OH MY GOSH, YOU GUYS, MY BRAIN IS IN OVERLOAD. Why? Why?! Because Teri Garr guest-starred in the episode in question this week. TERI. GARR.
You guys don’t need to hear about Star Trek today, right? I mean, they travel back in time and meet another species (through a too-perfect human intermediary) that’s also capable traveling through time and space. And the prime directive is all up everyone’s butts and Kirk is actually trying to enforce it but then not because it’s Kirk and since when does he legitimately care about the prime directive so long as he’s the hero? And then there’s the hint of shenanigans with Spock running around where you don’t expect to see a Vulcan and he has those ears and someone outs him via the ears again and I mean the whole episode is pretty typical Star Trek fare. Though, I suspect the cat that was a woman for two seconds at the end of the episode (which only Teri Garr saw) may be a hint that the non-human time-and-space traveling species is the same as the one from one of the most fantastic Halloween specials ever filmed. Just saying.
We’re all caught up now, right guys? Good. Let’s gush about Teri Garr with whom I was totally obsessed because she was one of many fantastic actresses who partook in a little thing called Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre. Also, major props to Ms. Duvall to using super-traditional spelling when naming her show to give it that old-fashioned feel. (Insert anatomically-correct crocheted heart here.) Here’s a clip of Terri as the princess in The Frog Prince:
Teri Garr as a Princess who doesn’t quite get Feudalism.
Also, because the king says “a promise is a promise” I am compelled to share this song from another version of The Frog Prince (stickaround a minute and see the princess played by Aileen Quinn, who once played a redheaded little orphan Annie, sing the song’s reprisal):
And now that I’ve brought your attention to this movie, I have to post a video of a song that was all too important to me as a kid and which I still sing to myself sometimes to avoid panic attacks because it’s too ridiculous. So here’s that (if you skip around in the video you’ll find elder sister Henrietta played by Helen Hunt!):
Funny thing about this movie deciding to have a very tall frog rather than use special effects to make him small (like the frog of Faerie Tale Theatre played by Robin Williams), it wasn’t first. Before John Paragon (the Too Tall Frog who also happens to be Jambi the Genie from Peewee’s Playhouse) put on the suit AND before Robin Williams defended Teri Garr from a scorpion with one of those toothpicks made to look like a tiny sword (didn’t use that clip to avoid distracting you from Teri-darling), Teri Garr played the princess in another rendition of the frog prince story which took place within the larger frame-story of the Grimm brothers getting lost in a forest inhabited by fairy tale characters and one of them gets turned into a frog!
Take a breath to absorb before watching this Princess Teri wait for her too tall frog to show up for a kiss (you’ll especially want to brace yourself for her hair):
And now that we’ve brought things back to Teri Garr, I think it’d be best if we brought them back to Star Trek. If only at a slant! That’s right, there is another rendition of this fairy tale that relates to Star Trek! How? Remember the alien-woman-cat I mentioned before and how I believed her to be of the same species of tiny-intelligence from a certain Halloween episode? Well, with that link you can see I mentioned in that post that Kirk took a big risk to come out on top by breaking her fancy cane.
If you like muppets, this should be pretty familiar:
Bake the Hall in the Candle of her Brain.
Which means Kirk is the frog prince AND with Too Tall Frog as my power ballad AND an online quiz recently telling which of the Enterprise crew I am most like (it was Kirk) IT’S AS IF MY LIFE HAS COME FULL CIRCLE, YOU GUYS!