The Rainbow Reconnection

How 'The Muppet Movie' helped me fight cynicism.

So, this is something new I’m going to do from time to time. One thing I really want to do is write more about individual movies. I may eventually post a second newsletter each week that is just my thoughts on one movie or perhaps a series of movies. I’m going to start by periodically writing about one of my top 10 or 20 favorite movies. I don’t think they’ll run straight through for the next 10-20 weeks, nor will they go in order. But I’ll probably just craft them as I feel inspired. 

Full disclosure that this week was another intense week. We dealt with the death of my grandfather and his funeral, work was insane, and we’ve had some family issues complicating the last few days of this week. So, to kick off this series, I grabbed an older piece I’d done about what might be my favorite movie of all time, James Frawley’s 1979 film The Muppet Movie. I like the way this piece turned out, and it never really garnered the traction I’d hoped for. So, I’m sharing it here. Hope you enjoy it. 

I could blame it on sitting alone in my apartment on a Saturday night, eating cold pizza and drinking flat Pepsi, but I know the truth: it was the banjo-playing frog that made me cry.

It was early summer 2009. I was still single, and my younger siblings were married and starting families. Earlier that year, I quit a newspaper job I loved to take on a tedious but higher-paying position as a marketing writer with the Army. Dreams of writing feature articles, novels, and screenplays were filed away in favor of drafting copy about the minutiae of military engineering and navigating a bureaucracy where people tried desperately to impress higher-ups they hated. But it kept the lights on, something a job as a reporter for a weekly paper didn’t, and at least I could still say I was technically a writer.

I don’t know what made me go to Best Buy to purchase a copy of James Frawley’s 1979 film, other than to say I was compelled to seek it out. The movie was a favorite of mine as a child, but aside from watching a few random episodes of The Muppet Show on DVD, I hadn’t thought much about Kermit and company in decades. Maybe I’d read something about the movie in one of the film books I was going through. Perhaps it was the fact that a children’s charity down the road was called The Rainbow Connection, and it triggered something in my memory. More likely, I was desperate to escape adulthood for a bit and return to something I’d loved in my youth.

The Muppet Movie is, of course, the story about how (well, “approximately how”) Kermit left his lilypad to make millions of people happy. On his way to Hollywood, he runs afoul of Charles Durning’s Doc Hopper, who goes to homicidal lengths to get Kermit to advertise for his chain of frog-leg restaurants. He meets Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, Miss Piggy, and pretty much every Muppet that existed in 1979 (including Big Bird, on his way “to break into public television”), who join him in his dream. In the end, the gang makes it to Hollywood and past one last obstacle ⸺ the studio secretary ⸺ where a big-time mogul (Orson Welles) draws up “the standard rich and famous contract,” ensuring their domination of the 1980s entertainment world.

Any worries I felt about outgrowing the film were dispelled in the prologue, where the gang gathers in a studio screening room to watch their story. Popcorn flies through the air ⸺ along with the boomerang fish launched by Lew Zealand ⸺ while Animal devours the padding on his chair. I laughed in anticipation of all the zany antics, dumb jokes, gratuitous explosions, and friendly monsters I remembered from childhood. I wasn’t prepared for the emotional impact the movie would have on me, nor how it would become a film I’d revisit throughout the years to keep cynicism at bay.

After the Muppets finally settle down and Kermit says a few words, The Swedish Chef rolls film and Frawley pushes in on the screen. Suddenly, we’re no longer in Hollywood but transported to Mississippi swampland, probably not too far from where Muppet creator Jim Henson grew up. The sweeping Hollywood score that had accompanied the title drops out, giving way to simple plunks of a banjo. As the camera descends into the swamp, Kermit the Frog (Henson) starts singing.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows

And what’s on the other side?

This was my Anton Ego moment. Every pretension I had disappeared, my surroundings dropped away, and I was 5 years old again. I heard my mother singing this song to me. I saw myself watching the film with my father on our living room couch. I was suddenly eager to spend time with friends I hadn’t thought much about in two decades. If my mission in purchasing the film was to revisit my childhood, it was accomplished in the opening chords of Williams’ ballad.

