Disney Keeps Removing A Muppet Series From The Internet And No One Knows Why

Muppet Babies started airing in 1984, months after The Muppets Take Manhattan included a nursery dream sequence featuring young versions of the Muppets. Young versions of Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, Rolf, Bunson, Beaker, and Scooter were joined by a new character, Skeeter, Scooter’s tomboy twin sister, and of course, the iconic Nanny, who was never fully shown. The series, which featured classic 2D hand-drawn animation paired with live-action movie and television footage, was an immediate hit.

While the inclusion of movie and television footage helped emphasize the make-believe playtime aspect of Muppet Babies, they also served the real purpose of keeping the animation budget down. As we’ll soon see, it was a strange twist of fate that Jim Henson decided to work with Marvel Productions for the series. It was also a coincidence that Henson, friends with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, could use footage from Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

Today, those clips are what’s being cited as the reason why Muppet Babies is being kept off of all streaming services and constantly erased from YouTube, but that’s not the full story.

In 2023, Guy Gilchrist, an animator on Muppet Babies, answered a question at L.A. Comic Con by saying that the movie footage was why the rights could not be secured to air the series. As he explained about the show’s run, “We didn’t fill out forms, requests, this or that. We basically did whatever we wanted to do with the blessing of all of the studios. These days, things are owned by Disney, Universal… and there’s not the camaraderie at the creative level that we had in the eighties.”

But five years earlier, in 2018, Muppet Babies head writer Jeffrey Scott, in an interview for the book Totally Awesome: The Greatest Cartoons of the Eighties said, “If the legal was handled properly, there really shouldn’t be any issues regarding the use of clips. They are typically bought in perpetuity for the very reason of being able to exploit the series in the future.”

There are other theories about Muppet Babies, ranging from pontificating about how Marvel and The Jim Henson Company didn’t pay for archival storage of the old movie footage to a loss of contracts during the multiple mergers and buyouts that have taken place over the years. If the only films used were Star Wars and Indiana Jones, that would be one thing, as both of those and the Muppets are now owned by Disney, but there’s another aspect that could make the rights issues a legal landmine.

Muppet Babies also used older movies, including silent films, and while most have now entered the public domain, there are still those that haven’t, and some rights can be divided among dozens of companies or individuals. The majority are under Disney, but some are held by Paramount, a few others by Universal, and it is odd that, at the very least, the rights may not have been secured for home release.

A new version of Muppet Babies was released in 2018, using 3D CGI animation, and so while it lacks part of the charm of the original, for the target audience, children ages two to five, it’s a modern hit. But for those of us who grew up with the original, nothing quite compares, and whether there’s missing paperwork or a rights nightmare between dozens of studios, it’s a shame that this show has been lost to time.