I don’t really care about sports, so I never really get caught up in all of this bracket mania that seems to occur every spring around this time of year … but this year Disney posted one up for The Muppets in promotion of their new movie coming out on DVD and, well, that’s something that I can really get behind!
But that said, I’m a little curious … is it common for you to pick a bracket and later then find yourselves completely baffled with the final outcome that otherwise just seemed like an absolutely shoe-in to you at the time?! I suppose it’s probably a little different with sports because your teams are actually competing for progress whereas The Muppets Bracket is essentially a vote for our favorite Muppet, but … just look at what happened recently…
Not for nothing, but how in the world did Kermit lose to Beaker?!?!?! Same with Gonzo vs. the Swedish Chef, and then also Miss Piggy! At first glance of this bracket, it kinda seemed a little pointless to me because it seemed like a given that the fab four of Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, and Miss Piggy would sweep, with the boss frog Kermit then taking his rightful throne on top of the pile. But this just doesn’t make ANY sense!!!
I mean, Beaker is cool and all, but he’s not really the very best Muppet ever! Maybe that’s why they’ve dubbed it an insanity bracket … I dunno. Also, where’s the love for Scooter – my man that actually kept The Muppet Show running doesn’t even make it into the list, but Pepe does?! Blasphemy!
That said, my updated vote is for Animal to take the final round.
But if Beaker somehow manages to beat out Animal, too … INSANITY!!!!! 
You may have noticed that I’ve been on a little bit of a Muppet kick after seeing the new movie earlier this week, so it seemed awesomely convenient when Disney released today’s clip just in time for me to feature it in today’s holiday post! 
Once again, I just can’t reiterate enough how much I enjoyed this movie, so if you want to get but one gift for yourself this holiday season, go and see this movie and I can pretty much guarantee that if you grew up loving the Muppets just as much as I did, it’s the kind of movie that’s bound to put a spring in your step and make the rest of your days even brighter…
This one is another little treat that I found over at the Progress City, USA blog, and it dates back to 1990 just days before Jim Henson passed away. I vaguely remember this when it first aired – I was probably only ten years old at the time, but we specifically subscribed to The Disney Channel (back when you picked channels individually!) so it would probably be a safe bet that we caught it at some point! What was particularly interesting re-watching it to me was that although they spent time at the Disney-MGM Studios, their own attraction hadn’t technically been built yet.
It definitely makes you wonder how much different Hollywood Studios would look today had Disney actually completed their purchase of the Muppets back in the ’90s instead of more than a decade later – it seems like areas of the park dedicated to the Pixar, Disney, and Muppet Studios would’ve been a pretty cool direction for that park to take!
Still, you never know – if Kermit & the Gang can make enough of a splash with their new movie to truly get them back on their owner’s radar, maybe someday… 
You could say that I was still on a bit of a Muppet high last night when I came across this ridiculous clip of FOX News anchors suggesting that the movie I had just watched and absolutely loved was actually “propaganda by the liberal Hollywood to brainwash our nation’s children…”
So I’ll admit that last night probably wasn’t the best time for me to encounter something like this because having just witnessed my childhood rekindled on the screen in front of me to song and dance, it cut pretty deep to hear such heinous allegations that this movie had any dubious intentions whatsoever beyond entertaining children of all ages and spreading a good message about believing in yourself and sticking by the side of friends and family.
I mean, any idiot who’s actually watched the movie understands the reasons why Tex Richman is the villain in The Muppets, and it’s certainly not just because “he’s a successful business man and they’re all jealous.” Maybe it has more to do with the idea that he wants to demolish the Muppet Studios so that he can drill for oil underneath, driven by a hatred for the Muppets because he had a bad experience with their act as a child himself…
Photo by Scott Garfield – © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
If they watched the movie, then they’d know that and realize just how ignorant their allegations sound … well, on second thought, no they wouldn’t because this is FOX News and their own agenda is to brainwash their conservative audience about something that they know nothing about because they won’t have watched the movie, either! I mean, their entire political perspective, from Occupy Wall Street to Obamacare to interpretations of the other side in general is founded on a pristine lack of knowledge and understanding about the very things that they’re staunchly offended by, so why should we expect them to actually do 30 seconds of research about a children’s movie before proceeding to use it as ammo in a war that they themselves started?!
If you can make it all the way through their clip, and prepare to be infuriated if you do because the bullshit just gets stinkier and stinkier as the “discussion” continues, these are the same people who argue against things like trying to keep the planet clean and not pumping our atmosphere with poisonous chemicals because from their perspective, those movements are all somehow anti-business and trying to put Americans out of work. Yep – Captain Planet and the Planeteers brainwashed my generation into thinking polluting is bad…
It’s not even worth arguing with these people anymore if they’re so twisted that they can look at a fun, light-hearted story like The Muppets and somehow interpret it as being an object of the “liberal media.” The next person who tries to tell me that “FOX News is the only station that’s actually fair and balanced!” is going to get punched in the face because they don’t even have any desire to learn about the other side of their opinion … how in the world could they actually be fair about how they’re going to present something that they know absolutely nothing about?!
