I saw Kermit last weekend. That’s not really what this article is about, but it helps me set the table, so please indulge me for a bit.
Kermit was part of a presentation at the University of Maryland – in fact, he was many parts of it. He gave an interview, he sang some songs, and, surprisingly, he did a Q&A.
Now, a Q&A is a risky choice. People can be stinkers. Someone could have said, “Hey, there’s a guy with his hand up your butt,” and there’s really no appropriate reaction to someone giving you that information. I lose my temper every time I’m told that. But that didn’t happen. The audience believed in Kermit too much and was too delighted by the tremendous performance of Matt Vogel, who had us smiling and laughing all evening long.
And yet, you already know what questions this audience of casual fans asked Kermit, don’t you?
Someone asked Kermit, if The Muppets could remake one movie but keep one human, what movie would you choose and which human?
The movie Kermit chose was Citizen Kane. The human he chose to keep was Jed. That first answer got a big laugh from the audience, and the second got the audience to quietly try to remember who Jed is, both of which are the ideal responses as far as I’m concerned. (For what it’s worth, Jed is Charles Kane’s friend played by Joseph Cotten. His full name is Jedediah Leland, which is a funny answer coming from Kermit if you’re the right kind of dork.)
A relatively young member of the audience (a college student, I assume) asked who Kermit would most want to have as a guest star on a hypothetical future episode of The Muppet Show. Kermit, ever the diplomat, said he couldn’t possibly choose, and asked this audience member who their choice would be. Guessing this answer requires a little more knowledge of Gen Z’s pop culture darlings of 2024, but if you have even the slightest awareness of this, you can probably accurately guess the answer.
So congrats to the person who got Kermit to say “Chappell Roan” while nodding.
I don’t have a rule of threes here, but I do have a point: Muppet fans sure are predictable. Casual fans especially. But at least we know what they want. There’s a clear demand for more Muppet Show and a clear demand for more Muppet adaptations. Both demands have held on for years. They are not momentary fads. They are the steady demands of the market. And now Variety is reporting that a big movie star, Rachel Zegler, is dreaming of starring in a Brian-style Muppet movie.
Muppet fans argue about both of these, and I get that. I don’t need either in my life. I remain skeptical about how well a 1970s variety show rooted in vaudeville theater would work today, and I also know that a Muppet adaptation of a classic story made with anything less than $10,000,000 is just The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz. But I also recognize that these demands tell Disney that the people want more Muppets and tell Disney how the people would like their Muppets served to them. What a gift!
We can make this Muppet fandom’s reputation. We can be known as the people who want to see The Muppets try specific, popular ideas that big talents support. And if we don’t I think Muppet fans will develop a different reputation based on our other online behavior. That is, I think we’ll have a reputation for being angry and defensive.
This past weekend, the internet freaked out over a rumor that the Church of Scientology was buying the Jim Henson Company lot in sunny Los Angeles, California. This rumor, plucked from some guy’s newsletter on beehiiv and spread by the DiscussingFilm account on X, was false. Of course it was. But why was it so compelling?
Sure, it feels wrong for such a concerning organization to get ahold of a historic film lot. When something we’re passionate about gets roped into a story like that, we expect some amount of cheeky commentary on it. But, more than that, we see how this story parallels a popular Muppet story. Why, they’ll have to put on a show to save the theater! We know how that story goes!
More than that, we see how that classic Muppet story reflects our general sense of The Muppets, the Jim Henson Company, and all extensions of Jim Henson’s legacy as forever the underdog, always fighting for survival in a world that doesn’t respect their value. Even though the Jim Henson Company hasn’t owned The Muppets for a long time now, so The Muppets wouldn’t have been affected by this sale if it was real, they are still bound to the same legacy that is among the most respected in the industry and most disrespected at once.
But this “put on a show” business feels awfully disingenuous when you remember that the Henson Company is putting on a show. Lots of shows, in fact, all the time. They have plenty of shows on streaming for you to watch, and plenty more in the works, not to mention their movies and that touring Labyrinth screening with the live orchestra that recently added more dates.
If what we wanted was to help the Henson Company succeed in a tough economy by seeing their shows, we can do that any time. That must not have been what we wanted. So what did we want?
Kermitment’s assessment may be right: maybe we just wanted to be angry about something, so we blew this out of proportion. It’s just very hard for me to imagine needing something else to be angry about in the election season of 2024. We have so many anger options! Why was this the thing to be angry about?
I’m reminded of the time last year when that cartoon YouTuber Tweeted that The Muppets would never be relevant or popular again. In that case, at least the thing that Muppet fans were angry about really happened – a cartoon YouTuber really did Tweet that.
Oh no. Those poor defenseless Muppets. Who will save them. From Tweet.
In all honesty, I was really disappointed by how Muppet fans reacted. It sucked seeing so many of my friends read some guy’s opinion that did not need a response from us and decide, seeing how many people had already piled on top of the guy, that they should also join the pile. I don’t know much about that particular creator and don’t have much of an opinion about him, but I will say that our reaction to this was absurd, whereas the hot take in question was honestly understandable.
