It was less than a year ago that I excitedly expounded on the second season of The Muppet Show being released on DVD, so it’s with that same enthusiasm that I bring you the third season of the Muppets Show. With a total of five seasons ever filmed, we’re over halfway towards having a complete collection of almost everything Muppets - and with the plentiful DVD extras, this goal is more possible than ever.

This DVD set contains 24 episodes, as have the previous releases. By the third season, the Muppets had really hit a unique rhythm and were attracting a huge variety of guests from the entertainment world. While every episode has at least a half-dozen memorable moments, not even counting the truly awesome Swedish Chef and Muppet Labs scenes, this season also holds some of the most well-known episodes, featuring Alice Cooper, Danny Kaye, and the legendary Harry Belafonte episode, which is a spiritual experience in itself. This might be a ridiculous thing to say of puppets, but I find it to be absolutely true.

There’s such a vibrant innocence to the show, and it’s never more clear than during Belafonte’s ‘Turn the World Around’ musical number. It needs to be seen. The Henson folks worked very closely with Belafonte on almost all of the content of the episode, all the way down to Muppet design - making sure that none of the African Mask Muppets would upset any religious or cultural sensibilities.

Some of my personal favorite guests include Leo Sayer and Roger Miller. Sayer’s spasmodic overacting makes him seem like he IS one of the Muppets, and while it’s pretty cringe-inducing, you settle into it by the end of the episode and you can probably base a drinking game on how many times Sayer can flailingly change his emotions in any given moment. Mime doesn’t work when your mouth is moving, Leo.

I admit that I’m too young to know who most of these people are without hearing their notable songs or seeing them in action, since all of the names come right out of the 1970s, but Roger Miller was one that I recognized by voice alone. In his episode, the entire cast comes down with Cluckitis and begins transforming into chickens. While he is spared from catching the epidemic, I had become a fan of Miller from his role as The Rooster in Disney’s 1973 production of Robin Hood (which is my favorite animated Disney movie of all time), so he got to be fowl after all.

Other guests on the 4-disc set include Jean Stapleton, Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd, Sylvester Stallone, Liberace and Gilda Radner, among many others. Of course, any TV-on-DVD set is only as good as its extras, and this set has some gems.

‘Muppets on Puppets’ is an hour long, black and white feature originally filmed in 1969, and is an extended exploration of puppets and puppetry by none other than Jim Henson, with assistance by Frank Oz and his puppet-making team. In relatively simple terms, Henson interacts with a bunch of puppets and talks about puppets from around the world, how they’re operated, how to make them, and how to put on a puppet show. It’s a rare opportunity to see Jim Henson as himself, operating his Muppets, and also pointing out to Rowlf that he is indeed a puppet, which only slightly shatters his world. Given how elaborately the Muppets are operated and have had a world seamlessly structured around them, it’s strange to see the humans who stick their arms up the Muppets’ guts. Just like the actors who performed alongside the Muppets, I forget that they’re not real - which is Henson’s real masterstroke. The whole feature is like watching an oldschool arts and crafts TV program, and it’s worth the price of the DVD set alone.

Additionally, there’s a 15-minute featurette called ‘A Company of Players’, which is a current-day conversation with the Muppet team about how some of the Muppets came about and the working relationship of all of the players. Finally, there’s 6 or 7 minutes of Purina commercials from the 60s that star Rowlf and another dog Muppet. As a huge fan of retro commercials, I approve.

And the whole thing is fuzzy. Yes, fuzzy. You can rub against it and it feels nice. It’s exceptional viewing, without exception, and I have many a soft summer afternoon planned with this playing. You should too.

As you’ve probably heard, Tickle Me Extreme Elmo is the second coming. Seriously folks, you’d better repent now, because this is it. Elmo has returned, and he’s EXTREME. While the word ‘extreme’ inherently implies that he’d be toting an AK-47, smoking a cigar and balancing a bikini-clad damsel in distress over his shoulder, there’s no such thing happening here. EXTREME Elmo just kinda falls down in hysterics. Were a human to participate in such activities, I can assure you that they’d not be dubbed ‘EXTREME’. ‘Inebriated’ would probably be more appropriate, but those Muppets tend to get away with a lot of chicanery.