The entire channel is hosted by people who are paid specifically to be absent from the reality that they’re attempting to report – about halfway through, at one point the woman proves that she doesn’t comprehend the notion that even despite food stamps and all of the other social programs that exist, there are still people who go hungry in the streets around our country every night! They tune out the parts of society that they just don’t want to acknowledge – oil companies are responsible for lots of pollution, which believe it or not is bad unless your lungs have somehow evolved to breathe polluted air; Occupy Wall Street isn’t about jealousy or envy, it’s about being fed up with executives getting rich by buying their own political regulations and profiteering off of all those beneath them; not everyone who uses our social deserves them, but at the same time not all who deserve them actually receive their benefits, either.
I said it last night and I reaffirm my position that it absolutely sickens me that these people are so hungry for controversy that they can take such a kind and selfless entity like the Muppets and turn them into a liberal device that they need to warn their own misinformed audience about. The problem isn’t that our children are being “brainwashed” by these ideas, the problem is that they’ve brainwashed the parents of these children into fearing something that they know absolutely nothing about because they know that just like themselves, they won’t actually ask the question of whether or not what they’re being told is even accurate in the first place.
Muppet Newsflash: You can’t be fair and balanced if you don’t actually know and understand both sides of the story.
Oh boy – where do I even begin?! I thought The Muppets was a fantastic movie – Jason Segel did an amazing job with the script, the story was both fun and incredibly emotional for any lifelong Muppets fan like myself, and I know that I left the theater not only ecstatic for what I had just watched, but also extraordinarily hopeful for what we might now see out of the Muppets in the future…
…because one of the things that rang extraordinarily true for me while I was watching this movie was that while although yes, it was a silly story for entertainment purposes, at the same time it was also a very real story because the Muppets aren’t nearly as big of a deal right now as they used to be back in the day, and I think the reason why this ended up being such a powerful film is that it truly became a fan’s story asking the question, “Wait a minute – what did happen to the Muppets, and what do we have to do to get them back???” It’s the kind of story that could only be told by a diehard fan like Jason Segel – not someone who spent the last 30 years performing these characters, but instead someone who spent those same years idolizing them.
At its heart, I couldn’t help but thinking throughout this movie, “These guys do deserve a comeback!”
Photo by Scott Garfield – © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
And mind you, I never actually even saw any of the big three Muppet movies in the theater – in fact, come to think of it, I only ever saw Muppets From Space which was as recent as 1999, but nonetheless as the opening theme to The Muppet Show played and the characters came marching across the screen singing like it was 1976, I couldn’t help but imagine that it felt something like that and frankly, even just recreating that experience from years before I was even born was pretty cool. These are timeless characters that have been around my entire life, and at the end of the show it was just really rewarding to finally see them getting the second shot that they’ve really been waiting on for what seems like over a decade at this point.
The high points for me?
- The Opening Number – Just as fun as I’ve been expecting since I watched the video of Kermit and songwriter Bret McKenzie singing a few weeks ago, with plenty of fun sight gags thrown in to play along.
- Amy Adams – She had a tough role in this movie because she eventually has to present one of the conflicts to Jason Segel’s character, but without making you absolutely hate her for it, and I think she did a really good job of that because when you see her singing and dancing again at the end of the movie, she still seems to fit right in with the whole gang.
- The Kermit & Piggy Dynamic – I really loved how they handled this without going over the top because even though it would’ve been entirely possible to create the entire movie around the mysteries between them and whatever happened to their relationship, instead it became more of a quaint rekindling with a lot of unspoken heart.
- The Rainbow Connection – I don’t really think that it’s a “spoiler,” per se, because it is on the soundtrack, but the actual performance of this song … including a very heartwarming interlude … was a huge moment. One of the many where I had to casually dry my eyes…
- A Flight of the Conchords-esque Soundtrack – It can’t be easy writing songs for characters with this kind of legacy, but Bret McKenzie did a fantastic job of penning quirky originals that seemed to fit right into the Muppet universe while also maintaining a modern tune.
- The GRAND Finale! – In a word, it was BIG, and TEAR-JERKING, and FUN, and INSPIRATIONAL, and all of the things that I remember from growing up watching the Muppets all of these years. Ok, so maybe that’s several words, but they really pulled out all of the stops and delivered a phenomenonal ending and to quote another random Internet commenter, “The only bad thing about it was that it meant the movie was over…”
So yeah, I absolutely loved it, and if I had the time between now and Christmas, I’d most definitely go see it again because you only see a handful of truly great movies in your time and The Muppets was certainly one of them! At the very least, I can’t wait for the DVD to come out, and until then I’ll probably be listening to choice hits from the soundtrack on regular rotation in my car and while I’m working!
Photo by Andrew Macpherson – © The Muppets Studio, LLC
One final note that I wanted to end on is that if nothing else, I sincerely hope that Disney takes full advantage of this movie’s destined success and uses it to actually elevate the Muppets back into our daily lives like so many fans have been wishing for years. I’m talking more appearances by the characters, I’m talking a new attraction (or possibly even a new land altogether) at Walt Disney World, I’m talking figuring out how to make The Muppet Show profitable and taking another stab at that, too! This was a movie all about taking chances and trying new things, so what better way to honor these incredible icons that Jim Henson left us by putting them back in the spotlight where they so rightfully belong to be?!
