Muppet Babies (1984 - 1991) Full Series Preservation (a WIP)

Surprised I haven’t seen any sort of preservation for the series before now, figured I may as well give it a go.

Muppet Babies, like many cartoons aired during Saturday mornings in the 1980s, lacks any official release. Both Muppet Babies and Alvin and the Chipmunks (my last preservation project, also on the site!) will likely never get releases, as they’d have huge copyright hurdles to leap through. This is where I’d like to step up the plate, and offer a definitive Muppet Babies experience!

What exists online seems to be a (nearly) complete set of episodes, albeit in pretty mediocre quality. Mediocre video is something that could be gotten around, but audio can only be repaired to a certain point. I’ve acquired everything I’ve been able to find, and I’m still sorely in need of quite a lot of upgrades.

On the upside, I do have a batch of episodes from the first three seasons with perfectly useable audio (pulled from Playhouse Disney UK during the early 2000s); those episodes are as follows.

104 - Raiders of the Lost Muppet
105 - Scooter’s Hidden Talent
106 - Case of the Missing Muppet
107 - Eight Take Away One Equals Panic
108 - What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?
112 - From A Galaxy Far, Far Away
113 - Good Clean Fun

201 - Once Upon An Egg Timer
203 - Fozzie’s Last Laugh
204 - The Great Cookie Robbery
205 - Out of This World History
206 - Snow White and the Seven Muppets
207 - I Want My Muppet TV!
211 - The Muppet Museum of Art
212 - By The Book

301 - Pigarella
302 - The Best Friend I Never Had
305 - The Muppet Broadcasting Company
307 - Fozzie’s Family Tree
310 - Treasure Attic
311 - Around the Nursery in 80 Days
312 - Fine Feathered Enemies
313 - Muppet Goose
315 - Of Mice & Muppets

401 - Muppetland

There are also four episodes officially available on DVD:

107 - Eight Take Away One Equals Panic
110 - Gonzo’s Video Show
202 - Piggy’s Hyper Activity Book
308 - The Daily Muppet

The quality on these is pristine, and won’t be needing any work. This leaves quite a lot of episodes in need of upgrades; I will be attempting restoration on the best VHS-sourced episodes I have available, but even those could stand to be quite a lot better. There are also a few episodes that only seem to exist in shorter (around 2 minutes of cut footage) syndicated runs:

101 - Noisy Neighbors
404 - Where No Muppet Has Gone Before
418 - Nanny’s Day Off
504 - Is There A Muppet In The House
713 - Nice To Have Gnome You (only copy I’ve seen to found was pulled from a retail VHS, which looks to have been edited on the tape program to include an incomplete start)

I feel like the odds of finding upgrades for episodes neccesary and completing the syndicated episodes are pretty good? The show aired, uncut, on Nickelodeon for 8 years (1992 - 1999), where they showed every episode outside of the final season (which could use upgrades, but the only shot there is original CBS broadcasts or international airings), so my hope is to find more Nickelodeon broadcasts (I do already have a few). I’m also looking to find Spanish and German broadcasts; I know captures of them exist, I have 80/107 episodes in Spanish, and I’ve seen dozens of clips from German captures (via Junior), so I’m hopeful more things will become available soon.

There are also a handful of episodes available on retail VHS, some of which I do have. I’m going through sources now to see exactly what I still need to get a capture of, I’ll have an update on that soon.

I’ll update this with any developments, which hopefully won’t be a dreadfully long wait!

YES. Can’t wait for this, sir.

This would be great to see.

Would love to see this when complete. I have the almost-watchable version that you mentioned, and I’d love to get my hands on a restored version.

Did this ever go anywhere? This is one of the series that it seems is stuck. Especially since the 2018 show came out and nothing surfaced of the original.

Hello. I have been making my own restorations and combined with the ones that Elijah Hechtman made have a total of 82 out of 107 restored episodes in my possession, 55 of which have been posted on my youtube channel (https://youtube.com/daneclark-lr1oe) and the rest will be posted over the next couple of days. The quality isnt always the best but everything is at least an 8 out of 10 IMO. I would like to apologize for things like the fact that a very small number of my “restorations” are nothing more than raw tvrips with the commercials clipped out and first second or so of the intro missing and for things like the fact that there might be episodes with plastered logos or the wrong credits in the part that was unique to each episode where they credit where they got all the stock footage from, I just wanted to make something that would be a 99.9999999% accurate representation of what we would get if an official release were possible. Anyway, I think that restoring the whole show this way feels like it just might be doable, so here’s what I’ll need:

If anyone has any of the stuff in this list, please PM me a video download link and I will credit you on the channel
-First of all, before anyone tells that some of these things are already online in acceptable quality, I disagree because some of the stuff I found there had the brightness and contrast turned up too high making the whole picture look overexposed whenever there was a lot of white on the screen and/or had too many compression artifacts and/or had the recordings cut off in annoying places and stuff like that

-I need Syndicated airings of “What’s New at the Zoo”, “This Little Piggy Went To Hollywood”, and “Old MacKermit Had A Farm.” These 3 episodes had the wrong Go Bye Bye sequences when they aired on Nickelodeon and some CBS airings lacked them all together, but my research seems to indicate that the edited Syndicated airings always had the correct ones.

