The Muppets

Well, it's Muppets. A once popular variety troupe of puppets have waned in stardom, and gone their separate ways, and it's up to a guy who's a super fan of theirs (because he too is bizarrely made of felt despite the rest of his family not being so, like it's a recessive gene or something) to remind them of what the Muppets meant to us, and get the show back together to save the theatre from an evil oil tycoon developer.

So, fine, it's a wafer thin plot which I'm pretty much sure they used in an earlier Muppet Movie, but if not, well, it's The Blues Brothers and Mel Brooks' Silent Movie. They're getting the band back together. Other than that, it's Muppets as you remember the Muppets being.

In a way, that's kind of my problem with it. I wasn't even that keen on the Muppets as a kid. It always used to be on, and I used to kind of sit through it dutifully on a Saturday; in retrospect, I doubt it'd have been on the TV at all if my parents realised how little of a fuck I gave about it. And what I think was my problem with it as a child is still the problem now. In all children's TV there's like a little slider which runs from Wholesome Caring Fluffiness at one end to Outright Physical Violence at the other. Or the Disney-Warner continuum, as I like to think of it. As a kid, I had no truck with the Disney end of things, with everybody being so fucking friendly all the time. When I was a kid, it wasn't a proper cartoon unless someone got an anvil dropped on them. Or fed dynamite. Or fell off a cliff a ridiculous distance, hitting the ground with an exquisitely timed cloud of dust. The Muppets, however, didn't really respect this, in that they spent most of their time being all kind and fluffy and sharing, with just isolated moments of bonecrushing smashes and psychos with dynamite. So I used to basically glaze over through the dumb little songs, I had no time whatsoever for Kermit, or Fozzy, and would wake up momentarily when it seemed like Gonzo was going to hurt himself. For the most part, I loved Statler and Waldorf most of all, because they echoed my own thoughts. Why am I stuck watching this crap every week?

So, here we have a film in which people who loved the Muppets *way* more than I did attempt to resurrect the phenomenon, trying to be true to it, while making it the best that it's ever been. And I think they do succeed at that, but at the same time, I don't think it's made me like it any better. So those isolated bits of nonsense I used to like are still there, and there were plenty of bits that made me giggle. Like the fact Fozzy Bear is now performing in a low-rent Muppet tribute act called The Moopets, and the Moopets version of Animal is played by Dave Grohl. But while there are quite a number of inspired bits of nonsense, in between them there's a very saccarine Disneyesque message which makes my eyes roll.

Anyway, I think this is probably a marvellous film if you weren't born cynical. But I was. Pity me.