Thirty years ago the Muppets made their first feature movie. In the years to follow they would make others—good ones, too (and some, a little later, not so good)—but that first one, the one titled, simply, The Muppet Movie, is surely their greatest. It is, for that matter, one of the greatest-ever movies period, Muppet or otherwise.
Midway through the film, Kermit the Frog hands a copy of The Muppet Movie screenplay to Dr. Teeth, organist and frontman for the great psychedelic Muppet rock-band, the Electric Mayhem. After reading to himself a few of the scenes we have just watched, Dr. Teeth shakes his head: “This,” he announces, “is a narrative of very heavy-duty proportions.” And it is.
The Muppets already had a successful TV show in 1979 (titled simply, of course, The Muppet Show), and before that creator Jim Henson had made Kermit and company familiar to audiences of Ed Sullivan and The Tonight Show; the Movie presents itself as the pre-history of the group, as “how the Muppets really got started”—or, as Kermit concedes before the movie-proper begins, “sort of approximately how it happened.” The movie introduces us, one by one, to each Muppet—and each Muppet is introduced to the other—as the cast sets out from various starting points toward a common destination: Hollywood.
The Dream Factory; the Magic Store.
I was hardly born when this movie hit theaters; consequently, although I can’t pinpoint the moment that I first saw it (as I can with The Muppets Take Manhattan, and, much later, The Muppet’s Christmas Carol), I have the good fortune of being able to remember this movie as far back, more or less, as I can remember anything—and I have the kind of privilege of sharing (more or less) my own milestones with it.
At the time of this writing, I am myself thirty. This seems to me a significant milestone for us both.
Thirty years ago, The Muppet Movie did things that, then new, are now commonplace. Before this film, parents were not expected to especially enjoy the children’s movies to which they dutifully took their kids; but here was a kids’ movie designed specifically for adults to also enjoy, with jokes and pop-culture references only the adults would “get”: the running gag about Hare Krishna, for example, or Mel Brooks’ ex-Nazi mad-scientist. The same formula had already proven successful for audiences of The Muppet Show. Besides that show’s sophisticated humor, it could also keep parents’ attention with its weekly guest stars; the movie built on this tradition, too, by incorporating as cameos a parade of 70s celebrities—Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Elliott Gould, Telly Savales, Carol Kane, Madeline Kahn—as well as older luminaries, like Bob Hope and, in a crucial scene, a larger-than-life Orson Welles as fictional movie producer Lew Lord. The then-ancient Edgar Bergen appears with his dummy Charlie McCarthy; Bergen died before the movie was completed, and, in a moving tribute to a man in many ways the ancestor of the Muppets, the film is dedicated to him.
In the three decades since this movie arrived, it has become an expectation that each new kid-film attract parents as well, with adult jokes and celebrity voices or cameos; it is worth remembering how new all this still was in 1979.
Jim Henson—a saint, I increasingly believe, among men—was very careful not only to include adults in his vision of an audience, but also to honor the potential and the creativity of his kid-audience. Paul Williams, longtime Muppet collaborator and songwriter for the Movie, has remarked that the key to Henson’s gift was in the way he approached his viewers. “To me, it’s not a children’s movie,” Williams told an Austin, Texas, audience in 2006 (a video excerpt of that talk is on youtube). “The big thing about working with Jim was, he said: ‘respect your audience and never, never … write down to them.’” Few children’s entertainers were then or are now so respectful of their audience. Kids are not only entertained by The Muppet Show and Movie; they are also empowered. All of this thanks, of course, not to Henson alone but to an impressive behind-the-scenes crew, including Williams and Kenny Ascher on music, director James Frawley, writers Jack Burns and Jerry Juhl, and, providing the voices, the Muppet Performers.