-Nick or CBS airings of “Where No Muppet Has Gone Before”, “Invasion of the Muppet Snackers”, “Adventures in Muppet Sitting”, “Nanny’s Day Off,” and “Is There a Muppet In The House”. I also need a Syndication airing of “Is There A Muppet In The House” to ensure that I can get the correct Go Bye Bye I need, the only copy of that episode online is a Syndicated airing that has the Go Bye Bye partially missing

-Nick airings of “Elm Street Babies”, “Junkyard Muppets”, “Bug Busting Babies”, “Six-To-Eight Weeks” “Not Necessarily the Babies”, “Skeeter And The Wolf”, “Goosetown Babies”, “ “The Muppets of Invention”, “Muppet Babies The Next Generation” and “Buckskin Babies.” I prefer using the regular Go Bye-Bye sequences instead of the altered “We’ll be right back” versions used in the hour-long CBS airings and Nick airings of these episodes would be the best place to find them. The first 3 episodes on this list also likely aired in Syndication with their correct Go Bye-Byes.

-CBS airings of “Gonzee’s Playhouse Channel”, Kermit Pan”, “Whose Tale Is It Anyway”, “At The Movies”, and “Return of the Bronzed Beetle.” Since these episodes never aired on Nick or in Syndication and aired on CBS when they show was still an hour long it’s likely that their Go Bye-Bye sequences only exist in the altered “We’ll be right back” form but if anyone does find the regular versions for those episodes please send them to me
-I would also like to point out that i think that some of the things I’m asking for were available on a bootleg DVD set that was flating around back in the mid 00s so if you think you might have that set please check for me. You can tell if an episode is unedited if it runs around 22:30 without the intro, credits, and Go Bye-Bye segment. I already have syndicated airings of “Where No Muppet Has Gone Before,” “Invasion of the Muppet Snackers,” “Adventures in Muppet Sitting,” and “Nanny’s Day Off,” so its OK if the Go Bye Bye Segments from those episodes are missing from that set. It also appears that the “We’ll Be Right Back” Go Bye Bye segments from all of the later season 7 episodes that never aired on Nick are just might be ones that are easy to reformat into the regular versions if someone could give them to me sourced from that set since I don’t have usable copies of any of them, and it would still prefer to use the pre-existing regular versions for those episodes if they exist, and I still want Nick airings of all the other episodes that had their Go Bye Bye segments altered like that

Update: I might be able to restore “At The Movies” tonight depending on how well I can edit the Go Bye Bye Segment, the altered version I have doesnt look as overexposed as the rest of the episode and I found a good quality foreign dubbed copy of it

I feel bad for this series it’s a huge one from my childhood. I hope high quality footage exists of it out there and not just tv rips same for Alvin and the chipmunks.

Looks like I’ll deffinatley be able to restore “Junkyard Muppets” because the alternate Go Bye Bye from that episode is one of the easiest to fix because it’s one of the only ones of not the only not to have any alternate animation and all i need to do is isolate part of the music. I don’t want to make a habit out of not hunting down the regular versions of these sequences but this is probably the one instance where I can deffinatley get away with it

Well, it looks like I wont be able to restore “At the Movies” for now because my English copy is missing a full 30 seconds or so at the beginning of the third act. I did restore “Junkyard Muppets” though, I uploaded last night but took it down so I could fix some inconsistencies with the audio volume, it will be back up tonight.

Just managed to dig up an old restoration of “Invasion of the Muppet Snackers” that I made way back in 2011

The link to your YouTube channel gives a 404

https://youtube.com/@DaneClark-lr1oe forgot the @

Well apparently the non “we’ll be right back” version of the Go Bye Bye segment from “Whose Tale Is It Anyway” does exist dubbed into spanish with alternate animation. This is one of those late season 7 episodes that was never rerun after the CBS run and I was skeptical of the standard Go Bye Bye sequences existed for. The Nick versions of “It’s Only Pretendo” and “Sing a Song of Superheroes” have Go Bye Bye sequences that IMO are easy to tell were edited in a way that implies that no standard version was ever made for them and I assumed that the same was true for all season 7 episodes because the Go Bye Bye sequences are missing from all the other foreign dubs of season 7 episodes I’ve found. We might need help from our UK and Australian friends here

Fullmetaled said:

I feel bad for this series it’s a huge one from my childhood. I hope high quality footage exists of it out there and not just tv rips same for Alvin and the chipmunks.

