The Muppets Show concept does, in retrospect, have a lot in common with SNL, and it got its start as a segment of SNL. Its whole premise revolved around self-reflexive riffing on show-business, something that I think has only become more popular in the Youtube era of Klingon Gangnam style. Whether the exact format of that showbiz satire is still fashionable remains to be seen. It seems like this kind of humor is now most often produced by hobbyists or aspiring internet celebrities.
New Muppet Show pilot in development
- Thread starter Kai "the spy"
- Start date
^Well, I wouldn't say it got its start on SNL. The Muppets had been doing variety-show appearances for a decade or two before SNL came along.
Kermit has been around over 50 years now. He was on a late night show called Sam and Friends on a Washington DC channel. From there Henson managed to build his way up.
^Yeah, but back then he was more Kermit the Nondescript Lizardy Thing. It took a while for him to emerge as Kermit the Frog.
Part of it was due to some really bad promotions (the trailers were dire), but, man, I don't think you could pay me to sit through Most Wanted again. The Constantine / Dominic thing wore so incredibly thin so incredibly quickly, the songs really paled in comparison to The Muppets and Walter had no reason to be in the film since he wasn't a Jason Segel fanfic self-insert anymore.
Yeah, I found it wasn't nearly as fun or imaginative.
I enjoyed it, but mainly for how weird they got with the puppetry. The fights with Constantine were all done with a puppet.
Wow, I thought it was enormously better than the previous film. The Muppets was pretty much a self-referential apologia, trying too hard to convince modern audiences that the Muppets were still cool, yet stripping away all of Kermit's inherent coolness and reducing him to a depressive whiner who needed Walter to convince him to do anything. MMW just went ahead and told a story and had fun with it rather than trying to justify itself, and it was a story that remembered that Kermit wasn't just an ineffectual "nice guy" but an assertive leader who had a real temper and knew how to use it constructively.
The gag with Kermit trying to escape the gulag by referencing movies but getting caught by Tina Fey due to her having every single prison escape film on Netflix was great.
I get that Most Wanted didn't have the self-references and the nostalgia and Jason Segel doing a self-insert and all that, but while it fixed that issue of The Muppets, it committed an entirely new sin of its own -- outside of a few bits, it wasn't funny.
At all.
Humor is subjective. I found it a lot funnier than its predecessor.
^For a moment I forgot what thread I was in and thought you were talking about John Constantine. And now I'm thinking that'd be an awesome crossover....
I grew up loving the adventures of a starship and its crew, the creation of a particular person with his vision and ethos plus that of a few key co-creators. Specific vibe, writing, sensibility, thanks to them. There have been other, later incarnations using the name, but done, imho, as a way to keep money flowing into a studio.
I grew up as a child laughing and crying (from laughter) at the Muppet Show. It was the creation of a particular person with a specific wacky vibe, writing, vision, feel . . . you can see where I'm going with this.
MAYbe it'll be awesome. Depends on the creative person behind it all and his/her co-creators. I am doubtful, but would LOVE to be surprised.
I grew up as a child laughing and crying (from laughter) at the Muppet Show. It was the creation of a particular person with a specific wacky vibe, writing, vision, feel . . . you can see where I'm going with this.
MAYbe it'll be awesome. Depends on the creative person behind it all and his/her co-creators. I am doubtful, but would LOVE to be surprised.
Yeah, sorry Christopher, but I guess it really is quite subjective. I was nearly bored by Most Wanted. The most important thing for me was that The Muppets was fun and brought back what I most liked about the Muppets in general. In general, I liked the idea of Most Wanted, but didn't like the execution, and it never clicked with me the same way The Muppets did. It felt drab, weighed down and siphoned of all of its colour, and I don't mean literal colour, but the overall makeup of the movie lacked exuberance that The Muppets had in abundance.
I think Jason Segel and his team did a great job bringing back the Muppets in a big way, and getting people excited again. I think Most Wanted suffered the same problem most sequels face when following a hugely successful movie, ie how the heck do you follow that up? I think it would have been great if he had stayed on as a consultant of sorts for the sequel. I liked a lot of his ideas.
If this new series does go ahead, I'd like to see Walter be a part of it.
