When kids TV was cool - My all time favourite show ever

So we finally come to our last post in this series where I’ve looked back and shared with you some of the delightful programs I used to watch as a child.  I’ve enjoyed watching the DVDs again and bringing back the lovely memories I associated with them and enjoying the delightful innocence of children’s TV when it wasn’t too PC and scared of offending anyone and children enjoyed it for what it is.

So we finally come to the last television show and my all time favourite and it still is enjoyable to watch even now, I often return to the DVDs to watch when I’m in need of a laugh and the films are all incredible and one of them is ranked as my all time favourite Christmas film which I could watch at any time of the year but always gets many views during the December month.

So……

It’s time to play the music

It’s time to light the lights

It’s time to get things started

On the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, Muppetational,

This is what we call THE MUPPET SHOW!!!!!!

Yes my all time favourite show as a child has to be The Muppet Show.  I can’t remember how old I was when I fell in love with Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, Gonzo and all the others but I know I was very young. This was taken one Christmas and I must have been either one or almost two because they house we are in is the one we left before my second birthday.

I had clothes with Muppets on, I still do. My famous Muppet pants that Lauren bought me a couple of Christmasses ago are the comfiest PJ pants ever and I have Muppet socks featuring Piggy, Kermit and Animal. I still have a mug with Animal on it that was from when I was younger as well as my more modern ones, the Animal mug has a date of 1978 on it which was when I was only 2 so that’s a guide to how long I’ve been a fan of these guys.

Of course when we went to Florida earlier this year, we went to Hollywood Studios which is the home of the Muppets at Disney so naturally we had to do the Muppets 3D Vision ride and have my photo taken by the Muppet fountain.  My love for the Muppets has never wavered since I was a child and to this day they still make me laugh over and over.

The Muppet Show was an old style variety show hosted by Kermit the Frog.  It featured a special guest star every week who featured in various sketches, dance routines and stand up.  Miss Piggy was a prima donna pig who was always jealous of the other beautiful female guest stars and the way her beloved ‘Kermie’ always got on with them or adored them.  Fozzie Bear had a regular stand up spot, telling awful jokes and getting heckled by Statler and Waldorf, two old curmudgeons in the theatre box. Gonzo was always coming up with new daredevil acts, usually involving dangerous or impossible stunts and the band Electric Mayhem provided the music led by Doctor Teeth.  There are various other Muppets milling around the theatre such as Scooter the Gopher, Hilda the Seamstress, Uncle Deadly, Robin the Frog (Kermit’s nephew), the Swedish Chef who cooks a variety of inedible dishes, Bunsen Honeydew the scientist and his assistant Beaker, Sam the American Eagle who takes offence at all the nonsense the Muppets come up with, the Newsman who tries to deliver Muppet Newsflashes with little success, Wayne and Wanda, a singing duo who never get to finish a song and various other monsters and creatures.

Currently there are only three series available on DVD and I hope that maybe one day series 4 & 5 will finally get a release and trust me when they do I’ll be first in the queue to buy them.  However until then I must make do with the first three and I’ll share with you some of my favourite guest stars.  Now I will point out that these may not be my favourite celebrities ordinarily but in their episodes, they do shine.

Series 1

Rita Moreno - sings Fever with Animal on drums who keeps interrupting her.  
She gets her own back!

Bruce Forsyth - replaces Fozzie as the stand up comic and teaches Statler and Waldorf a lesson

Series 2

Teresa Brewer - she is just so adorable and I love her first musical number
Cotton Fields

John Cleese - refuses to work with pigs until a monster eats his contract (and his agent) so ends up in a Pigs in Space episode and complains about his final closing number.

Series 3

Racquel Welch - Piggy gets jealous of Raquel’s popularity among the male Muppets and her getting a solo number, so she hijacks her performance of I’m A Woman

Spike Milligan - Muppet News Flash acted out by Spike, simply hilarious.

