Here at Tough Pigs, weâve covered nearly every Christmas special Jim Henson and/or the Muppets ever made. But most of the non-holiday-related specials have been neglected until now. Each week, Iâm joined by another Tough Pigs writer to watch a classic Muppet special that has nothing to do with Christmas.
Anthony: This week, weâre jumping ahead a decade, and weâre finally going to see Muppet Show characters other than Kermit. Itâs The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, and Iâm thrilled to discuss it with Tough Pigs founder (and author of the excellent blog Dark Shadows Every Day) Danny Horn. Thanks for joining me, Danny!
Danny: Hi, Anthony! Kissy kissy.
Anthony: So letâs start with context. This special is from 1982, and it really couldnât have happened at any other time. This was Piggyâs Big Cultural Moment. In 1981, sheâd starred in a movie, written her own book, and appeared on the cover of every magazine on this Earth.
Danny: Yeah, the obvious thing to say about this special is that itâs âtoo much Miss Piggyâ, and that you would have expected the American people to be utterly sick of her by now, but it doesnât seem like the spell had worn off yet. She had a record album in â82, and the Miss Piggy calendars were still best sellers. People really, really liked Miss Piggy in the early 80s. It wasnât just me.
Anthony: Thatâs true, to such an extent that she really is the sole star of the show here. Kermit and the other Muppets appear almost exclusively in the control room, a setting that has some cute gags but doesnât account for much of the running time. Rewatching it, I initially found myself wishing they were in it more, but then I realized – Of course they wouldnât be. They canât be. Piggy wasnât going to willingly share the spotlight with that bunch of clowns.
Danny: Yeah, theyâre definitely banking on Piggyâs appeal here, but they come back to the control room pretty often. Basically, after every Piggy scene, they come back for a moment with Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo.
Can we talk a bit about the âTV specialâ premise? Cause itâs kind of weird.
Anthony: Absolutely we can. Weird in what way, other than seeming exactly like a straight-forward cheesy 70s variety special?
Danny: They made an interesting choice, not to host this in the Muppet Theater. âThe Muppets Go to the Moviesâ was their first post-Muppet Show special, and they treated it like an extra hour-long Muppet Show episode — the same theater, the same format. This is a year later, and they go with a more generic âTV specialâ setting — kind of a big blank empty set that they fill up with dancers and Miss Piggy. Itâs got a very different feel.
Anthony: Very different. The choice to use human dancers is an odd one, I think. Something like the big Pagan Sacrifice number – which goes for a minute or so before Piggy shows up – would be a lot more entertaining if those had been full-body monsters. Or, if not more entertaining, at least more like I want Muppet stuff to be. The dancers (including Steve Whitmire!) acquit themselves fine, but it feels like they beamed in from a different, much worse type of programming.
Danny: And Piggy gets a little lost in these big human-sized sets. Watching this makes you realize how important it was on The Muppet Show that everything was Muppet-sized; the human guest stars were kind of these giant intruders into the Muppet world. Here, everything is human-sized, and in some numbers, Piggy seems really small, and isolated on a little platform at the front of the stage. âSnackcerciseâ is probably the clearest example, because the humans are way off in the distance somewhere.
Also — why is this a live special? Thatâs another element that feels a little off. You always understood that The Muppet Show was in front of a live audience, but a special like this is clearly being taped and edited.
I mean, itâs silly to get over-involved in the logic of the fictional world. But the tone of the show is really different from what another âMuppet Showâ special would have been.
Anthony: Youâre right, and the Henson team later ran into that same problem with âMuppets Tonight,â which could never decide if it was a live late-night sketch show or a prime-time variety series.
I will say that there are two segments where the sets work really well for me here. The first is the Calendar song, with its elaborate backdrop set that always keeps the focus on Piggy, and the other is the big finale number, which is set up like a concert-in-the-round. Piggy is on a platform, but it seems more appropriate for her bravura take on âI Will Surviveâ than it did for a silly gag like âSnackcersize.â
Danny: I really like the Calendar song. The set is great, and the numberâs powered by a good gag about tiring Piggy out with lots of costume changes. Theyâre kind of just showing off how good they are at Piggy hairstyles and costumes. Thatâs basically the underlying theme of the whole show — âThe Fantastic Miss Piggy Show: We Are Amazing at Puppet Costumesâ.
