Forty-five years ago, The Muppet Show ended after a five-year run as Jim Henson and company turned their attention to movie making and other ventures like Fraggle Rock. It was a good call by Henson because times were changing.
The show was mostly a parody of the variety shows which were all the rave back in the 1970s. What made the show so wonderful was it was a variety show about a variety show that was just self aware of itself it never took itself seriously. With a special guest each week, it seemed to thumb its nose at Saturday Night Live, which Henson and his puppeteers worked on.
Writer/actor Michael O’Donoghue famously quipped, “I don’t write for felt.” And John Belushi called them the “Mucking Fuppets.” Now, the same actors and musicians producers at SNL were wanting on the show were happily traveling across the pond to London to appear on The Muppet Show.
Since all episodes are available on Disney-Plus, people can enjoy them all over again 50 years after the show premiered as well as introduce them to their kids and grandkids. However, a recent special with Sabrina Carpenter has dropped as the Muppets return to the same theater to stage a revival. It’s a nice special but lacks a lot of the charm of the original series.
It has nothing to do with Carpenter who seems to understand the assignment. The scenes between her and Miss Piggy are some of the show’s highlights. But it feels like it’s stretching too much to even fit a half-hour format. This is odd because there’s a short scene of Seth Rogen being informed he’s been cut from the show. And then Rogen saying he’s the executive producer.
And that’s the problem right there. In the last 20 years, Rogen has gone from a high school dropout turned stoner-comedy actor to a major player in entertainment as he’s lost the Jewfro and his scruffy beard has turned grey, giving him more of an air of maturity. It’s almost like he’s become the Millennial version of Rob Reiner now making highly respected movies and TV shows. You got to hand it to Steven Spielberg for casting him in a more serious role in his semi-autobiographical movie The Fabelmans.
But like the other Seths (Green and MacFarlane), he seems to stuck in the past. The Muppets have gone through so many versions over the years, the special is being praised for not “modernizing” the show. Yet, the appearance of Carpenter, Rogen and even Maya Rudolph in a nice cameo is the modernization.
It’s obvious there’s some heavy criticism still over the 2015 show The Muppets which functioned more as a sitcom but it polarized people with jokes geared at older audiences.
But I remember Muppets Tonight, a then updated version of The Muppet Show. Of course, it didn’t last long just like The Muppets. For the most part, I think people are stuck too much in the past not willing to see the Muppets were intended for both adults and children and since Henson’s passing in 1990, very few people have been able to do that.
His son, Brian, achieved that with The Muppet Christmas Carol, but his 2018 feature The Happytime Murders shows that the puppeteers just want to have fun sometimes. I think Belushi and O’Donoghue might have enjoyed that movie if they had lived to see it.
Another problem is that Matt Vogel as Kermit can’t really capture what Henson and Steve Whitmire brought to the role. It’s not that the voice is just off. It feels like a bad impression. Also, most of the favorite old characters (Rowlf, Fozzie and Gonzo) barely appear. Also, having Ratzo do a version of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” seems to be thrown in for filler that doesn’t work.
Kermit drops a line that this revival might lead to a regular series but with all remakes, reboots and revivals, why not just introduce new people to the originals since it seems we have more access than every at TV shows and movies?
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 