We Will Make a Loud Zing-Zou-Zou!
Dreams from the Muppet Liberation Front. Apparently, there is a world where muppets and humans live side by side, like Sesame Street for grown ups, like Galaxy Quest but grounded.
And in that world, muppets have souls. It was evolution. They'd been, at one point, man-made, and humankind never did let them forget. But with the advent of artificial intelligence, muppets started building themselves and existing autonomously of their creators. But always -- as is often the way of these tales -- as a subspecies. Domestic servants, chauffeurs, children's entertainers, all the doers of dirty work, etc.
This was the age of the Last Glacier. It rose like a white cliff against the shore, and roads had been cut through it, and houses built in its icy crags and crannies. A huge brick mansion at the summit, with ice for its front yard and a verdant parkland for its backyard. Scientists lived there to study the glacier.
We were to join them, and took a bus up the winding ice road. A muppet was our bus driver. A camel-colored fellow with a flappy hat. As I looked out the window, I could see glimpses of the ocean. On the horizons, line after line of whales rose up and splashed down. Thousands. Far as the eye could see.
There had been another oil spill, quickly covered up. The whales were all beaching themselves to die.
"Wait 'til you see them on the shore," said the driver. "They separate themselves so that they can die with their own pods."
I cried out, "No!" and every time that line of whales splashed up and came closer, gray and glistening, or black and white, or strange and huge and blue, another line rose up behind them. And I cried out, "No!" again with every wave, as if I could not stop.
Later, the muppet driver and a lady scientist were falling in love. They could not help it, but they did not understand it. A little muppet toymaker sent the driver a toy, but when you stripped away its tag, there was another tag underneath, a secret census for Half-Muppets: products of human/muppet liaisons.
"You are not alone!" the tag read.
And it had the words to the Muppet Liberation Anthem, and the notations, too.
Soon, everyone -- human and muppet -- was whistling or humming the song, not knowing where the tune came from.
I only know the first two lines, because the alarm clock woke me:
"We will SHAKE a whopping great noise!
We will MAKE a loud Zing-Zou-Zou!"
"Zing-Zou-Zou," it was given to me to understand, is the Muppet "Hallelujah."
Make of that what you will, Leonard Cohen.
[LATER EDIT: Here is the complete Muppet Liberation Anthem]
***
And in that world, muppets have souls. It was evolution. They'd been, at one point, man-made, and humankind never did let them forget. But with the advent of artificial intelligence, muppets started building themselves and existing autonomously of their creators. But always -- as is often the way of these tales -- as a subspecies. Domestic servants, chauffeurs, children's entertainers, all the doers of dirty work, etc.
This was the age of the Last Glacier. It rose like a white cliff against the shore, and roads had been cut through it, and houses built in its icy crags and crannies. A huge brick mansion at the summit, with ice for its front yard and a verdant parkland for its backyard. Scientists lived there to study the glacier.
We were to join them, and took a bus up the winding ice road. A muppet was our bus driver. A camel-colored fellow with a flappy hat. As I looked out the window, I could see glimpses of the ocean. On the horizons, line after line of whales rose up and splashed down. Thousands. Far as the eye could see.
There had been another oil spill, quickly covered up. The whales were all beaching themselves to die.
"Wait 'til you see them on the shore," said the driver. "They separate themselves so that they can die with their own pods."
I cried out, "No!" and every time that line of whales splashed up and came closer, gray and glistening, or black and white, or strange and huge and blue, another line rose up behind them. And I cried out, "No!" again with every wave, as if I could not stop.
Later, the muppet driver and a lady scientist were falling in love. They could not help it, but they did not understand it. A little muppet toymaker sent the driver a toy, but when you stripped away its tag, there was another tag underneath, a secret census for Half-Muppets: products of human/muppet liaisons.
"You are not alone!" the tag read.
And it had the words to the Muppet Liberation Anthem, and the notations, too.
Soon, everyone -- human and muppet -- was whistling or humming the song, not knowing where the tune came from.
I only know the first two lines, because the alarm clock woke me:
"We will SHAKE a whopping great noise!
We will MAKE a loud Zing-Zou-Zou!"
"Zing-Zou-Zou," it was given to me to understand, is the Muppet "Hallelujah."
Make of that what you will, Leonard Cohen.
[LATER EDIT: Here is the complete Muppet Liberation Anthem]
***