Having seen the movie several times since that viewing eight years ago, I can now cite the film’s merits critically and dispassionately. At the time, I already had some film reviewing experience under my belt from the local paper I freelanced for. I was officially a professional critic, albeit in the loosest sense of the word, and I have to admit I was a bit embarrassed to admit to friends that I was sitting alone on a Saturday night watching a kids’ film. But all my critical faculties dropped away during that viewing as I sat in wide-eyed wonder watching Kermit and the gang wreak mayhem on the screen.

Critic Josh Larsen has written that the Muppets excel in something he calls “Holy Nonsense,” finding joy in the trivial. Where Henson’s Sesame Street gang taught preschoolers to read and count, and the Fraggles learned about friendship, the Muppets were never big on lessons; Kermit was too busy trying to keep the theater from being destroyed by this deranged troupe of frogs, bears, chickens, and whatevers. Nearly every Muppet Show sketch ended with an explosion or a character being devoured. The movies that followed their big-screen debut were exercises in pure silliness, featuring big Broadway numbers, European capers, witty takes on Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, and copious use of Charles Grodin.

The Muppet Movie is a very silly movie. Big moments still make me laugh, whether it’s the anarchy of jamming every Muppet into the tiny studio screening room or the vaudeville-ready jokes and purposefully painful running gags (“Myth? Myth?… Yeth?”). At one point, The Electric Mayhem band paints Fozzie’s Studebaker a garish combination of colors so that it will blend in ⸺ a sight gag that gets even funnier when, at just the right moment, it actually works. Moments that I’m sure must have killed in the theater in 1979 still make me chuckle. Animal growing 50 feet tall. Steve Martin as the world’s most bitter waiter. Jam-packed with cameos, bad puns, and a love for groan-worthy jokes, The Muppet Movie takes the anything-goes humor of The Muppet Show and lets it run rampant across the United States.

And I haven’t even mentioned the songs, which bring heart and wonder to all the silliness. Paul Williams’ tunes are possibly the best in any family film, from the achingly sincere but never cloying “Rainbow Connection” to the jaunty “Moving Right Along” and the rocking “Can You Picture That.” Like the best Muppet songs, they can have you guffawing one minute and then wiping away a wistful tear the next. It’s through these tunes that the movie becomes something more than an extended version of The Muppet Show, with each number finding notes of yearning, joy, and camaraderie you don’t normally get from kids’ movies. Every single one delivers, right up through the finale’s “Rainbow Connection” reprise.

It’s Henson company policy that the Muppet characters are never referred to as puppets. Kermit’s a frog, Fozzie’s a bear, Gonzo’s a whatever. The Muppet Movie never makes mention of strings, felt, or hands in nether regions. Even though they’re more obviously artificial than some of Hollywood’s best CGI creations, they’re more relatable than many flesh-and-blood characters. The Muppets have so much personality and their own little neuroses ⸺ Kermit’s sincerity, Fozzie’s eagerness to please, Gonzo’s ache for transcendence at great personal risk    that they never appear any less than 100% real. I’ve heard of reporters breaking down in tears on the Sesame Street set in the presence of Big Bird. I have to imagine I’d have the same reaction meeting Kermit in the felt. These characters aren’t simply lucrative IP; to those of us who grew up watching their antics, they’re old friends. That evening, and in all subsequent viewings, I bought the illusion.

I mentioned at the outset that I wasn’t in a great place when I sat down to watch The Muppet Movie. I was turning 30 with nothing to show for it but a cheap apartment and a job that I believed meant I had sold out. My parents had me in their early twenties, which means I watched them turn 30. I remembered the “Over the Hill” balloons and jokes about impending death. For me, 30 was symbolic of being an official grown up. Here I was, approaching that age and it looked like all life was going to be about was soldiering through a shitty job to keep debt collectors at bay. I’d struggled with cynicism all my life, but at this point I was starting to lose the battle.

