned nothing about which coffee’s good for him. The stuff of sitcoms and arms races, and the coffee drinkers went mad for it! Who needs tastebuds when you already have taste? This was truly educational TV, the school of hard knocks in seven-second tutorials, mini maps of the ways of the world. The preachers practiced hard, too. Rowlf the Dog, in a TV skit created to promote the imminent Sesame Street, explained unabashedly that the routines in the new show would be repeated ad infinitum, “just like commercials, until they sink in.” And, talk about casting against type, when the evil amphibian then returned as Mommy’s Morning Savior, there was no need to forgive because all was already forgotten. What coffee stains? The green one’s mondo cute.
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