Henson and his collaborators made a trilogy of Muppet movies, following up the original with 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper and 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Other Muppet movies followed Henson’s death, but the essential gift of the creator somehow did not make the transition completely intact. None of the later films stand alongside the three classics; even if they have their moments, they seem to miss Henson’s mark, often resulting in disappointing or even embarrassing shadows of the originals. One gimmick has been to cast the Muppets in revisions of classic stories—1996’s Muppet Treasure Island or 2004’s made-for-TV Muppets’ Wizard of Oz, the latter featuring Ashanti as Dorothy and the Muppets themselves in the supporting roles. (This kind of lopsidedly-cast classic adaptation began with 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol, the first Muppet movie made after Henson’s death, and the first to replace Kermit-as-protagonist with a human actor—Michael Caine, as Scrooge; Kermit was relegated to a supporting Bob Cratchet.) There are other problems with the later Muppet movies. Why, for example, remake of all things The Wizard of Oz with Muppets, when it has already been done, subtly and more skillfully? The Muppet Movie itself was already a Muppets’ Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy refigured as Kermit, Oz as Hollywood, and the man behind the curtain as Welles’ Lew Lord; even “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was remade to become “The Rainbow Connection,” a song about rainbows and about songs about rainbows. It was a smart, effective retelling. But the new Muppets do not allow for such subtlety; it is easier to write down to kids.
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One of my college professors once off-handedly remarked that The Muppet Movie is the most quintessentially American of all American movies; and it is. Certainly it participates actively in the tradition of the American road movie, evoking the broader-still tradition of Whitman and Kerouac, Huck Finn and the Joads. It is, in part, a Western, complete with a High Noon stand-off near the end. Consider also The Muppet Movie’s Kermit alongside R.W.B. Lewis’s description of “the American Adam,” our national-heroic archetype: he is “an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources…. His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent. The world and history lay all before him.” Kermit the Frog, inventing himself and his destiny in the symbolically charged landscapes of the American highway and, finally, the West, bridges the theme of self-reliant individualism with its flipside American impulse of community, building about him a family of like-minded and wide-eyed-innocent American dreamers. And, like any truly great road-story or Adam-story, this one transcends the national myth to evoke broader and timeless mythic archetypes.
A brief recap here of the plot: the very beginning of the movie features the Muppets arriving at the premiere of their movie, settling into their seats, and finally quieting down as the lights are lowered and the film itself—the one we, too, have come to see—begins. Music swells; credits roll. The camera begins in the sky, among the clouds, and follows a rainbow to the earth and into a swamp, finally closing in on a frog on a log (Kermit), strumming his banjo and singing “The Rainbow Connection” (the movie’s best-known song, which would become a hit—Oscar-nominated and often covered: by the Carpenters, Willie Nelson, Sarah McLachlan, and others). (I have always believed, incidentally, that the model for Kermit was Pete Seeger : the lilt of his voice, that lankiness, the unending optimism, and, above all, the long-necked banjo.) A Hollywood talent scout played by Dom DeLuise paddles by in a canoe, lost, and suggests to Kermit that he is just the thing Hollywood is looking for. With some reluctance, Kermit leaves his home for the promise of “making millions of people happy”; along the way he is joined by Fozzie Bear, Rolf the Dog, the Great Gonzo, Miss Piggy and others, each in search of his or her own dream. Kermit and Piggy fall for each other, which complicates things. Early on, Kermit is spotted by the Colonel-Sandersesque fast-food entrepreneur Doc Hopper (played by Charles Durning), who wants to use Kermit as a mascot for his franchise of frog-leg restaurants. When Kermit refuses (he imagines “thousands of frogs on tiny crutches”), Hopper pursues him and his gang across the country, bent on gaining Kermit’s cooperation, dead or alive.
I am a high school English teacher outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and my seniors begin their year by looking at The Muppet Movie. We watch it in conjunction with our summer reading book, Paulo Coelho’s big-best-selling The Alchemist, in which a boy crosses the desert in search of his “Personal Legend,” that dream that he was put on the planet to realize. We talk about Joseph Campbell’s heroic-journey archetype and apply the stages of that model to both Kermit’s story and The Alchemist—the hero is born both ordinary and exceptional; receives the call to journey; at first resists but finally follows the call; crosses a symbolic threshold into the realm of adventure; receives both supernatural help and the help of fellow travelers; enters and returns from the “belly of the whale,” a realm which others are barred from entering and from which our hero returns with a charm or new wisdom; slays the (literal or metaphorical) dragon; confronts and emerges from death, undergoing an actual or symbolic death and resurrection; and—in the end, coming full circle—returns home.
