The big problem with the new Muppets movie is that long-time Muppets fans are still feeling the loss of Jim Henson. He may have died almost 20 years ago, but I think it’s safe to say the Muppets haven’t been the same without him. Not that they haven’t tried; they’ve gotten different puppeteers to play the roles left vacant by Jim Henson, and Steve Whitmire is very good as Kermit the Frog, but the problem remains—the Muppets had a lot of Jim Henson in them, and without Jim Henson, the Muppets don’t feel quite right anymore.
At least that’s the way it feels to me. One of my first TV experiences was watching the Muppets, along with Sesame Street, and while I never quite warmed up to the guests (who cares who Bob Hope is when you’re four, you want the Muppets!), or appreciated the musical numbers, I could appreciate the chaos and the general silliness that the show brought to the airwaves. When I had the chance to watch the Muppet Show again on DVD, I finally understood all the adult humor that had gone completely over my head as a child, not to mention the incredible inventiveness. The “Hugga Mugga” sketch is still one of my favorites, and the rapidity with which the dumb jokes were fired off made them funny.
After Jim Henson died, Jim Henson studios did make a good attempt to keep going. In all fairness, I loved A Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, but then came Muppets in Space, which utterly failed to thrill me. I wasn’t a fan of the new Muppets they introduced, and the guest cameos seemed to degenerate from A and B list celebs to D-listers at best. Then Disney bought the Muppets, and my expectations went completely down the tubes. I don’t know how anyone else feels, but when I think of “quality all-ages entertainment,” I usually think of anyone but Disney. Yes, they can market to kids like nobody’s business. Yes, they’ve put out a lot of animated movies that are supposed to be all-ages, but with pretty much all of their movies until “Princess and the Frog,” I’ve never actually wanted to watch one, and when I have I’ve never felt at all engaged by their stories, which are basically fairy tales and folk tales remade with a healthy dollop of junior high wish fulfillment. Someday your prince will rescue you, provided you’re beautiful! If you’re down on your luck, you might discover you’re the chosen one who will discover a genie and the princess won’t really care that you lied to make her like you! The message Disney sent out pretty much appealed to either the popular kids in high school or the kids who wanted to be the popular kids in high school. If you didn’t fall into either of those groups, Disney wanted nothing to do with you. Plus, Disney is about as forgiving with their copyrights as Kim Jong Il is with North Korean dissenters. Who can forget the touching story of the time Disney made a nursery school paint over the Disney characters it had in their coatroom?
So yeah, when I heard they were making a new Muppet movie, I thought I knew where this was going. I could see Bob Iger sitting in the Disney boardroom and saying, “Yeah, Jim Henson had one or two good ideas, but now we’re really going to make the Muppets good! Now who has a movie script that we can make into toys and a Disneyland ride?” The fact that Frank Oz wasn’t in the movie, and had in fact condemned it, struck me as an extra little slap in the face to the remaining puppeteers and Muppets fans. Still, I heard good reviews, and I really did want to like it. So I bought a ticket the Sunday after Thanksgiving and braced myself.
You know what? It was a really good movie. Jason Segal should be congratulated for managing to make a movie that manages to hit all the notes it needed to, and it embraces some of the best parts of the Muppets. All the Muppets are themselves, and I want to point out that Sam the Eagle and Bo the janitor may be the two best character moments in the show, bar none. Not that the rest of the Muppets suffer, though. They’ve all been updated to keep up with the times, and I personally loved seeing where the characters had ended up.
Then you have a staple of the Muppet movies—the guest stars. There were a lot of cameos, and I think most of them were well-deserved. I’d like to give special kudos to Kristen Schaal, who played the most violent anger management therapist ever, Selena Gomez, who did a pretty good job spoofing herself, and Neil Patrick Harris, who definitely should have been the guest host.
Finally, I’ve got to say, this movie had heart. I’ve seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which is perhaps my favorite comedy about romance (NOT a romantic comedy) ever. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about breaking up and moving on, and while it does have the occasional misfire it deserves a lot of praise for showing not only how the process of breaking up and moving on really is, it makes the process funny and, just as important, it doesn’t pick sides of the breakup. Yes, the movie focuses on one side over another, but that one side is not necessarily always correct. I bring this up because in the new Muppets movie, Jason Segal manages to craft another relationship problem between the brothers Gary and Walter, and Gary’s girlfriend Mary, where Walter and Gary spend almost all their time together, and Mary wants to have some time alone with Gary. Jason Segal manages once again to give all three characters a valid point, and the way the situation is resolved isn’t forced or solved by a dues ex machina. The characters actually get to make choices consistent with their characterization to that point, and the movie is so much stronger for it that it almost overshadowed the main plot for me.
Still, you can feel the hole where Jim Henson’s presence was. I found myself asking, “Would the Muppets do that?” or “Is this appropriate for a Muppets film?” At least one joke in the film I could see being included by Bob Iger just to give Frank Oz an emotional backhand. Also, the film had a lot of focus on “the way the Muppets do things,” calling back to previous TV shows and movies. There’s only so many callbacks you can do before having to include new material, but with the Muppets the new material almost has to remind people of the old material without being the old material itself. It’s similar to when a band gets a new guitar player, or even more disruptively a new lead singer—fans of the way the band used to be pine for the original lineup, but they don’t want the band to simply rehash all its old songs. In this instance, I think every Muppet fan out there is going to have to ask themselves what new material they’re willing to accept. I think we’ll see a lot of different answers.
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