Lamb Chop
Shari Lewis's sock-puppet ewe was already thirty-five years old when 90s kids met her on PBS's Lamb Chop's Play-Along. The show gave the decade one of its permanent earworms: "The Song That Doesn't End," which is now playing in your head again. You're welcome.
Shari Lewis created Lamb Chop in March 1956 as a sock puppet for Captain Kangaroo, and the sassy little ewe stayed with her across decades of television and stage work — though by the early 90s Lewis had been off American series TV for about fifteen years, her last regular show a mid-70s BBC series. Then, on January 13, 1992, came the comeback: Lamb Chop's Play-Along ran four seasons and 85 episodes on PBS through September 22, 1995, built on Lewis's conviction that kids wanted to participate, not just watch.
The show paired Lewis with her puppet family — Lamb Chop plus Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy — in songs, riddles, and games aimed straight through the screen. But one element outlived everything else: "The Song That Doesn't End," the closing-credits earworm by Broadway composer Norman Martin. The gag was devilishly simple — the kids and puppets keep singing it on a loop while Lewis frantically tries to stop them — and it burrowed into an entire generation's brains, permanently.
Lewis won a string of consecutive Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series during the run (the show took a writing Emmy too, and she won twelve Emmys across her career). She followed it with The Charlie Horse Music Pizza and was still making children's television when she died on August 2, 1998, at 65, of viral pneumonia while undergoing chemotherapy for uterine cancer. Her daughter Mallory Lewis took over the act in 2000 and keeps Lamb Chop touring to this day — the song, true to its word, goes on and on, my friend.
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