The Muppet Movie very nicely illustrates the phases of that universal journey. There’s the early scene, for example, in which Kermit crosses the archetypal threshold into his adventure-realm, the crossing enacted symbolically as he pushes through the colorful beads hanging at the entrance of the El Sleezo Café, a seedy bar populated by a bizarre assortment of characters (think of the intergalactic bar that marks the beginning of Luke Skywalker’s travels in Star Wars). This is the borderland between Kermit’s old world and the world of his quest: it is here that the innocent Kermit first witnesses all kinds of depravity; it is here that he meets his sidekick, Fozzie; and it is immediately upon exiting the bar that he is first propositioned by the evil Doc Hopper. The quest and its principle conflict are fully established, the point of turning-back passed. Other scenes plug equally easily into the subsequent stages of the heroic journey.
Coelho’s The Alchemist fits just as neatly into the Campbell model and, besides that, engages directly with themes, such as following one’s dreams, that are at the heart of The Muppet Movie. Teenagers, and a lot of other readers, tend to love The Alchemist, with its themes of self-empowerment and dream-seeking, and its easy, aphoristic quotability. Although I admire the message and style of that book, and teach it and the Muppets together for their similarities in theme and structure, I have to admit that I find Kermit to be by far the superior hero to The Alchemist’s likeable-enough boy Santiago. The Alchemist teaches us that we all have a “personal legend,” that thing which, if we listen to and understand our calling, it is our destiny to do and be, and which is achievable so long as we believe in it and resist the superficial distractions along our journeys. Santiago’s personal legend is to find treasure (figurative, of course, but literal, too: he dreams about gold, and eventually finds it); later his marriage to a girl from the desert is also incorporated into his personal legend. Naturally, along the way he discovers a great deal about the universe and about himself, understandings which are more significant than the treasure or even the girl; but still, Santiago’s concept of the personal legend always strikes me as self-centered, essentially selfish, and this troubles me. You might at least expect him in the end to discover that his treasure is purely internal and to be happy with that—because certainly this is one of the book’s obvious messages—but, no, he does in fact find treasure treasure too and the book concludes with Santiago, conveniently, both wise and rich.
Not Kermit. It is, after all, not Hollywood’s promise of becoming “rich and famous” that appeals to him (the cash proves alluring to all the other characters, but not to the frog); it is instead the possibility of “making millions of people happy” that pushes Kermit to leave his swamp. Part of what makes The Muppet Movie such a profound and lasting story, besides making Kermit for my money a more noble hero than Santiago, is this: that his personal legend is to help others achieve their own personal legends. This, that is to say, is Kermit’s dream: to help us achieve our dreams. Such a quest—such a brand of heroism—is somehow almost unheard of in literature and film.
So he begins with the other Muppets, gathering around him a bear and a dog and Lady Pig and a thing (whatever Gonzo is) and a psychedelic rock band, all of whom have their own dreams of hitting the big time—and with Kermit’s help, those dreams (and thus his own) become realized. But the clincher only comes in the final scene, when the narrative blows wide open and turns almost desperately to us, the audience—we, too, are characters in this thing—and our dreams.
In this final scene, the Muppets have finally made it. They have just started filming the movie of their journey across the country to Hollywood (the very movie, in other words, that we have been watching all along), when Gonzo, recreating an earlier scene from the film, is carried away by a bunch of runaway balloons and in the process destroys the set; Crazy Harry plays with electricity; sparks fly; a light explodes; the set collapses; a hole is blown through the roof; and the Muppets’ shot at greatness seems as if it may be over before it began. You want to cry. Kermit wants to cry. The other Muppets gather around him to see if he’s ok. And then, before anyone can speak, a rainbow shines through the hole in the roof. Kermit starts to sing, slowly, and the others join in, picking up the tempo—
Life’s like a movie
Write your own ending
Keep believing
Keep pretending
We’ve done just what we’ve set out to do
Thanks to the lovers
The dreamers
and you.
—and trusting the fate of his Muppets to the hands of small children, Jim Henson has bestowed on his young audience the power to determine not only the outcome of the movie and of the Muppets but to determine also the course of their own lives. Sometimes I really do watch this final scene and believe that the disaster is so great that the Muppets’ big break has been damaged irrevocably, that it is all over for them (even if the very existence of The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie indicate that this is not the case, the set-disaster sometimes seems so final); and Henson allows me—recklessly, he allows even a child—to come to this conclusion. That after all of this, the Muppets fail.
