For fans of the Muppets, it’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. This year has been sensational, inspirational, celebrational, Muppetational for Kermit and company, highlighted by six Emmy nominations for Disney+’s “The Muppet Show” revival — including variety special (pre-recorded).
A few weeks after the nominations came out, the Muppets were seen performing at the FIFA World Cup Final halftime show with Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber and others. And this past spring, the “Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster Starring the Muppets” opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida.
“We’ve definitely got a lot of wind in our sails,” says Muppet performer Eric Jacobson (Miss Piggy), who was an executive producer on the new “Muppet Show.” Adds Muppets Studio vice president and fellow “Muppet Show” EP Leigh Slaughter: “I think now’s a really nice time for the Muppets. There is so much momentum.”
I do hope this Muppet renaissance sticks. In recent years, we’ve seen the franchise go from wocka to not-so-wocka and back to wocka again.
The 2011 movie “The Muppets,” from Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller plus director James Bobin, seemed to usher in a new creative era. The follow-up, “Muppets Most Wanted,” wasn’t as well received; then came ABC’s 2015 series “The Muppets.” That show — about the behind-the-scenes antics at a Miss Piggy late-night talk show — was ambitious, but audiences didn’t get it.
A limited series follow-up to “The Muppets Take Manhattan” for Disney+ was scrapped, and then the promising Disney+ short-form series “Muppets Now” only lasted six episodes.
When I was a kid, the Muppets were a constant. There was “The Muppet Show,” the stream of Muppet movies, the Saturday-morning cartoon “Muppet Babies” and my favorite, the monthly Muppet Magazine. (I was a subscriber, and perhaps Kermit helped inspire my journalism career.) The death of Jim Henson in 1990 put the Muppets in a bit of a creative limbo for years — still producing content, but things obviously weren’t the same.
Henson first aimed to sell the Muppets to Disney in 1989, figuring the company could take the franchise to the next level. That deal was scrapped after Henson’s death; it finally came to fruition when Disney finalized its purchase of the Muppets (with the exception of the “Sesame Street” characters, which were acquired by Sesame Workshop) in 2004.
It shouldn’t be so hard to keep the beloved Muppets in permanent pop culture rotation, and I was pleased to see the revived “The Muppet Show” special on Disney+ do just that. With guest Sabrina Carpenter, the performances were fun and the sketches were sharp.
“Our responsibility was really to keep an eye out and maintain the integrity of the characters,” says Matt Vogel, the voice of Kermit and an EP on the special. “It meant we had to make sure that the writing felt like the characters, and that the characters did things that you would expect the Muppets to be doing on ‘The Muppet Show.’ Everyone walking onto set had an emotional response to seeing the authenticity that was put behind the re-creation of the show.”
Despite the strong reviews and the Emmy nominations, the “Muppet Show” revival has so far been a one-off. Given how much went into bringing back the iconic program, this can’t be it, can it Slaughter doesn’t have any news to report, except to say that it takes time to figure out what’s right for the Muppets and what’s right for Disney.
“It is something we are always working on, and we are always planning our next move, even though it may seem like sometimes there’s a little bit of a gap in time,” she says.
As Jacobson notes, the quest to make more Muppets fare echoes what the characters have always strived to do, going back to the original “The Muppet Show” and “The Muppet Movie”: “We wouldn’t be the Muppets if we weren’t the underdogs, right?”