But the thing about the Muppets is that (horrible ABC sitcom notwithstanding) world-weariness and cynicism are against their ethos. As I listened to the songs and laughed at the jokes, I was also moved by the movie’s sincerity. Despite the whole “rich and famous contract,” Kermit’s not driven by greed; he believes that making millions of people happy is a noble goal. He finds a family of weirdos with the same dream, which only gets fuller the more people it includes; he even tries to get Doc Hopper to see things from his perspective. Despite the Muppets’ love for silliness, the movie ends with a celebration of hard but fulfilling work. The joyous “Magic Store” finale showcases every character on a soundstage with a role to play in making The Muppet Movie come to life. The Muppets may specialize in holy nonsense, but they’re also evangelistic about fellowship and passion. In Henson’s world, entertainment and creativity are things worth celebrating, and they’re even more worthwhile when they’re done communally. There’s no room for cynicism in that worldview.

If “The Rainbow Connection” was my Ratatouille moment, “The Magic Store” was my Grinch one. Watching these characters chase their dream together with joy and sincerity stirred something in me. When Kermit sang “I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it; it’s something that I’m supposed to be,” something in me returned to life. I felt a desire to write again. I felt compelled to share my passion with others. I wanted to call up friends just to laugh together. I made plans that on a long road trip with my sister and nephew a few weeks later, we would watch this movie together. My heart felt full for the first time in months. I was no longer ashamed to be watching a kids’ movie; instead, I was reminded of C.S. Lewis’ admonition, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

After the film ended, I delved further into Jim Henson’s story. I found that there’s a sense in which The Muppet Movie is more than just silliness and inspired nonsense. Writers Jack Burns and Jerry Juhl structured Kermit’s journey as a mirror of Henson’s. He left Mississippi and eventually broke free of the creative constrictions of the advertising world on his quest to make millions of people happy (he also ended up becoming rich and famous, of course). Along the way, he took up with a team of weirdos including Frank Oz, Juhl, Burns, and others. Without them, the particular chemistry of anarchy and sincerity that make the Muppets so special can’t be replicated ⸺  even with a clever script from Jason Segel. Henson was a genius and a force for good in the world. But he also was a skilled collaborator, and the communal joy I mentioned earlier is apparent in nearly every project he and his colleagues worked on in the 70s and 80s.

The final lines of the movie stuck with me. Indeed, today I have a plaque hanging up in my office bearing them alongside a drawing of Henson’s famous frog. As the “Rainbow Connection” reprise fades out and Muppet chaos causes the fake soundstage settings to give way to a rainbow that bursts in through the roof, suddenly every Muppet character fills the screen. Front and center, of course, is Kermit, now staring directly at the audience. “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending,” he sings. “Keep believing, keep pretending.” I burst into tears at that moment, feeling as if the DVD somehow was delivering a personal message. I suddenly felt that my thirties might not be a time of dashed dreams but of rekindled passions.

I didn’t know then if I would ever be able to write about things I loved for a living full time. To be honest, over a decade later, I still don’t. But I resolved to double down on my attempts, to celebrate artistry and enjoy the process, even if they didn’t always give way to tangible results. I vowed to run from cynicism and fight despair, focus on ways to create and celebrate good things and bring joy to others. I wanted to approach my work as if no dream was too lofty and build relationships with those who shared the same aspirations.

Cynicism is still a fight, and it’s still hard to feel like my creative work is reaching as many as I sometimes would like. That’s why I regularly pull out The Muppet Movie (since upgraded to a Blu-Ray and available on Disney+) and remind myself of the joy, hope, and passion that Henson and his collaborators championed. It’s a reminder that it’s okay to laugh, that making people smile is a worthwhile goal, and that the journey is not worth taking without some friends alongside you.

But there’s a new dimension to my love for The Muppet Movie. Now I watch it alongside my son and daughter. A few days before my 40th birthday, the movie played a brief revival in theaters; it was cathartic and brought me so much joy to watch Cece dance along in her seat or listen to Mickey laugh at all the gags. My daughter and I have turned “The Rainbow Connection” into a lullaby…and if the song made me cry as a 29-year-old alone on my couch, imagine how I felt the first time I caught my kids singing along to it in the car. Sometimes, as my daughter goes to sleep, I whisper that final line, hoping it finds its way into their dreams, passing on Henson’s hopefulness:

Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.

Note: As I said up front, it was a bit of an insane week. So there were no podcasts or reviews to promote, and I didn’t really have much of a chance to watch anything. So, this week, you’re just getting the essay. Hopefully we’ll be back with more next week!