And he allows me also, instead, despite everything, to continue believing the dream.
Usually this is the ending I choose.
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Some final thoughts, here, about that rainbow.
There are rainbows all over this film, and somehow they become tied up early on with the notion and language of dreaming. (”Someday we’ll find it,” Kermit sings famously at the beginning of the movie, “the Rainbow Connection: the lovers, the dreamers, and me.”) The movie begins and ends with images of a rainbow, and throughout the story, rainbows underscore the running dream-motif. While Kermit and Fozzie sleep, the Electric Mayhem, armed with buckets of paint and psychedelic vision, disguise their car as a rainbow, so that for a period of the movie the rainbow becomes their very mode of transportation. (Doc Hopper, to his assistant Max: “Max, find me a bear and a frog in a tan-colored Studebaker.” Max: “Gee, Doc, all I can see is a bear and a frog in a rainbow-colored Studebaker!”). Miss Piggy’s suitcase is stamped with a rainbow sticker. Twice in the movie, Gonzo flies recklessly and joyously through the sky holding onto a bunch of multi-colored balloons, themselves reflecting the rainbow image. As students of mine have pointed out, the Muppets themselves are still another kind of rainbow, representing a wild array of color but held together by a common goal or bond. In the final scene of the film, as the rainbow shines through that hole in the roof, the camera pulls back to reveal a huge cast of Muppets. They have multiplied exponentially from the small group we have been watching all along; gathered together into a crowded, colorful circle at a very literal end-of-the-rainbow, they resemble the famous pot of gold—they themselves are the treasure; transformed, they are “what’s on the other side”: the Rainbow Connection.
In the hands of another storyteller, this all might come off as hokey or hackneyed. But there is a depth and sophistication here that transforms what might be easy and obvious symbolism. The movie is very adult in its acknowledgment that rainbows are believed by most of the world to be “visions, but only illusions“; our dreams, too, might be nothing more than that. The movie even admits that most-of-the-world may be right and the visions/rainbows/magic/dreams unreal, ephemeral only and unobtainable. Kermit is convinced otherwise, that there is a very real “other side” where dreams come true, but there is always in this movie a tension between the real-world and the dream-world, a tension which at times seems irreconcilable. It is the lovers and dreamers alone who can one day reconcile these worlds, and we are invited to join that group. Ending in Hollywood but stopping short of a Hollywood ending, The Muppet Movie lets us decide for ourselves where we stand.
As in any heroic journey, we come full-circle, back to where we started. Kermit, of course, does not literally return to the swamp but instead re-creates it, with his new family and in his new home, on a Hollywood sound-stage. “The Rainbow Connection,” the song that began our journey, also ends it, with one significant difference. The refrain, “The lovers, the dreamers, and me [that is: Kermit],” is now, in the final line of the movie, “The lovers, the dreamers, and you [that is: me, i.e., you; that is, the audience].” This thing, then, has been about us all along.
This is a narrative of very heavy-duty proportions.
According to Joseph Campbell’s heroic cycle, the hero at some point in the journey receives guidance, advice, perhaps some kind of talisman, from a wise helper: often an elder, often supernatural. In Lord of the Rings, this would be Gandalf; in Harry Potter, Dumbledore. In Star Wars, both Obi-Wan and Yoda fill this role.
In the last scene and final sung verses of The Muppet Movie, the design of that story becomes clear: Kermit the Frog is not this movie’s hero. I—both as viewer and as a character, acknowledged throughout in occasional asides and directly incorporated into the closing song—I am the hero of The Muppet Movie. Kermit is the helper, his purpose to assist me in achieving my dream, to fulfill my personal legend and quest.
Like this movie, I recently reached thirty. I still watch The Muppet Movie, and it still reminds me—every time, kid or not—to keep going.
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Notes: The quote from R.W.B. Lewis is from The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, page 5. The Paul Williams talk, as noted, can be caught—incompletely and fuzzily, but thankfully—on youtube, here. My thinking about this movie has been shaped in part by wonderful conversations with my students and my teaching colleagues, for whom I am always grateful. A few final thoughts on The Muppet Movie, left out of the essay, will be available soon, below.