Rita Moreno’s ‘Muppet Show’ Duet With Animal Was Hilariously Difficult To Shoot

Picture It: Northern New Jersey, 1976. A 5-year-old boy, after a hard day in kindergarten and a dinner of baked ziti, sits down to his new favorite show, The Muppet Show, which airs right before his bedtime. He is mesmerized by the sight of this gorgeous woman with long black hair and a slinky dress, breathily singing the song “Fever” in between stints where she warns the furry drummer who keeps disturbing her groove. She finally clangs his head between huge symbols, and he says “My kind of woman!”

I’m not a hundred percent sure, but that Sophia Petrillo-esque moment might have been when I fell in love with Rita Moreno. Sure, it might have also been when she yelled “Hey, you guys!!!” on The Electric Company, but I doubt it. Even though I could barely read and write, I knew that Moreno was pretty and funny and could hold her own with even someone as wild as Animal.

Moreno, who just received a Career Achievement award from the Television Critics Association to go with her EGOT, spoke to The New Yorker about her famous duet with the crazy drummer on the first-ever episode of The Muppet Show. Her enthusiasm for the sketch, 42 years later, is still infectious.

“What I love about it is that my character’s trying so hard to be sexy and sultry. And this horrible creature in back of me is acting up. See? I can’t stop laughing. It tickles me to death,” she tells writer Elon Green as she gleefully shows him a video of the sketch on her phone. Yes, that’s right, 86-year-old legend Rita Moreno has the video easily accessible on her smartphone and won’t hesitate to show it to anyone who asks.

The other fascinating part of the article is how she details the difficulty in filming that scene: “I don’t remember how many takes we did. But we did a lot. Because here’s something else: if I made a mistake during the filming of the piece, we couldn’t go back, because I didn’t know where I was musically,” she says. “We always had to do it in one take, each time. So if I would make a mistake, or trip slightly, or not be happy with a movement I made with my hands or arms, we would stop and take it all the way back to the beginning.”

Other details: The dress, a Halston, was hers, but the hair was not. She donned a wig in order to make herself look as sexy as possible. Anyone who remembers ’70s-era Rita Moreno, though, likely would have thought that wasn’t necessary. And all the dialogue, in both Spanish and English, was improvised, as was the nose grab she gave Animal, who at the time was voiced by Frank Oz.

And here’s a fun fact: Her hosting gig on The Muppet Show got her her first Emmy, allowing her to complete her EGOT (before that acronym even existed). Just for that, Animal should be enshrined in the Television Hall of Fame.