So there we have it, The Muppet Show finishes off my collection of children’s TV shows that made my childhood enjoyable.  I will leave you with one of the all time most well known clips from the Muppet Show which was actually featured in Episode 1.  All together now…...

Video account of our trip

So, I am a vlogger more than I am a blogger so most of my work is posted on You Tube but I thought I would post a link to some of my videos relating to Lauren and mine's recent trip to Disneyworld.

First off is a selection of vids I made in the run up to my trip over to Canada.

Whats in my suitcase?

What's in my hand luggage? (excuse the mad smile on the thumbnail here)

And seeing as how we were too busy geeking out and having fun over there to actually do any vlogging as such, I decided to throw together a montage of all those photos we took over there (about 400+)

I did do a little filming over there, namely the Electric Light Parade, the Gringotts dragon bellowing flames and the Star Wars Jedi Training show

We did have the most amazing time and photos, videos and blog posts just don't do justice to the sheer thrill of being there in the moment.  I sometimes wonder if I dreamt it all but the whole holiday was so much better than I could have ever dreamed of.

And finally, if you can sit through it (it is over an hour long), my verbal account of our trip

Unbirthday Adventures at the Big D - aka Lauren & Angela do Disney

You've just gotta have a Main Street USA photo done.

As you saw from the last post that Angie wrote on May 16th: we went to Disney together last month! This trip was a super big deal for both of us, several years in the making as she mentioned. Angie's life long dream has always been to go to Disney and I knew that that was a thing that I could make happen for her. So my Mum and I set out to pull it off and we succeeded. We decided on this year for it so that it could be a joint Unbirthday celebration for Angie and I for our BFD 30th and 40th birthdays which are only 11 days apart in January. We chose to go in May instead of January for two main reasons: better weather and it being easier to get time off work in May.

Angie flew from the UK to Canada on May 17, and then on May 18 we started our two and a half day road trip to Orlando, we decided on a road trip because it was Angie's first time in the US period. Our route took us through New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia on the first day. West Virginia is all up in the mountains and as the day went on we ended up surrounded by more and more clouds. The effect was magnified the next day by the awful weather as we made our way through the rest of West Virginia, into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and finally into Florida where we spent the second night in Jacksonville. We were at Disney from May 20-27 when we started the two and a half day drive back to my house (the only change in the route is that we had to cross into Ohio on the second night for the hotel because finding one in Pennsylvania on Memorial Day weekend didn't work out for us), and then Angie flew out on May 30 and arrived back in the UK on May 31. We stayed on Disney property at a non-Disney resort called Wyndham Bonnet Creek, which is located near enough to Disney's Hollywood Studios park that we were able to watch the Star Wars fireworks display they have there from our patio.

Mad women on a motorbike!

Angie and I both being HUGE Potterheads we took one day off from Disney to head over to Universal Studios and visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter which was absolutely fantastic! I've always said I wouldn't even think of going to the Wizarding World of HP (WWHP from here on out so I don't have to keep retyping it) without Angie so I made good on that. While we were at Disney and WWHP a good time was had by all three of us (my lovely Mum came with us) and we did all sorts of fun things. On our first full day at Disney, the 21st, we started the day off right by having breakfast with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto at Chef Mickey's. Because really what better way is there to start a trip at Disney than having breakfast with the Mouse himself?

After breakfast it was off to Magic Kingdom again (we'd popped in the night before for the parade, fireworks and dinner), where we took that first photo you see up there. We took A LOT of photos, according to Angie's facebook album, at least 429. We decided to shell out for the Memory Maker Package (about $150USD) so that we could have digital copies of all of the professional Disney Photo Pass photos. The second day, Sunday May 22, Angie and I headed to Disney's Typhoon Lagoon water park while my mum relaxed at the resort. We spent most of the day mucking about in the wave pool there, and ended up getting horrible sunburns even though we'd reapplied out sunscreen, we were the lobster queens. My sunburn even extended into my scalp so I had to wear my baseball cap the rest of the trip instead of my awesome Maleficent Mickey ears that I picked up on the 21st. The 23rd was the day that we went to the WWHP where Angie and I's geeking out increased exponentially. We bought wands (I got Sirius's and Angie got Draco's), and Wheezes's products (shirts & candy), and chocolate frogs among other things; we rode the Hogwarts Express twice because the interactive trip is different in each direction. We weren't brave enough to do the dragon roller coaster there but we did the other 3 rides, the Gringotts one was definitely my favourite.