Gene Roddenberry did what he did as a way to make money. He was very mercenary. He tacked weak, never-used lyrics onto the theme music so that he could get half the royalties from its use. He forced the third-season producers to write the IDIC medallion into a script when he was about to begin selling them through Lincoln Enterprises. It was always about money for him.
People like to say that the things they dislike were just done for money and the things they like were done for some purer motive, but in reality, it's all about making a profit. That's not incompatible with doing good or meaningful work. After all, you can't tell good, meaningful stories on television unless you can afford to produce them.
And that's why it didn't work for me. What I like most about the Muppets is Kermit, and the movie The Muppets totally mischaracterized him. It was so concerned with painting him as a "nice guy" that it made him totally spineless (never mind that his "spine" is actually Steve Whitmire's radius and ulna), constantly giving up at the slightest setback and needing to be talked into doing anything. The Kermit I know was the one who inspired everyone else. And I didn't see that Kermit again until the second act of Most Wanted. To me, it was like the filmmakers recognized how badly they'd mishandled Kermit before and wrote MMW to get him back on track -- he started out just as passive and weak as before, which got him in trouble when he let Dominic take over, but once he was in the gulag, he had to rediscover his edge and become the leader he used to be.
Of course he did it for money. I think it was Samuel Johnson who said only a fool writes for anything besides money. My point was it was a project of a specific and special person who executed it in a particular manner (along with important aides.) As with Jim Henson.
I am just very doubtful when a corporation owns intellectual property rights to something and gets the idea to "do some more" of it. Though I'm not a fan of JJTrek, many are, and I think a lot of its success is because it had the stamp of an overall person with a vision for the ethos/vibe of a new Trek.
Is there someONE driven at Disney to do wacky yet heartfelt comedy and music (and yes, make some money) via puppets? It sounds like Jason Siegel was "that guy" for the first movie. Is there a creative heart behind this proposed incarnation?
Or is it a company thinking they're sitting on untapped gold (mixed metaphor, sorry) and time to start collecting on it somehow? I don't know. I suspect the latter, though admit I could be monumentally wrong and hope I am.
I am just very doubtful when a corporation owns intellectual property rights to something and gets the idea to "do some more" of it. Though I'm not a fan of JJTrek, many are, and I think a lot of its success is because it had the stamp of an overall person with a vision for the ethos/vibe of a new Trek.
Is there someONE driven at Disney to do wacky yet heartfelt comedy and music (and yes, make some money) via puppets? It sounds like Jason Siegel was "that guy" for the first movie. Is there a creative heart behind this proposed incarnation?
Or is it a company thinking they're sitting on untapped gold (mixed metaphor, sorry) and time to start collecting on it somehow? I don't know. I suspect the latter, though admit I could be monumentally wrong and hope I am.
The "love letter" thing was just my problem. It was trying so hard to be fannish and reverential to the Muppets that it didn't just focus on telling a story about them. The Muppets are irreverent by nature, so handling them with reverence takes something away from them. That was my problem with Kermit -- they took such a hagiographic approach to him that they forgot he had a quick temper and a sharp tongue and the interesting flaws of a three-dimensional character. He was like Kirk's good side in "The Enemy Within," incomplete without his bad side.
The Muppets was two hours of Jason Segel going "Hey, weren't the Muppets great?" I can sympathize with that, but it's not something I needed to be reminded of in that depth. I didn't want a love letter, I wanted a story. I thought Most Wanted did a great job portraying the Muppets as fully realized, faceted and flawed characters with the same kind of complicated, fraught relationships that real friends have.
Although I'll agree that MMW's songs weren't the greatest. They had some really clever lyrics, but there was a certain sameness to them musically, and some were too light and jaunty for their subject matter.
The Muppets was two hours of Jason Segel going "Hey, weren't the Muppets great?" I can sympathize with that, but it's not something I needed to be reminded of in that depth. I didn't want a love letter, I wanted a story. I thought Most Wanted did a great job portraying the Muppets as fully realized, faceted and flawed characters with the same kind of complicated, fraught relationships that real friends have.
Although I'll agree that MMW's songs weren't the greatest. They had some really clever lyrics, but there was a certain sameness to them musically, and some were too light and jaunty for their subject matter.
