THERE is a story about Jim Henson and the early days of the Muppets that sounds so in keeping that it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true.
Despite one of his previous creations, Big Bird from Sesame Street, having been on the cover of Time magazine the year before, Henson was unable to get funding in the US for his new project, The Muppet Show. Eventually, having made several distress calls, he was finally offered a deal by Lew Grade at ATV, on the understanding that Henson came over and filmed The Muppet Show in the UK.
“It will give your people something to do, and keep my people busy,” Grade explained, in the midst of coping with a militant unionised workforce.
And so Henson and his colleagues packed their Muppets in a series of giant trunks, and left sunny California for rainy, recession-hit Britain. That much of the story is fact.
Where it crosses the border into righteous apocrypha, however, is on the night that they landed in the UK, when Henson’s people started unpacking the Muppets. As they celebrated their new project, and discussed ideas for the forthcoming shows, they are said to have carefully removed from the heads of their Muppets a generous supply of the best psychedelic drugs the West Coast had to offer. Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem were devoted to prime West Coast marijuana while Kermit, apparently, had the acid.
Even if this story isn’t actually true, it is at least figuratively true. In the mid-1970s, Jim Henson did smuggle a psychedelic experience into the UK in the heads of the Muppets. If British music went from black and white to colour in 1967 with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, then The Muppet Show in 1976 is when TV finally went Day-Glo. While British children’s TV had dabbled in lysergic imagery previously — Mr Benn (1971) and Bagpuss (1974) spring to mind — it was an oddly melancholy, suburban, nostalgic psychedelia, very “Sitting in an English garden/ Waiting for the sun”, and centred on shops, and terraces, and no adventure being so great that you couldn’t be home in time for tea. The Muppet Show, by contrast, had an unmistakably American take on psychedelia.
It centred on optimism, modernism — no passing fad, from roller-skating to Star Wars, was ever overlooked — and things such as Elton John singing Crocodile Rock surrounded by crocodiles, rockin’. The Muppets would take off into space, sail the theatre out to sea as a pirate ship, turn into Hell’s Angels, or all get murdered; albeit in an amusing way, and by Liza Minnelli. Furthermore, the show, in an excess of energy, would often deconstruct itself as it went along, whether it was Sam the American Eagle’s neocon analysis of the acts (“This is degenerate”) to Statler and Waldorf’s sour running commentary (“Just when you think this show is terrible, something wonderful happens — it ends!”).
Given the show’s genuine air of hippy joy, anarchy and inventiveness, it’s hard to work out which is the bigger surprise: that the 120 episodes of the The Muppet Show eventually ended up with a devoted, worldwide, weekly audience of 235 million people — or that it wasn’t even bigger. It was, certainly, seminal television. Even today, 14 years after it ended, most people can do an impression of Fozzie Bear, sing Manamana (“Do do do doodoo”), tenderise a steak in the style of the Swedish Chef, or karate-chop a social irritant with the unmistakable porcine cry of “Hi-YAH!”
Taking all this into consideration, it’s easy to see why last week’s announcement by Disney — that, having purchased the copyright on the Muppets last year for $30 million (£16 million), it planned a worldwide Muppet relaunch to include ringtones, a film, The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz starring Quentin Tarantino and the R&B star Ashanti, and a TV series with guests Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Gervais — was greeted with mixed, but passionate, reactions. Since The Muppet Show fell into abeyance in 1981, the Muppets have been semi-retired, save for the occasional outing of a Muppet movie. Yet 235 million people — and now, thanks to the box-set of The Muppet Show, their children — have been very keen to see the Muppets return.
The problem is, do they want the Muppets back so badly that they’re willing for Disney to be in charge of them? Let’s face it — on most analyses of the company’s business practices or its artistic oeuvre, modern Disney sucks. And while there are many things that it sucks at — theme parks, fending off hostile takeover bids from Comcast, keeping any parent in its children’s films alive past the first reel — what it surely sucks at the most is being funny. The entire Disney corporation couldn’t tell a joke if Mickey Mouse’s life depended on it. Or, rather, it could — but it would first have to pass it through three focus groups, all its senior management, Disney’s representatives in China, the National Rifle Association, the League of Decency and, probably, Condoleezza Rice, just to check that it wouldn’t offend anyone, and subsequently lose the company a single $5 ticket at the box office.
That’s the thing with conservative, global monoliths — they’re not very good at quick, off-the-cuff one-liners. They can’t do irreverent because, when you’re as big as Disney, who are you going to be irreverent about? Yourself?
Having seen every Disney film ever produced — and all, indeed, a great many times — I can tell you that the funniest line Disney ever came up with is in the 1973 animation of Robin Hood. In the chase-sequence towards the end, Prince John shouts “Seize the fat one!!!” while pointing at a big hen in a bonnet. It’s a bit of a “you had to be there” moment.
Typically, Disney humour — such as it is — is a blend of cutesy visual gags that will play well in Albania (a bird lands on Beast’s nose; the Prince in Sleeping Beauty accidentally kisses his horse) and that cheapest of modern humours: wisecracking.