Perhaps you recall the media bombardment of the original Tickle Me Elmo in 1996. Sure, in this modern era of Elmos Which Can Fall Over With Laughter, oldschool Elmo is like the Vanilla Ice of the toy shelf. You all thought it was remotely cool and progressive once, but a new dawn has come, and man, were you wrong. Time to trim that tall, blonde pompadour. Of course, at the time, every child in existence was to get Tickle Me Elmo in the course of holiday giftgiving, else they’d be terribly ostracized and hung from the monkeybars by their Spider-Man underoos. ‘Homogenize or Die!’ was the cry of the playground. Or, if you went to a public school, it was likely something far less eloquent involving the words ‘butt’ and ‘face’.

This intense demand drove the prices of the original Elmo up to soul-melting ridiculousness around the holidays. The mainstream toy retailers were bereft of Elmos and the world resorted to the dark alley / man in trenchcoat avenue, since eBay was still a relatively new entity and people had not yet learned the art of eScalping from their eTrenchcoats. Sure, Tyco was going to make more Elmos - it’s not like the world’s population of whatever it was that they skinned to cover Elmo in red fur was going extinct. However, a post-holiday Elmo might as well have been a shank to the kidney of your darling little one, so it was worth mortgaging the house for an Elmo. An Elmo, mind you, that giggled and vibrated and not much else. Because of this demand, store clerks suffered severe injuries in trampling incidents at various stores throughout the US. They were dark days for human evolution indeed. Sure, it was okay for Caveman A to club Caveman B over the head for a bit of life-sustaining fire, but to break someone’s ribs to superficially placate a small child probably set us back at least five hundred developmental years. Thanks, guys, for delaying the development of my ability to fly and change colors based on my surroundings. How am I ever going to get a date NOW?

There have been variations to the voice-chip Elmo since its inception, most notably the “Surprise Edition”, which would stop talking on January 9th, 2002, and inform the squeezer that they’d just won a fancy cash-and-goodies prize that ranged up to a 300,000 dollar value. Other Elmos with poor-quality voice chips erroneously sounded like they were saying ‘Who wants to die?’ I don’t know, Elmo - do you plan on putting a halt to your unstoppable, trampling march across the progress of humanity? If not, the answer to that is ‘me, please’.

TMX Elmo retails, should you be able to bend all laws of probability, space and time and find one on a store shelf, for about 40 bucks. Proceed with caution, though - there have already been gunpoint-threats and injuries relating to this red-pelted terror. eBay auctions have made it clear that many, many profiteers have bought out retail stores for the sole purpose of reselling the Elmos on eBay for about 100 bucks each, but that price is sure to increase as the holidays approach. At the time of this writing, a certain Amazon Marketplace seller has a TMX Elmo listed for one thousand dollars, and unless this is a joke, I’m compelled to award him the Scalper Crown. It’s like a regular crown, but it comes with a free punch in the right eye. So if you have to make a choice, there’s two versions of TMX Elmo, differing by only a sticker on the front of the box. Get the ‘Warning’ sticker before you get the ‘Top Secret’ sticker, because if there’s ever a time when you suffer massive heart failure, you could probably trade the rarer of these for a replacement. Grandma Eunice lived a full life anyhow, and Timmy needs his Elmo, dammit.

In the media obsession with this TMX Elmo, it’s no surprise that people are sucked into this black hole of retail, but keep in mind that patience is a virtue. What you might buy for hundreds dollars today will be worthless as soon as January 2007 comes around, and teaches your child absolutely nothing about the crushing disappointment of life. Prepare them now, and please, think before you add momentum to the madness. And pick one up for me.