Around 2013- and you might know this- I started a private Muppet email list, because I intended to restore, for DVD, The Jim Henson Hour, in its entirety, and I wanted to talk to the most prominent Muppet fans who collected video, and see what I could source. I had VHS tapes newly transferred, and combined as many as six different VHS tapes into one image, playing at once. Episodes often took a week to restore in full.
I had a lot of help from the community generally, sourcing all of this material, and the project expanded into finding, sharing and restoring as much rare Muppet stuff as possible. It resulted, for awhile, in a Youtube channel called Henson Rarities, which the Jim Henson Company saved from copyright strikes several times, but which was eventually taken down by others.
I restored the three aired episodes of Little Muppet Monsters, which were only circulating in low quality before, and three unaired episodes that hadn't been seen previously. This resulted in a well-known GIF of Kermit typing.
I restored the 30 Years special, the John Denver Christmas, The Great Santa Claus Switch, A Muppet Family Christmas, The Fraggles Look For Jobs, and the Walt Disney World special. I restored and released hundreds of specials and appearances. If you've seen these, you've probably seen my versions.
In 2015, while working on releases of Puppetman, Go Hollywood and Go to the Movies that I no longer have, I had a shakeup in my life and put the Henson Rarities project on hold. The private email list had also started to become a little too public, for some of those involved.
Most of what I did back then is now public at my Archive accounts, along with stuff I didn't restore but which is rare.
https://archive.org/details/@ocpmovie
https://archive.org/details/@tygerbug
https://archive.org/details/@threepwoodmac
I often see "Lost Media" Youtubers now discovering stuff I shared on that list ten years ago.
There were at several Muppet restoration projects I never got to do back then, and that always bothered me, in the back of my mind.
There was Muppets Go Hollywood, which I have tackled to an extent more recently, although I can no longer find the sources I had then.
There were the first appearances of Miss Piggy, on the Tonight Show and a Herb Alpert Special, which had multiple sources which were mostly too messed up to share, until recently I decided to do various insane things to the footage, things that no one else has ever done and which I will not be doing again, or explaining.
A bigger challenge was the View-Master Interactive Vision VHS tapes, which included two Muppet tapes, four Sesame Street tapes, and one Disney tape. These VHS tapes were software for a unique video game console, and could not be captured fully using regular means. I had the raw signal captured via RF, by users at the Domesday Discord, and decoded using software, which took weeks, and eventually several months of work and rendering. Although a very experimental process, this allowed for a more stable signal, and to see portions of the picture that can't be captured using traditional means.
The goal was to make the games playable on a burnable DVD, that worked with the rare video game console, and which might eventually be emulated. It was unclear whether this would ever be possible. Eventually, after a lot of testing and frustration, I was able to create DVDs which work with the original hardware. All the gameplay is now possible, although the alternate audio has a terrible buzzing which I doubt can be corrected within the DVD format.
But the project that had been on my mind the longest was The Muppet Show itself. As a child I'd watched the show on Betamax, dubbed from the International master tapes. I regretted giving these tapes away around 2000. The versions of the show on DVD and streaming don't match what I saw as a child. I wanted to do something about that.
In particular I wanted to fix the Zoot endings. Every episode ends with a note from Zoot, and this footage was replaced in the 1980s when Jim Henson bought the rights to the show. About six episodes which had unique endings no longer have those endings.
In the process of fixing the "Zoot Problem" I discovered a huge amount of ephemera and lost media, and the project expanded quite a bit. I restored all of this material, sometimes making low quality material look like it was sourced from official DVD. A bunch of related lost media was also discovered which fell out of the scope of this project.
In late May, I finished thirteen - that's thirteen - Muppet Show DVD "Bonus Discs," intended as an addendum to how The Muppet Show was released on DVD. The discs are jam-packed with newly found and restored lost media that in many cases has not been seen by the Muppet fandom previously, or even known about. And certainly it has not been seen in this restored form and context. If you know what was cut from official Muppet Show releases, you'll get a high quality, corrected presentation of that. But there will also be surprises you wouldn't expect.
Unlike my many other restorations [like The Jim Henson Hour], I haven't put the full DVDs on Archive or Youtube or etcetera due to Disney copyright. Touchy subject to talk about. But I'm happy to share them privately via DM or whatnot.
However, sharp-eyed visitors to my Archive may notice that a collection purporting to be the Muppet Show's Zoot Endings -- which would only take a few seconds to compile -- lasts instead almost an hour, and has over a hundred bonus videos attached. This is actually a collection of edits done during the course of this project, presented in a way that's easy to miss.
https://archive.org/details/movies-the-muppet-show-itc-atv-zoot-ending-shots-and-promos