The show is also super up-to-date for 1982. Were you around in 1982? I forget how old you are.
Anthony: Iâm afraid I was born in 1984.
Danny: Well, now you know what 1982 was like; it was exactly like this special. The aerobics workout number, the âconsumer advocateâ product testing, George Hamiltonâs tan — these were super current references.
Anthony: George Hamiltonâs tan, and also the unironic use of him as a handsome, desirable man. Was that really a thing? Iâve always thought of him as self-evidently a joke, but Piggy treats him like the Ideal Male through this entire show. Piggy generally has good taste, so I assume this is supposed to be no different than Christopher Reeve or Gene Kelly on âThe Muppet Show.â
Danny: It was kind of ironic at the time, too. From what I remember, he was definitely considered attractive, but a bit too into himself. I guess the best way to explain it is that he actually was famous for being tan. I cannot explain that at all. It was just a fact about 1982.
Anthony: Since weâve brought up George Hamilton, letâs talk about the guest stars. In addition to being tan, George Hamilton also isnât very funny here. The only time I actually laughed at something he did was that over-the-top Cary Grant imitation.
Danny: Heâs got kind of a Leslie Nielsen quality. Â Heâs vaguely aware that heâs ridiculous and not very good at this — by âthisâ I mean acting and comedy and being a human — and heâs decided to double down on it.
Anthony: I can buy that. And he certainly seems to be having a good time, which helps. In the âlove sceneâ I mentioned earlier, he looks very amused at Frank Ozâs equally over-the-top Southern Belle voice, which helps make the whole thing even sillier.
Danny: Heâs the kind of guest star who needs to be blown up and stuffed into a chicken suit, basically. Heâs projecting kind of an over-confident veneer thatâs obviously fake, and it would be funny to see him have to deal with Gonzo or the monsters or somebody. Itâs kind of a shame that he only interacts with Miss Piggy, who takes him at face value and doesnât really push him out of his comfort zone.
Anthony: John Ritter, on the other hand, gets to do a whole bunch of different stuff.
Danny: John Ritter is adorable. Like, in general he is, and also specifically in this special.
Anthony: I really like that he gets to be in love with a disinterested Piggy. Is that an angle theyâd ever done with a guest-star before? Obviously they did that with Gonzo a bit in season two of TMS, but it still feels novel here.
Danny: I think the closest theyâd done was with Nicky in The Great Muppet Caper.
Anthony: Of course! It was a theme of the Piggyâs Big Moment era.
Danny: But yeah, I hadnât really thought about how unusual that would have been in The Muppet Show. I think it totally works here, because the whole show is about how amazing / terrifying Piggy is.
Anthony: In addition to the love triangle, John does some of his signature physical comedy in the consumer testing sketch, and his best spotlight comes at the end when he gets to sing âThe Impossible Dreamâ dressed as Piggy.
Danny: He is lovely. Thatâs actually another super-specific 1982 thing — John Ritter was a big TV star, and as far as I can recall, he was universally beloved. His role in the special is basically to come in and stand next to Miss Piggy and just be John Ritter.
Anthony: The special aired on ABC, the same network as âThreeâs Company,â and I canât imagine thatâs a coincidence.
Danny: Well, thatâs basically what âThreeâs Companyâ was all about, just arranging things attractively around John Ritter as he does silly physical comedy. In this special, he actually gets to make out with Miss Piggy. Thereâs that moment when they just kind of go for it. I guess America was ready.
Anthony: Once America has seen you vigorously kiss Elton Johnâs chest hair, theyâll watch you do anything.
Danny: Yeah, but that was just Miss Piggy kind of over-zealously jumping on a guy — you knew that at the end of the song, he was going to brush her off and get away. In the Piggy/John Ritter makeout scene, thereâs kind of a suggestion of, okay, I guess weâre just actually doing this now.
Anthony: Because, unlike the Muppet Show, Piggy is in control.
Another example of how amazing/terrifying Piggy is comes from our third guest star, Andy Kaufman (or maybe Bob Zmuda or maybe Paul Giamatti as Bob Zmuda) as Tony Clifton. His act is, of course, terrible – a grotesque parody of a lounge singer. But when everyone else in the control thinks itâs awful, Piggy is able to coerce them into agreeing with her that heâs âdoing wonderfully.â She never had that kind of power in the Muppet Theater, where her diva tendencies were just kind of tolerated. Here everyone has to indulge her, because sheâs in charge without question.
