The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

Director: Frank Oz

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I’m the guy who keeps noticing that the diner Jerry and George eat in the pilot of Seinfeld is actually the exterior of the luncheonette where the Muppets work here. It’s the movie released the weekend of my birth, no less.

Did I Like It: I really wished I did. It doesn’t have the heart of The Muppet Movie (1979), or the demented, anarchic glee of The Great Muppet Caper (1981). It might be unfair to say that a film based on characters who made their bones in a variety format is short on plot, but those previous films made good—and in the case of Caper, great—cases for their existence. Here, the Muppet gang are small-timers who want to make it big with their obvious talent and charm. Sound familiar from The Muppet Movie? It should. And then—surprise of all surprises—they do it. Without ornate sequences involving Kermit (Henson) and Piggy’s (Oz) nuptials and imagining the muppets as babies* which add nothing to the proceedings, the runtime might not have even qualified as a feature.

This is all perfunctory, as if all of the Muppet crew (here all together for the final time in a feature before Henson’s passing in 1990) desperately wanted to be doing something else. After reading the recent Brian Jay Jones biography of Henson, I’m thinking that was probably the case. Oz never felt comfortable with the Muppet label and seems to tolerate this exercise so he can have a hit under his belt so he could start directing what he might have viewed as real movies. The Dark Crystal (1982) bombed somewhat scandalously two years earlier, and I even get the sense throughout the is film that Henson hoped Crystal’s failure wouldn’t mean he’d have to be attached at the hip with Kermit for the rest of his days.

*Even the Muppets characters themselves stop the movie cold to eye a Saturday Morning cartoon deal.

Labyrinth (1986)

Director: Jim Henson

Cast: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Toby Froud, Brian Henson

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, and I can’t 100% remember when it might have happened. I missed it in my youth entirely, and by the time I did catch it in my 20s, my brain wasn’t in a place to take in any level of magic like Henson had to offer at the height of his powers.

Did I Like It: And I still think I may have missed the moment where this film would have burrowed into my brain in the way for which it was designed. Every moment is visually interesting (even the stuff that doesn’t quite work, i.e. some rudimentary CGI in the film’s early moments). Henson never stopped innovating, even if this squarely falls in the category of films where Henson took himself too seriously. I wouldn’t insist he only make the goofiest of Muppet movies, but I certainly know where my preferences lie.

I don’t dislike Bowie, but he’s never been a big part of my life, so the film already runs at a disadvantage. I enjoy Connelly a great deal, but I’m mainly thinking of her work in The Rocketeer (1991).

Which brings me to the thing about the film I just can’t—regardless of my generally unwavering respect for Henson and his work—wrap my head around. No, it’s not that the film never feels like it is anything other than an `80s film. It’s far more unnerving than that, although that would normally be enough for me to look down on a film. I’m reasonably sure we’re supposed to be swept away by the imagination and fantasy of the proceedings, but are we not also supposed to be pointedly creeped out by Jareth (Bowie) spending most of the film’s runtime leering after a teenage girl (Connelly)? It’s difficult to try to view the idea of marriage between these two characters as anything other than prurient when the aggressor is one of the most sexual figures ever to rise to the height of pop cultural consciousness.

Yes, it is quite clear either the movie missed me at the time it might have hit me harder, or I may be missing the point of the film entirely now. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect. 

The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

Director: Jim Henson

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A VHS recording from a local UHF station in the `80s became a regular staple in my house growing up. As much as I had uncertainty that I actually had seen The Muppet Movie (1979) in the past, that doubt was completely absent here.

Did I Like It: I can feel the criticisms of this movie as I watch it. It’s too jokey. It’s too irreverent. It’s too—dare I say it—clever?

Those people are wrong. The entirety of Henson’s output has been a concerted fight between goofing off (anything with the proper Muppets) and more earnest whimsy (anything Disney decided wasn’t worth buying after Henson died). This is the peak of that former mold, and it is in every way authored by Henson. Whereas The Muppet Movie (1979) had to shoulder the not insignificant burden of proving that the Muppets could even conceivably work on the silver screen, everyone could relax here and dwell on the absurdity that are the confines of a movie. Preposterously bad casting of family members (a running gag has Fozzie (Oz) and Kermit (Henson) as twin brothers) , credits (“Nobody reads those names anyway, do they?” “Sure. They all have families.”) and the very notion of exposition (“It has to go somewhere.”). All of it is picked apart directly in the movie and singularly fuels the best parts of the Muppet’s sense of humor in movies to come.

