The Fractured Mirror 2.0 #4 The Muppet Movie (1979)
There are some artists and entertainers that you don’t properly appreciate until you become a parent. Jim Henson is one. Before I became a dad I had a lot of affection and respect for Henson and his work. Everybody does. He's one of the few uncontested geniuses in our culture. But while I always liked Sesame Street, The Muppets, and to a lesser extent, Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller and Labyrinth/The Dark Crystal I didn’t have an intense personal connection to Henson until my son Declan was born.
When Declan started watching Sesame Street, I fell in love with the venerable children’s institution with a ferocity and intensity that surprised me. I was, and remain, blown away by the immensity and tenderness of Henson’s vision. I came to see Henson the way his die-hard cultists have always seen him. I now see Henson as no mere entertainer or storyteller but rather as one of those rare, magical people who single-handedly made the world a better, more joyful place.
In a dirty, degraded and cynical world, there’s something pure and untouched about Henson and his collaborator’s creations. Decades on, Sesame Street and The Muppets remain important to us as parents, as children, and as pop culture aficionados even if, like far too many of our greatest artists, Henson was taken from us much too soon, when he still had so much left to give.
But if Henson died much too young, it’s hard to overstate his legacy and 1979’s The Muppet Movie, a prankish, post-modern exploration of Muppets, movies, show-business and everything in between, ranks as one of his greatest triumphs. It was a film that brought the Muppet aesthetic to the big screen in the most satisfying possible way but it’s also a movie about movies that delights in continually reminding audiences that they are watching a fictional movie. Kermit is a habitual fourth wall-breaker here and the movie twists and contorts the boundary between reel and real with an elasticity and invention that recalls early Bugs Bunny cartoons.
The post-modern chicanery begins with an opening that finds the motley gang of puppety oddballs known as The Muppets gathered together to see the film-within-a-film we’re also about to see. The Muppet Movie opens in a movie studio lot, and then plunges us even further into the world of cinema by segueing to a screening room and then to a movie screening.
It’s a clever opening that establishes the film’s gleefully meta, post-modern tone but it can’t help but pale in comparison to the sequence that follows because, well, pretty much everything in entertainment pales in comparison to the scene that follows the super-meta Hollywood opening. There’s not much in film, or outside, that can compare to the sublime, sad majesty of lovable Kermit the Frog, that poignantly human amphibian leading man of the Muppets, crooning “The Rainbow Connection” while plucking on a banjo.
Kermit the Frog needs no introduction. We all know who and what he is — unless we’re some kind of non-Muppets-loving-or-knowing monster — but if he wasn’t world famous and a household name, this song and this performance would tell us exactly who he is as a character. “The Rainbow Connection” perfectly embodies the poignant yearning at Kermit’s core. The lyrics and his trembling, hopeful delivery tell us that Kermit is a dreamer as well as an everyman, and someone capable of aching sincerity and understated beauty as well as wisecracks and straight-man grounding.
It’s a sequence so lovely, so beautiful and so unforgettable that it’s impossible to top, or even match. The filmmakers perhaps realize this, because they follow Kermit singing “The Rainbow Connection” for what the wisenheimers in Monty Python might call something completely different.
This timeless sequence is followed by something incredibly timely: a guest appearance from the perpetually hammy Dom DeLuise (whom the filmmakers of the 1970s inexplicably found inveterately gut-busting and gave free reign) and an instantly dated dad joke where Kermit answers DeLuise’s statement about being lost by asking him if he’s considered Hare Krishna. In another context, the shift in tone between fragile beauty and broad comedy might be whiplash-inducing but it works surprisingly well here because both the song and the glib wisecrack perfectly embody The Muppets’ sensibility.
A lot of the Muppets’ comedy can be traced back to the baggy pants broadness of vaudeville, and The Muppet Movie lovingly resurrects such old-timers as Milton Berle, Bob Hope and the ventriloquism team of Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen, whom the film is dedicated to. Yet to his credit, Henson was never afraid to be sad and soft and melancholy, as evidenced by “The Rainbow Connection” and Sesame Street and The Muppet Show’s “Bein’ Green”, two songs I love but that I cannot listen to without getting a little teary.