Think about it for a moment. Think about how astonishing it is that a 1950s abstract puppetry act was turned into a 1970s primetime variety show, and this show spawned eight theatrically-released movies and countless other spin-off productions. Would you have expected other ’70s comedy variety shows like The Carol Burnett Show or Laugh-In to have this sort of legacy? It’s a miracle that The Muppets were ever hugely popular, and it’s a miracle that they keep going, especially since their imperial period ended in 1981.
Remember, The Muppets only had one true smash hit movie. In 1979. All of the others were disappointments. “But wait,” you scream, “what about (2011)?” About that. Let’s look at the numbers.
In 2010, Disney gave their big Thanksgiving release to Tangled, and it made almost $600 million. In 2012, they gave that spot to Wreck-It Ralph, and it made nearly $500 million. In 2013, they gave it to Frozen, and it made a million billion trillion dollars. Even their November release back in 2009, the unwatchable Robert Zemeckis motion-capture adaptation of A Christmas Carol, reportedly grossed over $300 million. Whereas The Muppets was given the same big weekend for family movies, the same all-powerful marketing machine with an aggressive bombardment of promotion, and even had two big stars on the poster. All of that was required to get it to $165 million.
That number is still a miracle. We’re lucky it performed as well as it did, and we’re lucky it got a sequel, because I can tell you that people my age – younger ‘90s kids, who were in high school in 2011 – didn’t know who The Muppets were. Before that movie, I had no reason to think these characters would be popular again given how forgotten they were.
That’s why, to me, Muppet popularity is a rare and fragile thing. Gen Z has grown up with greater access to Muppet content than those who came before them, and we are fortunate that they have popularized a small number of specific, yet highly flexible ideas that would still give the creators at the Muppets Studio room to experiment and play. We should probably get behind this… if Muppet popularity is really what we want. But should it be?
Back in the post-sale dry spell in the years leading up to (2011), Muppet fans got really creative. We were creating our own content in the absence of official Muppet material, and it was a special time. Today, our community creates so much more than ever before. We also have greater access to new and old Muppet merchandise as well as a restored Muppet Show, a growing fan archive of classic material to explore, and a hub in New York for live events and in-person get-togethers, not to mention occasional Kermit appearances in different parts of the globe and some independently organized Muppet fan meet-ups. We may not have a new movie, but we got us! Us is here! Us is creative and fun!
We’re honestly doing okay. The collapse of Twitter as we knew it has definitely hurt our community an awful lot, but The Muppets, The Jim Henson Company, and the Muppet fan community still have much potential. We don’t need to be angry or defensive, but I think the moments when we do get angry or defensive have to do with our fear of losing that potential.
Again, if everyone was concerned about the Henson Company being in trouble, you’d think everyone would be sharing news about their latest productions with the same fervor as they did the baseless rumor. The casual fans were not rushing to the defense of The Jim Henson Company, but to the idea of it. They are protective of the idea of more of the great stuff we grew up with being just around the corner, and it’s upsetting to imagine that potential being lost. Even when a new production is announced, we lose the abstract dream of “more Henson puppet things” that gives us room to imagine and must instead accept the specific reality of what thing is actually being produced. Switching out open-ended dreams for present realities is also a kind of loss of potential, even though it’s what we say we want.
If Disney’s Muppets have a new wave of popularity, there’s a lot of potential there too. Maybe they’ll take their live events to more cities! Maybe they’ll bring back more classic characters! Maybe they’ll know exactly which Muppet VHS tapes you grew up with and make more stuff just like your childhood favorites! But that probably won’t happen until they give into the demands of the populous, at least to a degree.
There are some ways in which we may not want them to do that. For example, social media responses to the recent Muppets/Sesame/Henson crossover video indicate that casual fans remain immovable on the issue of the casting of a certain frog. This is in part because they’re not watching long Kermit projects nor frequent Kermit projects, only hearing Vogel’s Kermit once in a green moon. Whereas I, a ToughPigs writer, watch more of modern Kermit than most, and I am ashamed to admit that I, like the pitiful peasants in the Facebook comments, am still really struggling to get comfortable with the voice after these seven years. That is not the typical reaction from our team, but it is mine. I just wish I could have gotten all the casual fans into that theater at the University of Maryland. All of us in that room fully believed in Kermit’s reality, myself included, even as Matt was fully visible in a bright shirt. Since I can’t do that, I don’t know what can be done about this, and neither do you, so please don’t make the conversation in the Discord about this or the moderators will be very cross with the both of us.
There is, of course, another option. Instead of demanding more from these companies, we could focus on encouraging more puppetry from more creators. It’s easier than ever to find tutorials on how to build a puppet, and there are 48-hour puppet film projects every year. This art form has so much Muppetational potential beyond what you’ll find at a studio in Hollywood, a museum in New York, a theater in Maryland, or on any streaming service. I will also add that, in a time when injustice and oppression are having a moment, I would personally love to see independent creators channel their Muppet-inspired projects toward making the world a better place.
That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with. This fan community can be that kind of dream too. So, this isn’t a call for submissions, but in a quiet moment today, just for yourself, take some time to consider… what are your Muppet fan dreams?
Click here to dream a dream and see on the ToughPigs Discord!
By J.D. Hansel