Danny: Tony Clifton is the one part of this show that I just think is unbearable, a complete and baffling misfire. Andy Kaufman was sometimes a really funny comedian, and sometimes he would just act annoying until everyone agreed that he was a genius. Tony Clifton was his most annoying anti-comedy routine — a shtick that was really only funny to comedians and probably not even them. On behalf of 1982, we didnât get it either.
But I think heâs in The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show precisely for that reason, because thereâs something kind of angry about the show, and the Tony Clifton scenes are the first real signs of hostility toward the format.
Anthony: Absolutely. Jim Henson, as the director, shoots those scenes of the control room watching Cliftonâs act in complete silence. These are the Muppets – theyâre used to terrible acts, they thrive on terrible acts – and even they donât know how to react to any of this. Theyâre just mortified that this thing is happening, and unsure of how to tell Piggy that without getting their heads chopped off.
Danny: Andy Kaufmanâs genre was basically âthe comedy of uneaseâ — you were supposed to feel uncomfortable. Itâs aggressive, like theyâre daring the audience to turn it off.
I think this is the last time the Muppets ever used the variety show format, isnât it?
Anthony: Wow, yeah. Youâre right. They did variations on it like the MuppeTelevision segments on the Jim Henson Hour, but that was an austere variety show from the future where there was no audience and nobody ever touched each other.
Danny: Yeah, the wire mother of comedy-variety shows. So I think The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show is kind of Jim Henson and Frank Oz saying goodbye to the format that theyâve been living in for basically decades, if you go back to the Ed Sullivan and Jimmy Dean days. Theyâre saying: we are now through with this, forever.
So the show starts out with some nice musical numbers that could easily have been part of The Muppet Show, but with human dancers. And then halfway through, Tony Clifton comes in, and kind of opens the door to an angrier take on the format.
Anthony: And then Kermit passive-aggressively shoots the âlove sceneâ with awful close-ups, leading to a big fight between him and Piggy (“I think a chat is definitely in order, frog!” “I think so, pig!”) Â When you mentioned that angry edge earlier, thatâs what I thought of. Itâs a lot like their lakeside argument in The Great Muppet Caper, but it feels more raw here somehow. After itâs over, Kermit still seems shaken in the control when he tells Fozzie âIs the pig on her mark? Get the pig on her mark.â
Danny: Oh, yeah. That gets patched up pretty quickly, but thereâs kind of friction in the air by that point, and the whole special starts to feel like they donât want to be there anymore.
I like that, by the way. Well, I donât like the Tony Clifton parts. But I kind of like the feeling that Jim and Frank are doing one more show like this, and then theyâre going to burn the place down. So the big concert number ends with this angry rendition of âI Will Surviveâ, and then they basically destroy the entire show.
Anthony: Thereâs even a moment where Kermit comes on stage to take the reins and end the chaos, just like he always does. But it doesnât really work, because this isnât the Muppet Theater and heâs not in control.
Danny: Yeah, the final confrontation scene between Piggy and the network Vice President is just extraordinary. Piggyâs excited about starring in her own series, and when the suit tells her itâs just a one-shot special, sheâs furious. She says, âIâve been killing myself for one crummy show?â which is basically saying that this has been a waste of time.
To some degree, this is what Henson managed to sidestep with The Muppet Show, by producing the show in England and distributing it in syndication. They didnât have network vice presidents who could cancel their show at a momentâs notice. So theyâre kind of playing out a nightmare version of what that would have been like, as their last variety show.
Anthony: In some ways, probably what it was actually like with the Valentine Special and âSex and Violence.â Also, I enjoy that the closing credits get in one last dig at that guy by crediting him as âFake Network VP.â
Danny: Yeah, the whole closing number is just the angriest, most punk-rock way to end a network TV special. Miss Piggy trashes the studio — karate-chops the network suit, pulls down all the crummy fake sets, smashes the cameras — calls down fire and destruction from the heavens. And then she walks out the door. Itâs unreal.
Anthony: And having destroyed the variety show, Jim Henson moved on to destroying camping, New York City, and fuzzy little bunnies.
NEXT: Joe Hennes joins me for Tale of the Bunny Picnic!
Click here to sing a ballroom rendition of âIsnât She Lovelyâ on the Tough Pigs Forum.
by Anthony Strand and Danny Horn