The Muppet Show's Greatest Guest Stars

In their heyday, Jim Henson's Muppets were some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. True, they're fictional characters, but that hasn't stopped them from making public appearances, endorsing products, or being interviewed on top-rated talk shows. And they've hobnobbed with their most famous peers — Robert De Niro and Katy Perry on Sesame Street, Orson Welles and Steve Martin in The Muppet Movie, and RuPaul on Muppets Now.

But no Muppet project was quite as loaded with star power as The Muppet Show. The 1976 series combined puppetry with the classic variety show format, meaning that every week brought a new guest star to Kermit's Muppet Theater. Many of them have been forgotten in the decades since, but The Muppet Show also attracted the biggest names of the era along with the entertainment industry's most legendary veterans. It can be surreal to see such big names letting go of their ego (and maybe a little of their dignity) to play second banana to a cast made of cloth. But the best of them treated it as an honor to work alongside Kermit and company, and they fit right in with their furry and feathery costars. Here's just a few of the most memorable guest performances.

There have been many attempts to update The Muppet Show for the modern TV landscape, but none of them have caught on. Maybe that's because the Muppets never really cared much about being up to date to begin with. From the love of cheesy puns and silly slapstick to the song choices to the architecture of the Muppet Theater itself, The Muppet Show is a throwback to the golden age of vaudeville theater.

That would explain why showbiz veterans meshed so well with the Muppet cast, and none were more veteran than George Burns, who got his start in vaudeville before graduating to radio and then TV with his wife Gracie Allen on The Burns and Allen Show. He only became more popular after Allen's retirement by playing up the incongruity of a little old man with an even older-fashioned idea of showmanship for all it was worth.

This made him a perfect fit for The Muppet Show. He takes all the chaos in stride, making his unchanging facial expression and slow drag on his big cigar as funny as whatever he's reacting to. And he sets up one of the greatest running gags in Muppet history — "Gonzo fiddles while George Burns." As writer Jerry Juhl says, "A joke that isn't good enough to use once may be bad enough to use several times."

Every once in a while, The Muppet Show hooked a true rock star. Paul Simon, Johnny Cash, and Blondie's Debbie Harry all guested on the show, but none of them had quite as Muppety a sense of showmanship as Elton John. The singer behind immortal hits like "Your Song," "Bennie and the Jets," and the Lion King soundtrack later saw his life turned into a blockbuster movie with Rocketman.

As much as his music, he's famous for his flamboyant performances and costumes. But playing against a candy-colored cast of zoo animals and who-even-knows-whats, he needed a little something extra to stand out. And John more than delivers for his performance of "Crocodile Rock" (backed up by Muppet crocodiles, of course), augmenting his usual giant sunglasses and sequined bathing cap with dozens of huge feathers, some of them bigger than his head.

The Muppets also have a little fun with John's image — Sam is horrified to see him "dressed like a stolen car," and when the rest of the cast — even Statler and Waldorf — comes out for the curtain call dressed like John, he turns up in his everyday clothes. "Boy, Elton, you look weird!" says Scooter. John shoots back, "Well you guys are all dressed like stolen cars!"

The closest precursor to the Muppets' surreal style of humor is Monty Python's Flying Circus and its big-screen spinoffs, most famously Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The series' breakout star was John Cleese, who parlayed his success into starring roles in movies like A Fish Called Wanda and TV shows like Fawlty Towers.

Cleese helped write his own script for The Muppet Show, and while his more cynical sense of humor makes it easy to pick out his contributions from the regular staff's, it still meshes beautifully. One sketch shows Monty Python's classic multilayered comedy, with John Cleese as a pirate attacking Pigs in Space's USS Swinetrek. The main focus is on Cleese's arguments with Captain Link Hogthrob, but at the same time he's having an even funnier old-married-couple spat with his own parrot, and, perhaps inevitably, Cleese references one of his classic Python sketches by asking the bird if it wants to be "an ex-parrot." Cleese's put-upon persona gets an even better workout in the grand finale, where Kermit announces, against Cleese's will, that Cleese will be singing "The Impossible Dream." And every time he complains, the curtains fall and Cleese is roped into an even more uncomfortable situation.

It's easy to imagine many Muppet Show guest stars saw playing with puppets as slumming, but not Harry Belafonte. The singer and activist who almost single-handedly made calypso trendy in the States is quoted in Of Muppets and Men saying, "I seldom do television appearances, but I have always had the highest regard for Jim Henson's taste and artistry, so when I was invited to be a guest on The Muppet Show, I saw that this might be an opportunity to do something very worthwhile."

And he did. His performance of "Turn the World Around" with Muppet recreations of authentic African ceremonial masks was so personal to both him and Henson that Belafonte performed it again at the puppeteer's funeral. Belafonte even sings his biggest hit, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" on TV for the first time in his career. When Fozzie Bear learns about this milestone event, he pulls out all the stops — which predictably, hilariously, all goes wrong.

By the time The Muppet Show premiered in the late '70s, most of the stars of the movie musical's Golden Age weren't spry enough to keep up with Kermit and crew (with the notable exception of honorable mention Gene Kelly, who appeared in the final season), but they got the next best thing with Liza Minnelli. Minnelli's not just a bona fide Broadway diva in her own right, with an Oscar-winning film role in Cabaret, she's also Hollywood royalty, and she channels her parents, Wizard of Oz star Judy Garland and master musical director Vincente Minnelli on her Muppet Show appearance.

This episode takes the form of an old-school murder mystery, with Minnelli as the "dame" who contracts Detective Kermit to solve the backstage murders at the Muppet theater. Minnelli's old-school starlet charm is on full display, and she throws herself into her musical performances on this life-sized puppet theater with just as much gusto as she would for the most venerable venues on Broadway.

Diana Ross is a true musical icon, scoring radio hits a mile long both on her own and with the Supremes, with a career that stretches from the early days of Motown soul through disco mania. The Muppets have a lot of fun with her reputation, with a plot running through the episode of the hostile crowd booing any act that doesn't feature Ross off the stage (one trio of singing fish gets literally eaten alive). But even though she's one of the biggest stars alive, Ross never acts like The Muppet Show is beneath her (except for one moment backstage when she asks, "What am I doing on this crummy show?"). She talks to the Muppets like real people and pours her soul into performing her hits, "Last Time I Saw Him," "Reach Out and Touch," and "Love Hangover."

That last one is an especially impressive blending of Ross and Henson's artistry, placing Ross on a Valentine-colored set with huge tropical birds and even huger feathered creatures that show off some of the Muppets' most complex engineering.