Seeing Kermit and Fozzie and Miss Piggy up on the big screen was a genuine reminder that this is an amazing cast of characters, full of heart and love and the desire to make as many people laugh as they possibly can. All Disney needs to do now is step back and let the Muppets do their thing…
My wife and I are finally going to see The Muppets this evening, so it seemed only fitting that today’s advent post make mention of one of my favorite Christmas movies of all-time…
The whole movie is hilarious, of course, but this medley of holiday songs at the end of the film definitely holds a very special place in my heart! It’s just nice to see all of the Muppets, including the ones from Sesame Street, all singing together like one big, happy family – because really, that’s what Christmas is all about, right?
I’m rather proud of the whimsical deal that I stumbled upon this evening. Mind you, it wasn’t quite as lucrative as the Toy Story 3/Blu-Ray deal that I honed in on last spring, but still…
Basically, it goes something like this – currently Disney Movie Rewards is running a promotion where if you buy select Muppet DVDs, you get a free ticket to go see The Muppets in the theater! Since I already know that we’re going anyways, I saw this as a convenient opportunity to pick up the remaining two seasons of The Muppet Show that I never got around to buying in the past for only ten bucks a piece:
- The Muppet Show – Season 2 ($20 at Walmart)
- The Muppet Show – Season 3 ($20 at Walmart)
- SUBTOTAL – $40
- The Muppets movie vouchers (-$10/each x2)
- GRAND TOTAL – $20
And it could’ve gone even cheaper than that if I had A) ordered from Amazon (didn’t want to wait for shipping, but they listed both sets as $18.49 a piece), or instead bought one of the actual movies (only $13/each, but I already have them all…). Best forty bucks I’ve spent in a while! 
As you can probably tell from the last couple of posts, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Muppets coming out in theaters next week, and more so wondering exactly what to expect from it. On one hand, I’m really excited to see that Disney is attempting to revitalize The Muppets after they’ve more or less sat in the corner untouched since 2004 … but on the other hand, I’m admittedly also a bit nervous of what the final product is actually going to be like – especially considering that I wasn’t all that impressed with The Green Album, the collaborative release of classic Muppet songs covered by modern artists that came out earlier this year.
It also makes me curious because I’ve stumbled upon various articles citing that some of the Muppet veterans like Frank Oz were unhappy with the direction that the script was going and didn’t want to be a part of it.
Now as for the comments, I’m trying not to read too much into them because I do still have a lot of respect for Frank Oz for also tacking on that he didn’t want to elaborate on it for fear of hurting the movie, so it’s not like he’s ready to cast them off and say “To hell with them!” but instead is clearly still attached, as would only be expected for someone who performed a character like Fozzie for 20+ years of his life! In fact, it’s probably kind of weird to look on now and see somebody else performing “his” characters to boot, so it’s probably not even worth giving that angle another thought…
At this point I almost think I’m likening it to the perspective that a lot of folks have of The Simpsons lately because even though I’m still as much as a die hard fan as I always was growing up, there are a lot of folks that pretty much despise anything created after about season 7 and are convinced that whatever is airing now 15 years later is complete and utter crap. And I have a hard time processing that because as much as I love Mr. Plow and Who Shot Mr. Burns? and all of those other classic episodes from the early ’90s, I also recognize as a writer that you have to constantly be trying new things and reinventing yourself or you’re never going to survive to produce your 500th episode 22 years after first going on the air!
I see the same thing happen over at Disney World all of the time, and although that one’s admittedly a little bit harder for me because I’m not always the greatest person with change myself, you have to allow something to grow and evolve over time or eventually instead of Disney World being this happy place where millions love to visit each year, it would become old and dated because the people who first saw the classics like Snow White and Pinocchio are 70 years old now! Jim Henson first started working with puppets in 1955 and debuted The Muppet Show in 1975, making them 36 years old as the prepare to hit the silver screen again this week. If we want The Muppets to survive and continue to contribute their fun brand of whimsical entertainment to the world, the powers that be need to be able to try new things and push them in different directions that may not have originally been considered decades ago when the characters were first conceived.
And for what it’s worth, whoever made the comment that Fozzie would’ve never stooped to the level of fart shoes must not be familiar with the bear that I grew up laughing at because really, aren’t “fart shoes” just whoopee cushions that you wear on your feet???
Although I don’t really watch Saturday Night Live much anymore (except for random clips the day after, such as these), it looks like last night’s episode might’ve been worth staying up for!
Via New York Times Magazine, here’s a sneak peak at the theme song from the new Muppet movie – written by none other than Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords fame!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/magazine/bret-mckenzie-muppets.html
Talk about a thankful relief from the mediocre yawn of a release that was The Green Album from earlier this year – this song, on the other hand, make me feel a lot more excited that The Muppets is going to remain true to these furry childhood friends whom I cherish so dearly!
