What Is The Lone Mystery Car In The Grimmest Muppet Christmas Special?: Cold Start

While I was in Los Angeles this past weekend, I had to do a lot of driving around, because that’s what you do in LA: drive. I like driving, of course, but creeping along the miserable 405 in dense, cruel traffic is hardly driving, so you need a good distraction. That’s why I was listening to the wonderful Rocklopedia Fakebandica podcast, done by some good friends of mine, and this week’s episode was one that brought back a lot of memories, because it was about a holiday TV special I remember strangely well: Emmet Otter’s Jug-band Christmas. 

Emmet Otter’s Jug-band Christmas was a 1977 Muppet special that pre-dates The Muppet Movie (1979) and in some ways can be thought of as a testbed for Advanced Muppet Techniques, like getting Kermit the Frog to ride a bike and the way the Muppets can seemingly traverse complex three-dimensional environments, instead of always having to be hidden behind muppeteer-hiding walls or tables or desks or crates or whatever.

Here’s a little promo/trailer thing for the special, to give you an idea of what it’s like:

It’s definitely a triumph of Muppet technique and technology; this special was the first example of radio-controlled elements in Muppet-ing, among other innovations. I remember watching it as a kid, being a big Muppet advocate (I still am, one doesn’t just abandon Muppets, after all) but it’s hard to ignore the fact that, really, this is sort of a wildly grim tale, which seems a peculiar choice for a Christmas special filled with talking animals.

Based on a 1971 book by Russel Hoban (the guy who did those Frances the badger kids’ books) and the story in turn based on the fundamental conceit, also quite grim, of O.Henry’sThe Gift of the Magi. Like Magi, the water in which this story swims is poverty, brutal, crushing, and unrelenting poverty.

I could go into more details about the special, but that’s what the podcast did, so I’ll just let my boys here describe to you the cold, hungry, bedraggled world that these animals that wear hats live in:

What I will talk about in a bit more detail is the one car seen in the entire special, a car driven by the sort-of antagonists of the story, a band called The Nightmare from a neighboring town called River Bottom. You can see them, and their car, here, where they’re assholes to Kermit, for no clear reason:

Man, what a pack of dickheads, right? That said, all they were really trying to do was win the same battle of the bands-type competition that Emmet Otter and his band was trying to win, too, and who am I to say that’s wrong? Because it’s not. It’s a battle of the bands! And their band did bring some powerful rock and roll energy to what was otherwise a kind of hokey lineup. Check them out:

Hot damn! It’s almost kind of punk, with the refutations about toothbrushing and the general don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. Oh, and the backup singer/keyboardist isn’t a bear, like I and everyone else who watched the damn thing thought. It’s a stoat. If that’s a stoat, it’s one ugly-ass stoat, because stoats look pretty cute to me. Plus, he’s fucking huge.

Anyway, in addition to the stoat, there’s a snake and a weasel and lizard and even a catfish. It’s a hell of a crew and they all drive around in a car that looks like this:

Hmm. Let’s get a little closer look at that, if we can. Computer! Zoom, and enhance, quadrangles 1,3 to 5,6! Execute!

That’s a little better, I guess. This is a puzzle! It looks quite old, I’d say a 1930s design at the latest, though it’s oddly wide and kind of squared-off, especially that radiator, for that era. The overall timeframe the story takes place is quite vague, too. It feels like maybe the 1900s to 1920s, with a strong depression-era feeling, but then we hear The Nightmare playing very clearly midcentury rock-and-roll, using amps and equipment that feel like 1950s tech at least, and we also see them wreaking some havoc on snowmobiles:

Those snowmobiles, with what appears to be fiberglass bodies, seem like ’50s or even early ’60s designs, don’t they? If this does indeed take place in the ’50s or ’60s, it does make the living conditions of Emmet Otter and his family and friends even more apalling.

Okay, so what is that car? I suspect that, realistically, it was a radio-controlled car built just for the production and not really based on any one particular car. But that’s no fun. Let’s figure out what, in the world of this story, that truck could have been, assuming that humans were around and sharing the Earth with these sentient animals capable of speech and operating towns, and still building motor vehicles.

With that in mind, I have a theory about The Nightmaremobile: I think it’s likely a custom-built machine based on the chassis and modified body of an International truck:

I’m thinking a ’30s-era IH heavy-duty truck. There are references to a sawmill (that is, of course, shutting down) in the town or nearby, and that’s the sort of place that would have employed multiple trucks like this one. My theory is The Nightmare has members with some ties to the sawmill, and bought a used or de-commissioned truck, then cut the cab down to make it a convertible, removing, reframing, and hinging the flat, rectangular windshield in the process, and then building up a big, open body from doors and body panels from other similar trucks.

The long, straight lines of the body and the square doors and the large, curved fenders, with their wide running boards, seem to fit the general design of those IH trucks. The bumper is sort of similar, too. The roads we see in Frogtown Hollow aren’t great at all, suggesting that automobile traffic was pretty rare; maybe the sawmill’s fleet of IH trucks were really the only automobiles around, so when the members of The Nightmare wanted a sweet ride, they had to work with what they had.

If that’s the origin, then I think they did a remarkably good job; their cut-down truck is pretty well transformed into a sporty and imposing big open-topped roadster, one capable of hauling around five wildly different animals in what I assume is relative comfort.

I’m open to hearing your theories as well, and hearing if any of you remembers this special, too. I guess I should mention that there is a last-minute happy ending, so if you were avoiding watching it so you wouldn’t have to see cute Otters staring into the maw of destitution, you don’t have to worry.