The faces of fear ladies & gents - the Dark Side had no cookies...

The 24th found us at EPCOT where I geeked out over Figment before we took a trip around the World Showcase, and then we tried to ride Test Track but got absolutely fed up of waiting in the line after the ride got stopped due to technical difficulties so we decided to go back to Magic Kingdom again so we could ride Space Mountain a second time (Space Mountain is my Mum's favourite ride and one of my favourites at Magic Kingdom.). On the 25th we headed to Hollywood Studios the home of all things Star Wars related at Walt Disney World. We rode Star Tours twice because we had read/heard that there were like 50 different possible tours, and our second tour ended up being better than our first. We also decided to go and meet Kylo Ren which was a horrible idea because OMG he was so intimidating!!! He was probably laughing at us behind his mask.

Our last day at Disney was on the 26th and it was a full day, we spent most of the day at Animal Kingdom where we all got super soaked riding the Kali River Rapids and where I made the mistake of taking my poor Mum and poor Angie on a roller coaster that they both absolutely hated (Primeval Whirl). Animal Kingdom has an old school carnival games area where you can win stuffed animals (dinosaurs and such) so I forked out $20 to get the three of us 7 tickets. I won both the games we played, I won a sea horse plushie for my dog and a purple dinosaur that I gave to Angie because purple is her favourite colour. We left at around 4-4:30 because we had an 8:00pm dinner reservation for the Hoop-de Doo Musical Revue and we wanted to relax first. It's a good thing we left the park when we did because as we were relaxing I decided to read the reservation confirmation again and noticed that we would have to pick up our tickets at the box office first an hour prior to the show AND that from the parking lot at the resort there was a 20 minute bus ride to the back of the resort property where the box office and show were located. I noticed that at 6:30 so the minute I noticed that we all kicked into high gear and got ready super fast. It was a fun show to end our time in Disney on.

We'd already started planning our next trip by the time Angie flew home.

Lauren

This is me setting out on an epic journey

So I am writing this on the eve of travelling over to Canada to meet up with my fellow blogger, Miss Lauren.  She has already introduced herself so I won't go on too much but what she says is absolutely true in that we are best friends and have been for many years now.   We have lots of common interests such as Disney, Harry Potter, books, The Sims, in fact there isn't much we disagree on but there are some things  (No I will never ever get into Star Trek unless it is Enterprise)

So we are off on our long-planned, thought-we-would-never-get-there, special-birthday trip to Disneyworld, Florida.  You would not believe how excited I am about this, I am 40 years old and a HUGE Disney fan since I was a child but I have never been to any of the Disney theme parks until now.  I have seen pictures on the internet, watched videos on YouTube, liked posts on Facebook and listened to colleagues talk about their trips but finally, I am going myself.

I still don't think I will believe I am going until I see the castle, that iconic Cinderella castle, with my own eyes.  And although to some people, this isn't anything out of the ordinary, to me this is going to be the most amazing day of my life.

We have a few days yet before we get to Disneyworld, as I said I'm flying into Canada to meet up with lauren and her mom and then we are travelling down by car to Florida so we actually don't hit Disney until Friday but the whole trip is going to be so amazing.  I'm going to have to photograph and video every minute of it because I still won't believe I've been for real.

So this is me, signing off as I head off.  I heard Disneyworld have a health and safety issue.  Have you seen the size of the mice there? ;)