The Muppets may not be the most fondly remembered part of Saturday Night Live history, but they sure fetch a pretty penny.
Two puppets created by Jim Henson for SNL’s “Land of Gorch” sketches just pulled in over $25,600 on the auction block. The lot, comprised of two “Glig” puppets from the recurring Season 1 segment, were sold as part of Julien’s Auctions’ “Jim Henson Company 70th Anniversary Auction.”
“The Land of Gorch” was a staple of SNL during the show’s debut season. Henson had been enlisted by NBC’s Weekend Late Night Programming director, Dick Ebersol, to contribute new adult Muppet characters to SNL ahead of the show’s launch. The puppets that hit the auction block were used in SNL’s fourth episode, which was hosted by Candice Bergen. In the sketch, King Ploobis hopes to feast on an endangered species of bird-like creatures called Gligs, but only two of their kind remain.
Those two Gligs, performed by Frank Oz, now find themselves mounted on a custom stand made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Estimated to fetch $8,000-$10,000 when the auction was announced last month, the pair of Muppets—one static, and one operational—ultimately netted $25,600 on Tuesday.
The “Land of Gorch” characters had a tumultuous history in Studio 8H. Early into their run, it became apparent that Henson and his puppets were not gelling with the SNL staff. Henson had creative differences with the show’s writers, who he felt were contributing material that was off-brand and too risqué.
“Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch,” writer Alan Zweibel recounted in the oral history book Live From New York. The differences came to a head when writer Michael O’Donoghue strung up a stuffed toy Big Bird in the SNL offices. “That’s how we all felt about the Muppets,” Zweibel said.
That tense relationship between Henson and the SNL staff—and O’Donoghue’s dark overture—were dramatized in last year’s SNL biopic Saturday Night.
SNL ultimately staged 15 “Land of Gorch” sketches in its first season before deciding to pull the plug on the collaboration. They returned once more for a farewell sketch in the Season 2, where host Lily Tomlin visits the puppets in a Muppet Morgue.
