Last year, the Trent Film Society hosted our first annual Pajama Party and Retro Cartoon Night… and people loved it! Dressed in onesies and teddies and slippers and flannel, students filled BE at the Trend. As per request, we showed Pinky and the Brain, Animaniacs, The Tick, Clone High, Adventure Time and other toon-time favourites. Students munched on breakfast cereal while chatting nostalgically about their favourite Saturday morning cartoons and enjoying the more adult libations provided by BE at the Trend. After the event, many students approached us to say that they had a wonderful time… and inquired whether we would do it again. We decided to make it an annual back-to-school event!

Join us at BE at the Trend for our second annual pajama party! We will kick things off at 8pm on Wednesday, September 28th. This time, we are having a Jim Henson themed night and we will be screening Muppets movies (such as Muppet Treasure Island and the 2011 The Muppets Movie), The Dark Crystal and fan favourite Labyrinth starring David Bowie as the Goblin King! Additionally, we will be serving all different kinds of breakfast cereal and several types of milk (dairy and non-dairy options). Want something a little stronger? BE at the Trend will have a cash bar available so you can relive your childhood memories with a beer or cocktail in hand!

Wearing your pajamas is not necessary, but highly encouraged. Why not throw on something comfy for a night of nostalgia? We will be giving out prizes for some of our favourite pajamas- including Worst PJs (in the worst shape, or the oldest), Best PJs and Funniest PJs. Come on, we all know that you have a onesie somewhere—now you have an excuse to wear it out of the house! Don’t feel like wearing your pajamas? That’s okay, too. Just come by the Trend for a big old helping of cereal and nostalgia!

Chances are that while you were growing up, you watched a Jim Henson movie or TV show. The master puppeteer got his start on Sesame Street before developing his own TV series called The Muppet Show in 1976. It was an astounding success; people fell in love with Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Rowlf the Dog, Fozzie Bear, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem; a 1960s themed rock ensemble of hippie puppets. Following The Muppets’ triumph over television, a series of films were produced famously including cameos from a slew of Hollywood celebrities. It seemed that everyone was eager to work with the Muppets and Jim Henson. While continuing to work for Sesame Street for 20 years, Henson lent his puppeteering skills to feature films unassociated with the Muppets including The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Harkening to its name, The Dark Crystal is a rather more sombre vehicle than The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. The film’s release in 1982 gained extensive praise for its puppetry and animatronics. There is something eerie and uncanny about The Dark Crystal and it remains a fan favourite to this day. Jim Henson and Frank Oz teamed up again for a lighter film in 1986 called Labyrinth. This feature tells the story of Sarah, a reluctant baby sitter, who accidentally wishes for the Goblin King to kidnap her baby brother and her subsequent quest to retrieve him. Despite its enormous budget, catchy musical numbers and impressive puppetry, Labyrinth was a box office bomb and would come to be the last film directed by the late Jim Henson. Since then, it has gained cult classic status and continues to thrill audiences thirty years later. In 1990, Jim Henson passed away suddenly at the age of 53. Though his influence continues to inspire Hollywood so many years later. The Muppets in particular have proved to be an unstoppable force with a long-running film franchise and periodic revivals of their television show.

We are excited to honour such a ground-breaking and influential filmmaker like Jim Henson at Trent Film Society. He paved the way for many more artists to continue to entertain kids and adults alike for years to come. We think Henson would be honoured to know that Hollywood has never, and will never, forget his incredible work. From light-hearted and educational contributions such as Sesame Street, to wild and wacky characters like those from Fraggle Rock, from adaptations of masterpieces like a Christmas Carol and Treasure Island that exposed a new generation of youngsters to classic literature, to spooky and brooding epics about faraway lands like The Dark Crystal, from the Goblin King to Kermit the Frog, Jim Henson forever changed the way that the world views puppets.

So slip on your onesie, throw on some slippers, wrap yourself in a blankie and pour a big bowl of Capt’n Crunch, because we are ready to take you back to a simpler time when the world was full of puppets and magic. See you at BE at the Trend on Wednesday, September 28th at 8 pm.