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Without Kermit, they don’t work.
To Jim, The Muppet Show would always be his version of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, with the mostly patient Kermit anchoring an eclectic cast of misfits.
“I was working as Miss Piggy with Jim, who was doing Kermit, and the script called for her to slap him,” said Oz. “Instead of a slap, I gave him a funny karate hit. Somehow, that hit crystallized her character for me—the coyness hiding the aggression.”
“The
place fell apart. It was like just instantly you knew that you go...
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“Miss Piggy was to have been a minor character,” noted Jim, “but Frank Oz gave her such a strong personality that she immediately became one of the principals.”
“She loves the frog—my God how she covets that little green body!—but the frog doesn’t love her.”
“I had no training of any kind, except two little sessions with Jim and Frank, so I felt very unqualified.” But as Jim seemed to inherently understand—even if Goelz didn’t—that was just the sort of perspective necessary to create the character. “Gonzo believes he is a worthless creature,” said Goelz. “He knows and believes it, but he wants to prove he has worth.”
With a new enthusiasm, Goelz rebuilt Gonzo to remove his permanently sad eyes and replaced them with an eye mechanism that allowed the character to open his eyes for a wider range of emotion.
“Gonzo can still get very, very depressed, but he has moments of high, intense excitement.” Jim’s faith in Goelz, and Gonzo, had paid off. “As I got confidence, he got confidence,” said Goelz of Gonzo. And both would regularly get laughs from the Elstree crew.
“The atmosphere and excitement during the making of these shows was electric, and in a
very short while we had international celebrities clamoring to do the guest spot,” recalled Grade. Grade even loved dropping by the set every once in a while to watch the Muppet team at work, strolling the studio and casually asking, “Everything all right, boys?”
The Muppet Show had picked up stations at an almost exponential rate, growing quickly from the initial five CBS O&Os in late 1975, to 112 stations by May 1976, including 87 of the top 100 markets in the United States. By the beginning of the 1976 television season in September, The Muppet Show had been picked up by a record 162 U.S. television stations—making it available for viewing in a staggering 94.6 percent of American households—as well as in a wide number of international markets, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan.
As a result, when Jim arrived back in London that May, The Muppet Show was already being watched weekly by 15 million faithful Britons. Fan mail poured into the Muppet Suite at Elstree, burying Jim’s desk until his return. The Muppet Show Album, scarcely a month old, was speeding up British music charts, and would knock The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl from the number one spot by summer (meanwhile, back in the United States, the album would never even crack the Top 100, reaching only 153). And like the Beatles whom he had displaced on the music charts, Jim suddenly found himself—and the
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Critics] didn’t feel this show could bridge the gap between kids and adults. But we knew it could. We knew it.”
He was always pushing the limits.”
move on to another phase.… That’s what kept him doing this.… If he didn’t have that other thing, he would be bored. But he never stopped thinking or going beyond.”
now he was going to make a movie.
Grade, said Bernie Brillstein, “was the only one who understood” Jim’s conviction that the Muppets could work on the big screen, and listened and nodded enthusiastically as Jim made his pitch. It wasn’t until Jim mentioned the budget he had in mind that Grade finally arched an eyebrow. At a time when most Disney movies were budgeted at just over a million dollars, Jim was asking for $8 million for his film. As always, Jim’s “whim of steel” was tough to resist. “Lew Grade, being a true gentleman, went ahead with it,” said Brillstein admiringly.
The success of The Muppet Show had meant more than just fame or high ratings; it also meant the workshop at Elstree was becoming a destination, almost a kind of Mecca, for Muppet fans. “Unlike other TV studios, [ATV is] all quite open,” said Muppet Show director Peter Harris, “and we’ve had parents bringing their kids in to watch it all happening.”
they were simply tools of their craft. “I’m not
sentimental about them,” he told Spinney.
“Jim said, ‘It’s okay, we’ll see Don again,’ ” said Oz, “and he really believed it.” It
There’s always a little hell going on, because everyone’s vying for Jim’s attention. But somehow, when he pulled it together, we’d support one another and we’d go on.”
Muppet Show had now been sold in 106 countries, with a total audience of 235 million (a number Henson Associates willingly circulated, even as some privately joked that Mandell would soon be claiming a viewership larger than the world’s population).
Disney had conquered film, then moved into television. Jim had conquered TV, but had yet to make the leap onto the big screen.
Jim had wanted to direct The Muppet Movie himself, but had been grudgingly persuaded by the argument that it was better to have an experienced director at the helm of the Muppets’ first foray into film.
