wild speculation about the muppets

ANYWAYS. the muppets show guest starring Sabrina Carpenter aired the other night. YES it was fucking peak. but there is one tiny detail that only nerds will care about.

i don't think many longtime muppet fans would disagree that disney never quite got the muppets. both in their style of humor, and how to handle them being a small piece of a much bigger company. at least until very recently.

unlike....i think every other muppet thing since the hensons sold the franchise, this one is very specifically not marketed as DISNEY'S muppets.

Jim Henson was trying to sell his company to disney before he passed away but "disney handles everything involved with being a corporation while the main team of writers, producers, and performers keep their current positions" is a very different structure than "disney buys the copyrights to a set of movies and tv shows and sees the characters as a set of costumes," which is the deal that ended up happening in 2004.

if the acquisition had gone through as Jim intended it, he probably would have had the power to keep doing more adult oriented muppet stuff. but when disney finally did get around to buying the ip 14 years later (specifically as an ip, not as a production team), in their mind they acquired a new set of mascots.

the parks (an extremely important and profitable division) had already embraced them as disney characters , and they didn't have a set of writers and producers within the company to tell them "yeah, the muppets would say 'screw disney' and kermit knows what the word sexy means."

but Frank Oz (Jim Henson's right hand man, guy who was with the muppets from the very beginning and only quit once disney bought them) gave this interview in 2021 . he, of course, talks about the muppets.

"there’s a woman there called Leigh Slaughter who really loves the Muppets and is trying to change things. Prior to that, Disney didn’t have a clue. They didn’t understand the purity that was needed, the affection between the puppeteers that was needed. They felt they bought the puppets. And they didn’t understand it really wasn’t the puppets. It was really the people who do them, who worked together for 20 to 30 years.

It’s odd that I was never asked to help as part of it at all. And I think it is there’s some hubris there, but you have a vast company like that, and Muppets is only a tiny drop in the bucket for Disney. They’re thinking, “If we need help from other people, why did we buy it? We have people who can do that. It’s just puppets.” I compare it to a fan of Formula One racing who jumps in the car, and he thinks he can do it himself. He doesn’t really get it. And that’s kind of what happened with Disney. Again, that was before, and I’m not angry at them. I just feel sad that they that they felt that they couldn’t ask for help from the performers who did it for 30 to 40 years. But now I feel the intent has changed tremendously. Leigh is really doing her best. I know the intent is completely different, which is really nice."

essentially, the entire muppets franchise is managed by an internal holding company within disney's parks division called The Muppets Studio. Leigh Slaughter (the article itself misspells her name as lee) is the president, she's credited as executive producer on every muppet thing from this decade, and she's apparently been working overtime to change the way disney views the characters.

now FINALLY, all these years later when we finally have a new muppet show, produced by people who apparently truly understand what makes them work, they didn't release it under the disney label. they put it under the 20th television label. the label that, by nature of being the family guy label, is very much not afraid of adult humor.

it's entirely possible that i'm barking up the wrong tree and the 20th television thing is just a technicality because abc played a role in the production, but the fact they didn't market this as DISNEY'S muppet show feels like a sign that they finally understand the muppets are closer in spirit to late night tv stars than they are to mickey mouse.

...

and by the way, Matt Vogel does a better Kermit than Steve.