Disney Is Killing The Muppets When Saving Them Is So Easy
It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time for Disney to get their act together and do the Muppets right.
You can argue that Disney ruined Star Wars or that they’re in the process of ruining Marvel, but nothing it’s done to those franchises even comes close to how badly they’ve mismanaged the Muppets.
Is It Even The Muppets Without Jim Henson?
And the worst part? Saving the Muppets would be so ridiculously easy that I have no choice but to assume Disney is killing the franchise on purpose.
Look, no one can replace Jim Henson. When the man died in 1990, he took the secret to producing perfect Muppet content with him.
Even his children, who inherited the Muppets before passing them along to Disney, couldn’t quite reproduce the magic of those early Muppet projects.
Revive The Muppet Show
If something as dreadful as It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie could be made on Brian Henson’s watch, I obviously can’t expect Disney to handle the IP perfectly.
But there’s imperfect, and then there’s downright misunderstanding of the material. The truth is Disney does not “get” the Muppets. Not in the slightest.
If they did, they would just remake The Muppet Show. None of this Muppets as YouTubers or whatever Muppets Now was but a proper revival of The Muppet Show.
The Muppet Show Is Always A Good Idea
Put those little foam rubber freaks in a theater and have them perform sketches and musical numbers with a different celebrity host every week.
Do that, Disney, and I guarantee Muppet fans like myself will devour it. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel or modernize things to make the Muppets more relevant.
The original Muppet Show took its inspiration from vaudeville. Do you have any idea how relevant vaudeville was in the early ’80s? Not one bit. Did kids and adults still watch the Muppet Show? Does Fozzie wear a hat?
Disney Keeps Messing It Up
The Muppets should be as timeless as Mickey Mouse, and yet Disney treats them like they’re Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. To be fair the 2011 film The Muppets was decent.
Ditto for the underrated Muppets Most Wanted (2014). For a brief moment, thanks to Jason Segal and Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords it looked like Disney had the Muppets on the right track.
Then they blew it.
They should have followed up the movies with a new version of The Muppet Show, but instead, they made a weird mockumentary ripoff of The Office, confusingly titled The Muppets.
Yes, you read that correctly, Disney followed up their 2011 movie The Muppets with an unrelated TV show also called The Muppets. Disney even managed to botch Lady Gaga & the Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular a Christmas special that could have been another John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together.
It’s Simple
Instead, it played like a hollow bit of corporate synergy. The Muppets were there to promote Most Wanted, and Gaga was there to promote her album Artpop. Meanwhile, all Muppet fans want is another variety show with singing and comedy like the one we grew up with.
The fact that half of Disney’s revenue comes from exploiting nostalgia makes the fact that they haven’t remade The Muppet Show even more of a headscratcher. Muppets, celebrities, songs—I know I sound like a broken record, but the formula is so simple.
We Won’t Hold Our Breath
If Disney isn’t willing to do what’s right for the Muppets, they should sell the franchise to someone else. They won’t, of course.
They’ll just hold onto it and let it rot. Oh, they’ll occasionally produce something dumb like The Muppets Haunted Mansion but then they’ll toss Kermit back on the shelf and let him collect dust for a few years.
I just pray that someday Disney will find the Rainbow Connection, that magic spark that will allow The Muppets to reach their full potential again. Until then, the lovers, the dreamers, and me will be over here rewatching The Muppet Movie for the gazillionth time.