“So [Jim] knew that he needed somebody who was a filmmaker and knew what to do with the camera.” Juhl—who had swallowed his own pride
“[It] was actually a very frustrating experience for him in that he wanted to direct,” said Juhl. “So much. It drove him crazy.”
“He felt pretty good about my sense of humor,” remembered Frawley. “It seemed like a good combination of talents for his Muppets. I had a very childlike approach to my work, and the Muppets fit in well with that.”
“[He] would never ask us to do anything that he hadn’t done himself or wasn’t willing to do himself.”
response. “Bullshit,” he said. Hopper would remain unredeemed.
“If The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98.”
Lord Grade was marketing the film aggressively, pumping $6 million into publicity—if the film bombed, joked Jim, “we’ll all lose our shirts”—and Jim and Oz were ferried from one interview to another with Kermit and Miss Piggy on their arms, gamely bantering with reporters.
the film had both heart and brains—and like The Muppet Show, its appeal cut across age groups. The Muppet Movie was an affectionate nod to old Hollywood, with running gags and barroom brawls, dance numbers and slow-motion romantic montages, as well as mad scientists, thrown pies, and characters who winked knowingly at the camera.
“It’s discouraging to see the Muppets succumb with increasing frequency to sentimental impulses overly exercised in The Muppet Movie,” wrote Tom Shales in The Washington Post, lamenting that the Muppets had gone for “sanctimoniousness, rather than their playful anarchic streak.”
“Back in the sixties—when I was working on movies like Time Piece—I thought of myself as an experimental filmmaker,” Jim said—and to some extent, that was still true. While the Muppets were certainly the most well known, and most profitable, of Jim’s projects, Jim never had, and never would, consider himself to be solely about the Muppets.
part of my creative mind is already somewhere else, doing something quite different. I think that’s the normal pattern. By the time I’m actually producing something, part of me is wanting to do something else.
“I felt that if we gave too much time in between Muppet movies, we couldn’t keep that audience,” said Lazer, “and I knew Lew [Grade] was ready … to go for that second Muppet movie immediately.”
“Jim wanted to do The Crystal,” said Lazer. “His mind was off Muppets. He wanted to get The Crystal done.” And Lazer, who understood perhaps better than anyone just how important The Crystal was to Jim, instead “gave him every reason we should do another Muppet movie.”
“After five seasons, we’re doing other projects,”
From the beginning, Jim knew he wanted his film to be a homage to early movie musicals, “because I so enjoy those movies. I intended [the second Muppet movie] to have the fun and joy of those earlier films.” He also knew he wanted Kermit to be a reporter-turned-detective who would have to compete with a rival for Miss Piggy’s affections—but typically, he was having a difficult time articulating the rest of his story, only vaguely directing that it be “joyful” with a “positive attitude toward life,” and that it contain “several hilarious sequences [with] big laughs” as well as “some real
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the words around in her mouth, she had scrawled “escapade? escpigaide? caper?” and then scratched all three alternatives out. Jim circled The Great Muppetcapade and the crossed-out word Caper. Problem solved. The Great Muppet Caper it would be.
Orton cryptically. Stevenson obliged, and
As far as Jim was concerned, the world wasn’t ending; he had other projects to attend to, and The Muppet Show would live on in reruns.
“It has taken me twenty years to get [here],” Jim noted, “and I’m delighted to have made it.” In a way, Jim had already been directing for years, watching the television monitor as he performed his characters and adjusting on camera as needed.
From the very beginning, Jim knew he wanted Caper to have “something new—something to talk about.” As he filled several pages of a notebook with possible ideas, he scrawled out “Kermit swimming,” and
then, below it, “Piggy/Ester [sic] Williams.” That would be it—an elaborate homage to the swimming, diving, and underwater ballet numbers made famous by Esther Williams in the 1940s and 1950s. “If I had to search out any guilty pleasures,” Jim said later, “it is that I probably indulged myself in Caper in the underwater sequence with Miss Piggy.”
Not only would the puppet’s foam head soak up the water like a sponge, but the water eventually would wash away the flocking sprayed on the character, discoloring the puppet and leaving a scrim of flock shavings floating on the surface. Before a single frame of film could be shot, then, the Muppet builders had to figure out a way to design a waterproof, colorfast, flexible puppet for Oz to work with.
spending a week shooting a water ballet sequence that would last only a little over three minutes in the completed film.
