So it really makes me happy to introduce to you

[austin_dern]

Although I'm watching a surprising amount of Disney Channel these days it's mostly the cartoons, even the ones I've seen plenty of times before. They've got plenty of live-action shows; I just don't like any of them, what with not being maybe ten and pretty easily amused. But they put together something or other featuring The Muppets, and I'll certainly give them a try at least.

I don't know exactly what it was I was watching, but it was some sort of interaction between The Muppets and various characters from The Suite Life Of Those Two Guys and Some Other Disney Live-Action Thing. I think the premise was supposed to be that they were talking backstage about how they would put on a show in which the Muppets interacted with the characters ... I know this sounds confusing, but I could process that, I think, in about the same way I understand how every episode of The Jack Benny Show on radio consisted of them remembering what happened a few days ago as they tried to rehearse The Jack Benny Show. The important thing was Kermit pretending to be the hotel manager while Miss Piggy and that spoiled girl made endless demands.

I don't think I was thrown by the fact the Muppets don't have the same voices they had in the 70s. Who has, after all? It was the pacing which threw me: there were very obviously pauses being left in for where the audience should roar with laughter, but absent a laugh track the result was dead air promoting a sluggish feeling. Also distracting me was realizing that the Muppets were acting, more or less, like that had been doing around the time of The Muppet Show, but that's a program that current ten-year-olds probably have never seen, or maybe only seen when their parents forced them to sit through the DVDs. Perhaps the subtleties of the Kermit/Piggy relationship don't take that much time to grasp, but does it baffle kids to see these shows where these Muppets obviously know one another in way more detail than the usual guest stars to the stuff they actually like do? Has a kid today got a fair chance at understanding Gonzo?

Trivia: The film which researchers Charles Batchelor and W K L Dickson presented to Thomas Edison on 6 October 1889, showing the results of motion picture photography, consisted of Dickson greeting his employer back from his trip and saying ``I hope you are satisfied with the kineto-photograph''. Sound was provided by a simultaneously started phonograph. Source: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson.

Currently Reading: Bloom, Wil McCarthy.

Comments

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

Necessarily, all the ones voiced by Jim Henson haven't been the same since his death, but now all of Frank Oz' characters aren't him as well.
For more information on the Disney blitz:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/movies/21barn.html?&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=all

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I would be a little surprised to learn any of the Muppet characters were still voiced by the peak-era voices --- it has been over 30 years since The Muppet Show and the performers had to be pretty skilled and experienced then. That doesn't throw me, though; the replacement voices are reasonably close and talented enough. All the other sorts of problems the Muppets as a set have, well, that's different.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

It seems like the much of the Muppet franchise has had the stink of death all over it since the nineties, yet somehow it soldiers on. Going all the way back to The Jim Henson Hour it's just seemed like they can't understand that the audience for "puppets" just don't grok the inside-joke, famous-for-being-famous, let's-be-entertained-by-"entertainers", personality-driven world of television that was the rule back when the Muppet Show was sharing airtime with new episodes of Carol Burnett.

Not saying that it's a "good thing" that age of the "entertainer" is over, but... that's how it is. Star Power is about slick packaging, not "personality". And Muppets are *not* slick. They've tried a few times to make it that way... witness disasters like Muppets Tonight and... it just doesn't work. A Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy sketch *right out of the gate* is carrying so much institutional baggage along with it that it just can't help coming across like one of those stale MGM musical moments you see on PBS during Pledge Week. (You know, when they dig "That's Entertainment!" out of the vault to get seniors to pony up.) Which of course highlights the other problem... Muppets were an largely an *adult* phenomenon in the first place. I doubt kids *ever* really laughed that hard at Jack Benny or Carol Burnett, at least when their parents weren't in the room to explain it to them. (Or not explain, depending on the *true* nature of what they're laughing at.) Sure, I laughed at the slapstick antics of the Muppet Show when I was a kid, but... I didn't really *understand* the show and laugh "for real" until getting a couple decades on the odometer.

I just can't see Disney pulling anything good off, here. The level of respect they've demonstrated for most of the franchises they've acquired lately borders on necrophilia. ;^b

But maybe I'm just crabby today.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, I do think part of the problem is that there haven't been any really regular Muppet productions since ... ah ... Muppet Babies closed up shop, with the short-lived exception of Muppets Tonight. They carried on making the occasional movie or made-for-TV movie, but I think there's a certain skill that comes up from trying to fill a 30-minute programming block week after week that just can't be filled however decent a production The Muppets Wizard of Oz turns out to be.

Maybe it's that when you do face an endless programming void you can't be quite so reverential to the characters as icons and you have to let them breathe again. Or that they have the room and time to breathe; if Miss Piggy is going to try to marry Kermit by starting the rumor they have a secret cottage in Maine together that just can't be part of this year's two-hour movie-type feature; it doesn't make any plot sense. If it's one plot of two dozen episodes this year there's room for it.

And part of the trouble again is that there's just not the proven audience for variety show bits anymore, when in the 70s you could still put one together and have a credible chance of drawing an audience. The YouTube videos mentioned in that New York Times article above might be one avenue for getting people interested again ... after all, is there any reason Mahna Mahna would not work as a ``dude, check out this video'' event?

It did seem like the 90s were just there for the Muppets to crash and burn, didn't it? There was this sad little ``oh, isn't that cute they keep pretending to try?'' air to the movies and special productions. I suppose at least Disney won't let the franchise disappear beneath the waves as long as they can help it, even if it does involve having them hang around Hannah Montana.

I think the last time I saw a Muppet on a late-night talk show was around 1996 or so, when Kermit was on Conan O'Brien's show. You'd think his show would be a natural to have puppet characters around just because half the sketches they do are with their own puppet or costume characters.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I agree completely that any Muppets revival would likely be through YouTube or similar, as most of their sketches are neatly sized for that. I think the variety show notion would have to be reworked greatly if at all.. the 90's saw the shift from.. well. the banter-filled guest-starred TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes to America's Funniest Home Videos. And the 00's saw Punk'd, though I didn't.

It's interesting to think of Muppet relationships as subtle, as well, and I somewhat agree. Part of what made The Muppet Show enjoyable was that these were rather dimensional and nuanced characters. And I realize the childhood pretension implicit in saying this, but, I'll say it about Danny Phantom too, and I'm ready to believe it if an 8-year old says it about iCarly. But to capture Kermit, you have to capture a fairly competent boss, who barely keeps things under control, who's pliable yet frantic, prone to anger and sarcasm yet genuinely friendly.

In final almost-related mention here, Muppets From Space I enjoyed more from the MST3K-like commentary bonus feature from Kermit, Gonzo, Rizzo, and the director-or-somebody, than the actual movie.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's one of the many things which mystifies me that the variety show format so completely fails these days, particularly when folks will entertain themselves with a set of goofy online videos that have only vague thematic or genre similarities, or will go channel swimming through half the network dial. A decent variety show will give you that and keep a minimal level of competence. I suppose Robot Chicken has some resemblance even though it's really a string-of-spoofs show, but ... eh, maybe it's just waiting for the right personality to serve as host and professional as talent booker.

Kermit isn't really at his best without some stressful activity flying apart around him. The tension brings out his comic edge, and that's probably part of why it's hard for him to be as entertaining in movies where he's captain of a pirate ship instead.

I somehow haven't seen Muppets From Space yet, although I know where I was when it came out in theaters: I was taking a three-week course at NASA and going to the Smithsonian weekends.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Robot Chicken is only fifteen minutes long of a show, to note; I think the notion of an hourlong variety show wouldn't keep attention spans long enough, and a half-hour barely gives you any use of a Special Guest Star.

And agreed totally about Kermit. Muppets In Space worked a bit well on that, though not perfectly, and it was incredibly Gonzo-focused.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Is it only fifteen minutes? ... Well, it seems to run in blocks anyway. Still, I wonder if one could sneak up to a variety-type show by starting with an SCTV or Robot Chicken type string-of-spoofs and work music and novelty acts into it.

Gonzo is another weird case ... I think he works best where he has absolutely no idea that he's pursuing an insane goal ineptly. That's great for starting out stories where his problems turn into other people's, but it makes it hard for him to successfully achieve a goal in a satisfying fashion, the enchickening of the whole Muppet cast notwithstanding.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

It did seem like the 90s were just there for the Muppets to crash and burn, didn't it? There was this sad little ``oh, isn't that cute they keep pretending to try?'' air to the movies and special productions.

Some of the seeds of destruction were planted by Jim Henson himself, of course. By the mid-Eighties or so he'd reached that phase that every "performer" known for comedy goes through where they suddenly want to be "taken seriously". "The Dark Crystal" might of been the first real sign of trouble here. That production, saddled with an *incredibly* top-heavy and self-important (and not at all child-friendly) plot and cinematography which just screams "Look at me, I'm artistic and serious! Really!" was the template he kept trying to duplicate for the rest of his life. Sure, he kept doing "The Muppets" as an increasingly tired sideline, but his heart obviously wasn't in it anymore.

The last attempt at a regular TV which Jim Henson lived to oversee was of course The Jim Henson Hour, of which half of the hour was assigned to an at times nearly-unwatchable rehash of the original "Muppet Show", while the other half was devoted to one of his usually unfunny Creature Shop productions, including segments of the positively tooth-pain-inducing "The StoryTeller" (http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/The_StoryTeller). It was evident from the title card of the the show which half Jim Henson actually cared about: The overblown, self-important, "Serious art critics love it but parents are actually vaguely uncomfortable with what they're seeing" half. I suspect that by the time Jim Henson unexpectedly keeled over during the production of "The Witches", another dark, violent, and *way too serious* flirtation with "serious storytelling" he had seriously undermined the creative foundation that the Jim Henson Company had been founded on. It's no wonder the Nineties were such a disaster.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not just comics or comic performers either. Most celebrities have a time when they want to try publicly doing stuff they're not celebrated for, resulting in such things as entertainingly awful song cover albums.

It does take a certain performing maturity not to be worried about that, though, and I suppose the effort to prove that Muppets Aren't Simply Kids Entertainment --- and it must be hard to overcome that impression considering how important they are to the quintessential Kids' Program, Sesame Street --- will run amok at times. But they really did work out their best when doing that show that was supposed to appeal to kids and their parents simultaneously, as long as the parents see the humor in how often characters get blown up or eaten.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

It's sort of funny, but... while thinking about Jim Henson I was reminded of a movie which didn't make much impression on me when I saw it originally: Being_John_Malkovich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich). If you've never seen it, well, it's impossible to explain, but... I do find it "interesting" that the character in the movie who (ultimately unsuccessfully) hijacks Malkovich's body for an extended period of time is a frustrated puppeteer, who then leverages Malkovich's reputation as a "serious actor" to jumpstart his ambitions in the puppeteering field.

I'm sure the plot overlap (reversal, really) is a coincidence, but... one has to wonder: Did a frustrated artsy-fartsy film school major climb through a portal into Henson's brain sometime in the early 1980s? ;^) Would explain a lot of things about his last years...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I do indeed remember the movie --- for some reason when I was in Troy, I got an upgraded cable package somehow which included a bunch of the lesser HBO-type channels (HBO Suspense, HBO Easily Impressed Family, and whatnot), and I think that was the first movie I watched on that. I liked the gimmick, although it sort of fell apart after the ``Malkovich? Malkovich? Malkovich!'' scene.

Perhaps the problem was a frustrated film school major, although it's hard to rule out wanting to get away from what he became a celebrity for combined with the desire to not be Too Much For Kids when the last big hit was the iconically for-kids Muppet Babies.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Disney Channel? They still play cartoons? :D

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

A healthy number of cartoons, in fact, although they don't show the oldest stuff. They also don't show enough Dave The Barbarian for my tastes, although since there's only one season of that maybe they're better off not over-running that.

Still, Phineas and Ferb deserves attention.