DeLuise’s cameo serves another purpose as well. His character is a Hollywood agent who ignites Kermit’s imagination with visions of feature film stardom. Kermit is a humble chap but the idea of making millions of people smile is irresistible to him. So he embarks on a road trip to Hollywood that doubles as an origin story explaining how this strange combination of animals and monsters came together.
The team is assembled piece by piece, player by player. We learn how Kermit met Fozzie Bear and Rowlf and many of the other most beloved Muppets, in colorful set-pieces that delight in cameos of both the human and puppet variety. The film also delights in its own artifice. There is a wonderful and much remembered sequence, for example, where Kermit and the gang meet the acid-addled felt freaks that constitute Electric Mayhem and they begin to explain what has happened to them so far and Kermit insists that the audience will be bored being inundated with information they already know so instead they simply give Electric Mayhem a copy of the script to bring them up to speed.
It’s a boldly meta riff on the clunky exposition found in so many movies but what makes it particularly clever is that this time-saving measure ends up actually ends up eating up more screen time, and in a more distracting way, than simply disseminating this information through conventional exposition.
Given the centrality that Miss Piggy plays in the Muppets universe, it’s a little surprising that she doesn’t make her proper introduction until the movie is half over but she’s such a strong, attention-grabbing character that she can’t be onscreen without dominating the proceedings. So it makes sense to indelibly establish the film’s simultaneously fantastical and grounded world and Kermit as a wonderful, relatable everyman protagonist before bringing a force of nature like Miss Piggy into the equation.
Of course no film would be complete without conflict, so The Muppet Movie has Kermit and his growing menagerie being pursued by a sinister chain-restaurant mogul played by Charles Durning who wants to pay Kermit 500 dollars to be the spokesman for a nation-wide assemblage of fried frog legs restaurants. Kermit, to his credit, isn’t about to sell out his fellow amphibians for what is ultimately an insultingly low payday. I would lose a lot of respect for him if all it took was five hundred dollars to get this friend and hero of children everywhere to actively promote the genocide and mass consumption of his fellow frogs.
The Muppet Movie is 1979 in pure cinematic form. So while we’re treated to cameos from old-timers like Bob Hope and Milton Berle, who are older than Fozzie Bear’s jokes, and also quite possibly time itself, the film also features cameos from probably the two hippest, hottest comedians of the moment: Steve Martin and Richard Pryor.
Richard Pryor plays a balloon salesman and it speaks to the film’s weirdly brilliant, palatable combination of old-school Catskills silliness and understated beauty that the movie gets a shocking amount of emotional mileage out of Gonzo's love of soaring through the air, powered by helium balloons. In The Muppet Movie, Gonzo's yearning for transcendence is both a silly gag and oddly beautiful.
The Muppet Movie climaxes with a child’s conception of Hollywood success. Kermit finally makes it to the big studio at which point Orson Welles’ (ostensibly playing a character, but at that point Orson Welles pretty much just played Orson Welles, and delighted in having such an exquisite, deep role to inhabit), studio bigwig, is so wowed that he gives him the standard contract making Kermit rich and famous.
Time and nostalgia have been kind to The Muppet Movie. It’s a movie people love in part because they saw it at a pre-critical age but also because it is a legitimately good, bordering on great movie that’s funny and sad and lovely and blessed with songs by Paul Williams that are uniformly wonderful.
The Muppet Movie works brilliantly as a kids movie. It works brilliantly as a movie about movies. But above all else, it works magnificently as a musical where the songs carry the emotion but also work magnificently on their own terms. The subsequent Muppet movies all have their charms, some more than others, but this lovely, funny and unforgettable movie set the bar so prohibitively high that nothing that followed has been able to match its ingratiating sweetness and novelty.
Buy The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from Amazon here
Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace