This is the opening song that Kermit The Frog sings in the 1979 movie "The Muppet Movie"; which to this day, I have no idea whether that's the name of the movie or the movie within the movie that the movie is ostensibly about.
To specifically answer Kermit's question, I had a scavenge around the internet to find out how many songs actually address the question "about rainbows and what's on the other side" and came up with exactly one: this one.
The very next line of the song informs us that "Rainbows are visions but only illusions; rainbows have nothing to hide"; which explicitly tells us that there is nothing on the other side of a rainbow. I will go so far as to say that owing to the way that light is bent through water droplets, that there is in fact no other side of a rainbow and that they only exist relative to the observer. In fact, every rainbow that everyone has ever seen, is on the other side of the observer relative to the light source.
Wow.
Er...
I have run out of rant.
I really should have thought this through a bit better because now I am playing with the fourth wall and it's all gone a bit meta; which is kind of like The Muppet Movie itself.
No. Only joking. Actually what I wanted to rant about was Kermit's banjo and all of this was just an elaborate framing device.
Although the answer is not reliable, I have it on the flimsiest authority that Kermit The Frog is 24 inches tall. Using scalar calculations, I can establish that the scale length of Kermit's banjo is 17 inches.
The scale length of any chordophone is the distance from the nut to the bridge. This is the length of the string when played open (that is without anything else being done to it) that vibrates and produces the root note for that string. As western music decided a long time ago to use a 12-tone system and we can not escape basic physics, then the next highest octave is exactly half way between the nut and the bridge. If you mark off any interval between the nut and the bridge, then you get a different note and voila, you have the most fundamental explanation of how every stringed instrument in the history of ever works.
If you look more closely at Kermit's banjo, after you have ignored the obvious facts that he is a puppet and that this is a movie prop (we are playing inside the world created within the suspension of disbelief), then you can see that because he is so small, the banjo only has four strings; which I assume are tuned to the standard tuning for a four string banjo, of CGDA.
If this is the case, then Kermit's banjo with a short 17 inch scale length and in standard tuning, would have very sloppy tension across the strings; which would be advantageous if you are only a small frog trying to play the banjo. I think that we are led to believe by the soundtrack, that this is a short scale banjo rather than a banjolele or other instrument.
Even so, once you are prepared to accept all of that, it is still quite an effort for a 24 inch person to be playing a 17 inch banjo. I am near enough to being six feet tall as makes no difference and if I had a banjo which was in proportion to Kermit's banjo, then the scale length would be a monstrous 51 inches. That's well beyond the length of normal instruments and gets beyond even that of double basses, which are in general no bigger than 44 inches. Also as an aside, the end part of a stringed musical instrument's bow that encloses the mechanism responsible for tightening and holding the bow hair ribbon is called a 'bow frog'.
Here's the thing that I have never been able to ascertain. I do not know if Kermit has a banjo because this is a piece of self insertion by Jim Henson or whether this is something else. Remember, Rowlf the Dog is a piano player and there are musical items all of the way through the Muppet canon. The reason for my confusion has to do with Steve Martin showing up as a waiter in the film (who also is inexplicably wearing shorts while working as a waiter).
Steve Martin apart from being a comedian (let's be honest, The Muppet Movie itself is a framing device for a series of vignettes with a revolving cavalcade of 1970s stars), is also a Grammy Award winning bluegrass banjo player. In fact, Steve Martin probably got his start in comedy by playing funny songs; which is a pretty common route for a comedian. I have wondered for a while if the actual banjo player, is in fact Steve Martin.
I make mention of this because while listening to a podcast this week, I heard Steve Martin say that the bluegrass festival that he was supposed to appear in, was cancelled due to the ongoing pandemic; he said that he would have to go back to playing the banjo in the swamp like Kermit.
I will also readily admit that in writing this I am also asking "What's on the other side of 'songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?'?" which relative to me as the observer, is now getting on for several layers of meta in this mental mille-feuille as well as being an elaborate framing device for a series of vignettes with a revolving cavalcade of barely connected thoughts clunking around.
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