In the case of Alvin and the Chipmunks the first 65 episodes have been preserved from Teletoon Retro recordings that are pretty close to being in perfect quality. They’re Syndication edits so some of them might be time compressed or have very slight edits but I can confirm that this was one of the most forgiving shows out there in regards to Syndication cuts and some episodes were already short enough that they didnt need to be edited or compressed at all. It’s just the later episodes that were never syndicated that we need to find better copies of

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Muppet-Babies-Nanny-VHS/dp/B0006687JY
“Nanny’s Day Off” was released on this UK retail tape if someone could hunt it down and send me the video file. I already have the Go Bye Bye from a Syndicated airing of that episode.

There, we now have 86 out of 107 that are absolutely complete and in acceptable quality. Now I just need people to help me with the stuff I’m still missing. You might see some of the episodes I’ve already posted replaced with better quality copies in the near future but for the most part I’m pretty satisfied with what i put out.

The original was definitely far superior to the 2018 version, but I will admit that the reboot was still pretty decent for a modern-day pre-school show. Out of all the shows my nephew watched back when he was younger it was probably the one of the few shows in his demographic that I could really stand watching. The producers knew that adult Muppet fans were watching and put in lots of easter eggs for them, the penguin girl wasn’t a bad character at all, and there were moments that were genuinely funny for a contemporary pre-k show. My only real gripes are that sonetimes the lessons the characters learned felt a little forced and the fact that they made an extremely awkward episode about Gonzo wanting to wear a dress

Found the Go Bye Bye from a Nick airing of “Buckskin Babies” on Youtube, we can scratch that one of the list

I just replaced a bunch of episodes with copies I got off a torrent that were slightly better quality than the ones I got of archive. I also replaced a few episodes with older better restorations of mine that I found going through my old things and fixed some episodes that had annoying combing artifacts.

Please, I need anyone who collects TV recordings to check and see if they have any of the stuff I need to get this project finished. It’s so close to being finished and I know that there’s a decent chance of finding at least some if the stuff I’m missing if I could just get people to check and see if they have any of this stuff, if you think there’s even a slight chance that you might have something I need please just check for me, you’d be doing a huge favor for Muppet fans and animation fans. If you have anything I need abd can rip it and put it online please send it to mbrestored1984@gmail.com

I was able to recreate the standard Go Bye Bye segment from “Gonzee’s Playhouse Channel” in just barely acceptable quality and improved the rest of the episode using a Spanish-dubbed copy.
Please, i’ve been having lots of fun with this project and have been getting mildly annoyed that nobody has been responding to my requests for help. Maybe nobody has any of the things I’m looking for but please, if you’re one of those people who collects long blocks of off-air TV recordings from the 80s and 90s and if there’s even the slightest chance of you having one of the things I need then I would really really like you to check for me and send them to mbrestored1984@gmail.com if you find any of them

I just obtained the UK Retail VHS containing “Nanny’s Day Off” off ebay but don’t have a PAL VCR, If there’s anyone who can digitize it for me please email me at mbrestored1984@gmail.com

DaneLClarkJr said:

I just obtained the UK Retail VHS containing “Nanny’s Day Off” off ebay but don’t have a PAL VCR, If there’s anyone who can digitize it for me please email me at mbrestored1984@gmail.com

It has “Nanny’s Day Off” and “Plan 8 from Outer Space”.

VixeyBlo02 said:

DaneLClarkJr said:

I just obtained the UK Retail VHS containing “Nanny’s Day Off” off ebay but don’t have a PAL VCR, If there’s anyone who can digitize it for me please email me at mbrestored1984@gmail.com

It has “Nanny’s Day Off” and “Plan 8 from Outer Space”.

yeah, I already have a nice looking copy of “Plan 8” taken from a CBS airing uploaded that I’m already satisfied with

“Where No Muppet Has Gone Before”, “Is There A Muppet in the House”, “Kermit Pan”, “Adventures in Muppet Sitting” and “Bug Busting Babies” are now up thanks to materials that were just posted on archive last night. I thought about restoring “At the Movies” but decided not to because I think I’ve done enough cheating when it comes to recreating standard Go Bye Bye sequences. I could have restored “Nanny’s Day Off” too but I just spent 40 bucks on a PAL retail VHS of it and I don’t want it to go to waste, if it were ripped straight from the tape it would probably look nicer than it would if I used any other available resources but I don’t have a PAL VCR, if there’s anyone here I can send it to who could digitize it for me or has any of the other things I’m looking for then please email me at mbrestored1984@gmail.com