The Hip Pocket #27: THE MUPPET MOVIE

Because Muppet People are the best people

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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The Muppet Movie
Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Charles Durning, Austin Pendleton, Edgar Bergen, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, James Coburn, Dom DeLuise, Elliott Gould, Bob Hope, Madeline Kahn, Carol Kane, Cloris Leachman, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Telly Savalas, Orson Welles, Paul Williams, Scott Walker, Lawrence Gabriel Jr., Ira F. Grubman, H.B. Haggerty, Bruce Kirby, Tommy Madden, James Frawley, Arnold Roberts, Steve Whitmire, Kathryn Mullen, Bob Payne, Eren Ozker, Caroly Wilcox, Olga Felgemacher, Bruce Schwartz, Michael Earl, Buz Suraci, Tony Basilicato, Adam Hunt, Caroll Spinney
cinematography by Isidore Mankofsky
music by Kenny Ascher and Paul Williams
screenplay by Jerry Juhl & Jack Burns
produced by Jim Henson
directed by James Frawley
Rated G
1 hr 35 mins

A frog, a bear, and a pig seek fame in Hollywood and make a variety of friends along the way.

Jim Henson was a genius.

Seems like a non-controversial statement, but then again I just learned this year that there are people who think Mr. Rogers damaged a generation of children, so I’m surprised at just how wrong human beings can be.

I was introduced to the Muppets via Sesame Street, and even though that show was educational and enormously effective at it, there was also a pretty basic joy that was communicated through the humor of the show. Jim Henson and the other Muppet performers were amazing at communicating personality and behavior through their hands and mere felt. I still, to this day, don’t quite understand how much range of emotion they were able to evoke through the faces of their characters.

When The Muppet Show premiered, it was an immediate mainstay in my home, and it was clear that my parents loved The Muppets in a very different way than I did. In the early days of VHS, one of the first tapes my parents ever owned was a compilation that had been put together by someone, many of the best sketches from Sesame Street and other sources collected in one place. That tape went everywhere, to parties and on vacation and to church camp, and everywhere we took the tape, the tape was a huge hit, and with every age group. The Muppets were as close to universally loved as any entertainers of my childhood, which is certainly an accomplishment, but which doesn’t really qualify Jim Henson as a genius.

And, yes, I know James Frawley is the director of The Muppet Movie, and he certainly deserves credit for his part in the film. Frawley is as old-school as old-school gets, and his attachment as the director is part of what helped convince the financiers that they could indeed make a Muppet movie. You’ll notice that they never asked an outside filmmaker to direct the Muppets again, though, and that’s because the Muppet performers were already more than equipped to do it all by themselves, even if no one else had that initial faith in them.

Jim Henson knew what he was doing from the very start. He was working with puppets when he was still in high school, and Sam and Friends, his first puppet comedy, was on the air while he was in college. Sure, it was the early days of television and pretty much all you needed to get on the air somewhere was a desire, but to have had that kind of clarity of artistic vision is pretty amazing because it’s not like he had the Muppets to look up to. I get why there are puppeteers today. I understand how someone could spend their whole lives amazed by the work these performers do and end up compelled to do it themselves. That’s me with filmmaking, so of course, I understand the urge. But to be there first, to be the one who comes up with an entire way of approaching comedy, that’s vision. And to see that it could be something more than that? Well… that’s genius.