Messing with the Muppets

...As you can see, The Mup-pets Go Hollywood really shattered me The Muppets had fallen from their pedestals, for two weeks I was depressed Luckily, I caught Kermit hosting the Tonight Show and I started believing again But what really revived my faith was going to see The Muppet Movie The special presented two snippets (there's a name for a group, The Snippets) from the film, and both were very misleading Now that I've sat through the entire film, I have only two words for it Rivit, nvit A very funny movie, assuming you like frogs I especially recommend it to those of my readers who don't have the slightest idea what I have been talking about for the last thousand words Approximately, the story tells how the Muppets got together and broke into the big time In the lead role, Kermit is absolutely rivetting His smile is more genuine and sincere than that of the Ultra-Brite lady while she is being propositioned But it is not Kermit's good looks alone that are responsible for his achieving the status of matinee idol (Actually, he is a Don Rickles lookalike) His personality and charm play a considerable part, too On TV, Kermit is the consummate host, keeping things moving He is both the jaded, cynical showman who has seen it all and the ingenuous rube who has just come in from the lily pads, still wet behind his nonexistent ears It ain't easy being green Complicated, multidimensional, Kermit makes Merv, Dinah and Mike resemble a bunch of stuffed animals The movie further enriches his TV persona You'll understand why I gave up frogs legs proven-gale in his honor The performance of Miss Piggy, who has at last become a fully realized character, is equally admirable As the ultimate narcissistic movie star, she is the symbol of everybody who puts on airs, who really thinks he or she is hot stuff Seventy-five human leading ladies should sue Henson and writers Jerry Juhl and Jack Burns for telling the truth There but for the grace of Jim Henson, they might say, goes moi Miss Piggy energizes every scene she appears in On her first date with Kermit, for instance, she takes him to a nightclub There they are served wine—which, she explains, makes "moi giggly"—by a Lithuaman waiter (Steve Martin) She starts to whisper sweet nothings to Kermit as stars shine in her little pig eyes Then the waiter interrupts to tell her she has a call Walking on a cloud of love to the phone, she is nevertheless able to yell to her agent, "What do you got, Manny...

...Am I Peter Falk...

...He looked like a fish out of water, a lox on loan from Zabar's back East The only true Muppet moment occurred in the brief interview taped before the big-event party Miss Piggy was sitting at poolside dictating letters to her secretary "Let's just say, 'Let's have lunch sometime ' l'mso ires...

...Where am I? Peter Falk...

...Ires busy " With sunglasses on top ot her little face, it w as easy to see why some people feel that this conceited, self-centered temale is the most beautitul pig in the world On the whole, though...

...The Muppets Go Hollywood ranked with such sleaze as The Making of The Deep, The Making of Star Wars and Rocky's People, a special about the making of Rocky II The networks always used to air this kind of filler material at the end of movies to fill the 10 minutes or so until the 11 o'clock news However, in 1977 a breakthrough took place The Making of A Bridge Too Far was shown on prime time And nobody complained We have all been lobot-omized by TV, we can't even tell the difference anymore between commercials, trailer-filler material and real programs Can we...

...The delivery of that line had to knock even Statler and Waldorf out of the balcony box Yet perhaps the most amazing thing about The Muppet Movie is how visually exciting it is This is in part attributable to the fact that we are not watching the Muppets on the tube All my beloved characters are bigger than life—particularly Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem Band, who positively explode on the movie screen But more than the nature of the medium is at work here Jim Henson's wit deserves credit, too The scene in which Kermit's and Miss Piggy's eyes first meet is the funniest visual spoof of the Clairol hair-coloring commercials?where the two jerks run toward each other in the field—that I have ever seen The paint job on Fozzie Bear's car—a 1951 Studebaker—will crack you up as well Best of all, The Muppet Movie is uninterrupted by commercials and other local station trivia Hollywood can't be all bad Can it...

...Miss Piggy, the noted sex symbol and prominent pig fatale, Fozzie Bear, Rowlf, Statler and Waldorf, the two old fools, Crazy Harry, Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem Band, and Animal, who went around goosing Cheryl Ladd and Nanci Sutter Yet these beloved characters came across as a bunch of publicity hungry worms groveling for exposure, like everybody in TV land I suppose that this could be regarded as a satirical statement of sorts But if so, it wore thin very quickly The humans were even more objectionable The limos kept dumping thousands of pounds of celebrities at the entrance of the Coconut Grove Rita Moreno, Dick Van Dyke, Peter Falk, James Coburn, Gary Owens, Paul Williams, Valerie Pernne, Christopher Reeve, Liberace All were bad, but the first three were particularly embarrassing Moreno and Van Dyke made for a cohost combination worse than anything a Muppet-hater could dream up A living legend in Muppetmania, Moreno was one of the first hosts of the Muppet Show I still remember how some of the more outgoing Muppets fondled her dernere—a family-hour breakthrough This time she was nowhere near as sexy Van Dyke has in the last few years become a Midas in reverse Everything he touches bombs As for Falk, who was asked to make small talk about the Coconut Grove mghtclub and the momentousness of the occasion, his performance can be summed up thus "What...

...On Television MESSING WITH THE MUPPETS BY MARVIN KITMAN The second major comedy disappointment of the past season was The Muppets Go Hollywood, presented on CBS the night of May 16 (Freddy Silverman's speech to the NBC affiliates, in which he explained that news is what a television network like NBC is all about, was the first) Done in the format of a Hollywood party honoring the puppets on the completion of their feature film, The Muppet Movie, the prime-time special will go down with the swine flu vaccine in the annals of hype Indeed, this program was so different from the syndicated Muppet Show I have loved for three years that I suspect the producer and usual chief-writer, Jim Henson, was captured by the same Lutoman terrorists who kidnapped Moe Creen, the station general manager on the Second City TV show (Moe was forced to drink Perner water, a beverage that is consumed in massive quantities in Hollywood and is the chief cause of bad television today The carbonation pixilates the bram ) The weekly Muppet Show is a half hour of whimsy and music hall comedy where animals, monsters and humans share the stage equally The premise is making fun of TV and all showbiz, needling the sacred traditions, letting the air out of stuffed shirts, and so forth In fact, ever since its beginning m 1966, this has been the anti-television show, its very existence a meamngful statement about what is wrong with the medium Small wonder that it had a hard time finding a home CBS rejected the program in 1975 (freeing the so-called comedy network to discover and bring us such laugh riots as Big Eddie, Bust-in' Loose, Syznzyk, Co-Ed Fever, Flatbush, Just Friends, et al) ABC and NBC also passed on it The Muppets, they claimed, were not quite ready for prime time Finally, to get his show produced, Henson was forced to go into exile in London, where that funny little man, Sir Lew Grade, gave the Muppets a base at his ATV studios The Hollywood mentality that ruins television had once more managed to drive out original talent What made the Muppet special so disastrous was that Henson adopted the very same Hollywood mentality Piling celebrity on celebrity, he belittled his own achievements and bored millions True, all mv favorites attended There was that star of stage, screen and 111v pad himself, Kermit the frog...