Saturday Coffee: Is Disney finally showing The Muppets some respect?
The new ride looks great, but can someone please greenlight “The Muppet Show” already?
A super-sized subscriber letter for a super-sized weekend.
A little under a year ago, I wrote a post wondering why Disney just couldn’t seem to figure out The Muppets. This was in relation to the closure of MuppetVision at Hollywood Studios. The attraction, which was shuttered to create a Monsters Inc. roller coaster, was the final Muppet project Jim Henson worked on, and it opened exactly one year after his death.
I was heartbroken at the attraction’s removal. Two years back, our family took a Disney World trip and I was more excited to experience MuppetVision than I was to see the new Star Wars rides. I don’t usually get into ethereal vibes and all that stuff, but you could feel Henson’s spirit unleashed throughout the show, exploring the possibilities of theme park technology. Sure, 3D movies exist – but what if we added bubbles and smoke to make it even more immersive? Can we get animatronic penguins to conduct the orchestra? Let’s put an animatronic Statler and Waldorf in the balcony to heckle the audience. Can the walls be screens so when the Swedish Chef shoots a cannon from the projector room, it looks like the theater’s falling apart? What if a real-life Sweetums runs in halfway through? It was funny and chaotic in a way that felt like I was sitting inside an episode of The Muppet Show.
It seemed wrong to close something of such historical significance. And while I know Pixar is much more popular with children these days than the Muppets, papering over the area with a Monster’s Inc. land seemed so boring. But it was in line with what Disney has done with Henson’s creations over the years. After Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller resurrected the characters for 2011’s The Muppets, Disney has been clueless about how to handle them. They tried a mockumentary in 2015 that was sour and cynical. They had the Muppets retell American history at the Magic Kingdom, but discontinued it abruptly. They did a Muppets Haunted Mansion that just seemed to use the characters as shills for their theme parks, a streaming series that curiously only seemed to let two or three characters share the screen at once, and a fun Electric Mayhem series that was cancelled after one season. Disney seemed unable to figure out how to make these characters work.
But this year, they seem to be getting the hang of it.
