Perhaps there’s a bedrock upon which to build a healthy appreciation for vaudeville shtick, the value of impractical persistence, adaptive imagination, finding your friends and family in unexpected places, valuing your image and IP, and never letting the opportunity for a quality pun slip by that is more endearing and enduring than 1979’s The Muppet Movie. But if so, I’ve yet to encounter it, and that is the specific blend of elements you’ll spend your whole life looking for.
The Muppet Movie is back in Regal and AMC theaters via Fathom Events on June 2 and 3. At its simplest, this is a film about the origins of an artistic collective. About finding a similarly inclined bunch of weirdos and workers with a common goal and figuring out how best to use everyone’s strengths without falling prey to everyone’s weaknesses. (It is a tragedy that business majors are caught up in their Sun Tzu and their G. Gordon Liddy instead of their Muppetry, because the idea of balancing the fanciful and the pragmatic is literally the dialectic at the heart of all That Which Muppets.)
The Muppet Movie really is a remarkable film. It ages very well, maintaining an emotional relevance that evolves throughout a viewer’s life, speaking to the burgeoning imaginations of children with the same sincere and wry kindnesses that it uses to address the minefield of the business world and making adult relationships work. In the way that Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying gave us as a culture a system by which to understand the process of grieving and loss, perhaps there is also a Kermit Continuum for all that life is, because Kermit the Frog is always teaching us something about being alive and present in the slow-motion parade that is human development. And honestly, that’s a lot for one frog to bear. But even when things skew dark (and in The Muppet Movie, loneliness, industrial theft, nonconsensual body modification and depression are all in play), there’s a feeling that there is a purpose to it.
Also, there are the songs. Gonzo’s “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” is like an unexpected punch in the gut. And as deeply moving as it and the peerless “Rainbow Connection” are, that’s how imaginative the freaky rock stomp of “Can You Picture That?” lands. Has there ever been a musical that features nonstop bangers from beginning to end to the extent that The Muppet Movie does? Purple Rain does, and Xanadu comes very close, but there’s an impasse that keeps good-to-great musicals from ascending to flawless. And composers Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher are in flawless mode here.
It warms my heart that Orson Welles was down with the Muppets. There’s a nobility in holding space for both high and low culture, and this is something that becomes all the more apparent as you return to this film at various points in life. Celebrating its 45th anniversary (1979 was a staggering year for film) is as good a reason as any to take another trip with the Muppets, or to introduce someone new to the experience. As difficult as the shoot was (director James Frawley was not particularly happy during the making of the film), it still endures as a shining beacon of sincere optimism twinkling from between the Nixon and Reagan eras — a promise and a presence for all who have grown up in its wake.