But in that wry sense of the absurd, in that chasing of the laugh, the film doesn’t try to shed the things that made the Muppets beloved in the first place. The Happiness Hotel might very well be the nastiest hotel that the movies have ever brought us (I include The Overlook from The Shining (1980) in that calculus), but who wouldn’t want to stay there when Dr. Teeth (Henson) the Electric Mayhem (feat. Rowlf (also Henson*) are around? It’s not just that the Muppets are lovable, it’s impossible to not want to be around the characters whenever possible.

*My working theory after also spending some time watching The Muppet Show? Dr. Teeth is merely a vaguely humanesque suit that Rowlf wears for certain gigs

The Muppet Movie (1979)

Director: James Frawley

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt

Have I Seen it Before: You know… I can only say I’m kind of sure I have. Large portions call up a memory, but others are a complete blank. Ours may have been more of a The Great Muppet Caper (1981) house.

Did I Like It: Is it even possible to dislike the Muppets? Especially in that uniquely, brazenly period of cascading creativity when Jim Henson wielded these characters to their maximum potential?

No one would have been considered controversial if they spent the `70s convinced that Kermit (Henson) and company were a phenomenon that could not move beyond the scope of television shows like Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. They are funny, and they are cute. But can anything surpass the confines of television when, by their very nature have to be shot from the waist up?

That wasn’t enough for Henson*. He proceeded to make a movie that is just as funny and charming as his television work, but credibly lets the characters inhabit the big screen. Cameos abound, and any movie filled with that many famous people would be almost automatically considered a case of subtraction by addition. But here, it’s somehow both expected and adds to the material. Everyone fits into the movie like. puzzle piece, and it’s just an absolute head scratcher that Orson Welles didn’t end up guest starring on The Muppet Show, considering how fond he was of Henson’s work.

And what’s more, this is just the opening salvo in Henson’s brief quest to see just how far his deceptively simple puppets could go. One could only imagine how far he might have gone if he had lived just a bit longer.

* He didn’t direct the film or write it, but anyone who thinks he’s not the author of any Muppet production prior to his death is kidding themselves.

Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird (1985)

Director: Ken Kwapis

Cast: Carroll Spinney, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Thomas

Have I Seen It Before?: That poor VHS copy we had never stood a chance. Smash cut to the 2000s, I find a copy wallowing quite unfairly in the five dollar DVD trough at the local Wal Mart. Watching it again, I was likely emotionally compromised, whether from being at a sensitive age, or having a normal amount of some substance pushing me along in that direction*.

Did I like it?: There is a tendency in children’s entertainment—especially feature films geared towards children—to eschew any sense of an auteur. The puppets of Sesame Street may have originated with Jim Henson, they were further refined by puppeteers like Frank Oz, Carroll Spinney, and Kevin Clash, and the program may have been nurtured through its first several decades by producer Joan Ganz Cooney. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t watch this film now, notice that a number of characters including Big Bird (Spinney) and Miss Finch** (Sally Kellerman) staring at the camera and expressing their frustration and bemusement, and couldn’t help but notice that director Ken Kwapis was forming the skills he would bring to bear twenty years later in the US version of The Office.

That, however, is only what I noticed on this particular viewing of the film. I’m brought back to it because of its pointedly cinematically literate. The film should have made 100 million in the box office, based soley on the notion of everyone’s favorite eight-foot-tall bird in the place of Cary Grant in that most famous sequence from North by Northwest (1959). Alas, it bombed and put the Children’s Television Workshop’s financial life in some jeopardy for the next few years.

It is fast paced—naturally to keep pace with a child’s waning attention, even in the 1980s—but never deigns to skip over real peril or stakes for the characters. The wants and needs of Big Bird that send him through the story are real, and he comes through the process having changed, realizing all the family he really needs or wants are at Sesame Street. At the same time, Sesame Street’s selfless, almost unconscious, collective efforts to jump into action to find him are enough to send this reviewer to a point where faith in humanity may not be the craziest idea in the world.

With human society feeling like it might just possibly crumble or snap, I think we all may need to give this one a whirl in the DVD player again.

*Is this the first piece of writing about Sesame Street that alludes to the use of marijuana? Surely not…

**Every time I hear a mournful wail of that name, I am reminded that such calls became synonymous with “Oh no!” in my house for several years.