In October something incredible took place on the historic Fox lot – a new installment of “The Muppet Show” was filmed. Legendary Muppet performers like Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, Eric Jacobsen and Matt Vogel gathered, giving life to beloved characters like Kermit, Pepé and, of course, everyone’s favorite whatsit Gonzo the Great, for a new iteration of the classic show.
The production is noteworthy as it marks the continuation of a 50-year-old franchise. The original series, a variety show that combined skits, musical numbers and quasi-vaudeville routines (with Jim Henson’s iconic characters interacting with human guest stars) ran from 1976 to 1981, with 120 episodes. Over the course of its run, “The Muppet Show” was nominated for 21 Emmys and won four, including the 1978 Emmy for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series. That same year it won a Peabody Award.
But since the height of Muppet-mania, the characters have taken a precipitous fall from grace, first after the death of Jim Henson himself in 1990, which lead to the dissolution of a sale to the Walt Disney Company and, more catastrophically, in the years since, as the characters changed hands multiple times and eventually wound up at Disney, largely unloved and uncared for. In particular, the characters have survived a cruel decade defined largely by false starts, aborted projects and creative in-fighting.
Worst of all, it has meant an entire generation of kids, who have glommed on to “Bluey” and “Paw Patrol,” are largely immune to the distinct charms of the Muppets. Within Disney’s cradle-to-the-grave approach to marketing their IP, this is a huge oversight. The Muppet fans of today were Muppet fans from youth. And there has been no platform to introduce the characters to adults who may be unfamiliar.
All of that makes this new “Muppet Show” hugely important to the characters and the company.
Now “The Muppet Show” is back. Kind of. Disney is calling the new episode, which will air on Disney’s linear network ABC as well as its direct-to-consumer streaming platform Disney+, a “special.” But it’s clear, in everything from its marketing (proclaiming that it’s “back on the very stage where it all started and then ended and is maybe starting again”) to the attitude of those at The Muppet Studio, a specialty division within Disney Live Entertainment, which is nestled within Disney’s Walt Disney Imagineering group that shepherds the characters, that they want to do more.
This new “Muppet Show” iteration comes after more than 10 years of what could charitably be described as disastrous mismanagement of the franchise. The Muppets were shuffled awkwardly between different parts of Disney and slotted into several attempted relaunches that didn’t take hold with public consciousness. (What, you don’t remember 2020’s “Muppets Now,” where they tried to graft the characters onto bite-sized, Internet-ready formats?)
With “The Muppet Show,” Disney is attempting to return the franchise to its former glory, by simultaneously returning the characters to the past and also pushing them forward, with modern musical numbers, a hip, Muppet-adjacent guest host (Sabrina Carpenter, understanding the assignment perfectly) and a focus on the core character us “older kids” have all cherished for decades.
This could be the best – and, perhaps, last – shot at the characters returning to prominence, with the full might of the Walt Disney Co. behind them. It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets on “The Muppet Show” tonight. Or else.
“The Muppets is an IP that is like ‘Star Wars’ in that it’s got enough nostalgia behind it that letting fans get a hold of it can be both a blessing and a curse,” Brian Jay Jones, author of the indispensable “Jim Henson: The Biography,” told TheWrap about the characters. “Sometimes you get someone who really knows what they’re doing with it and has that genuine affinity, but also knows how to make it work on screen. Other times you don’t.”
Muppets tonight
It’s hard to envision now just how much of a cultural sensation the Muppets were once upon a time. In 2001, Brian Henson, son of creator Jim Henson, said that “The Muppet Show,” at its height, was seen in 100 countries, with an estimated 230 million viewers worldwide. It’s been speculated that, at the peak of “The Muppet Show’s” popularity, it was the most popular television program on the planet.
At the time, the Muppets were everywhere – they were selling products (here’s an extremely charming 1977 American Express ad featuring Jim and the Muppets) and appearing on PBS’ groundbreaking “Sesame Street” and trading zingers with late night talk show hosts. And that’s not to mention the countless pieces of Muppet merchandise that was produced and sold. The characters had captured the zeitgeist. Keep in mind the show was made overseas and without a network partner; it was a syndicated series, unmoored to a single network or time slot, that had somehow captured the hearts and minds of America and the rest of the world.
After the show ended, there were hit movies and subsequent television series that featured the characters. But since Henson’s untimely death in May 1990 and, in particular, since Disney purchased most of the characters in 2004, there has been a throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to the Muppets. Attractions in the Disney Parks have been planned and torn down, countless series attempts have been made and a general sense of confusion and unease has blanketed the characters.
With this new “Muppet Show,” though, you can feel every gear turning in the same direction; Disney is getting behind it with the dual launch on linear and streaming channels, there seems to be real excitement from casual and die-hard fans alike, and there is a general groundswell of support. People want the special to succeed, because we’ll get more Muppet stuff. It’s been years since the characters were truly popular and now that could actually change.
Deeply felt
At the time of Jim Henson’s death, he was in the middle of a complicated deal with Disney, then led by Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. The deal would have seen Disney own the entire company – not just the Muppets – and was predicated on a handshake deal between Eisner, who had been a champion of the characters during his early days as an ABC executive, and Henson. Once the deal was completed, Henson would have stayed on for the next 10 years as a consultant and been given the freedom to pursue his own creative endeavors.
“We will bring Miss Piggy into the fold the same careful way Walt Disney brought Winnie the Pooh into the fold,” Eisner told the New York Times in 1989. An official statement from Henson at the time read, “I have enjoyed running my own company, but now I am really excited about joining forces with Michael Eisner and the Disney organization and finding out how much more we can accomplish together for our audiences all over the world.”
But Henson died of a bacterial infection on May 16, 1990. He was only 53. Just 10 days earlier, “The Muppets at Walt Disney World,” an hour-long special that was part of “The Magical World of Disney” and was meant to introduce the idea of the merger, aired on NBC. Eisner was still bullish about acquiring the company, but the mounting inheritance taxes following his death and the perceived insensitivity of Eisner and Disney (who pushed to include the “Sesame Street” characters in the deal), led the Henson family to pull back. For a time, they even threatened to withhold Muppet*Vision 3D, the first of a planned series of Muppets-related theme park attractions, from opening at the Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World.
“My dad was selling the whole company. His real dream at that time was that the Muppets would be in the theme parks. And honestly, it was because he was running out of ideas of what to do with the Muppets,” Brian Henson told TheWrap in 2024. “When that deal was scuttled, we were all still very aware of that dream of my dad’s.”
Eventually both sides came to an agreement; Disney finished the 3D film (with the help of close Henson collaborator Frank Oz) and would greenlight additional Muppets projects, like 1992’s “Muppet Christmas Carol,” directed by Brian Henson, and “Muppets Tonight!,” a spiritual successor to “The Muppet Show,” that ran on ABC for two seasons from 1996 to 1998. “Muppets Tonight” is perhaps best remembered for an episode that guest-starred Prince, then in his unpronounceable symbol era, that was directed by Brian Henson. There’s a particularly wonderful rendition of his “Starfish and Coffee” from his masterful 1987 double album “Sign o’ the Times.”
While the two companies continued to collaborate, ownership of the characters remained slightly out of reach. The planned Muppets-themed land was never built and a Muppets takeover of Disneyland was similarly canceled.
In 2000 the Jim Henson Company sold the Muppets to a German conglomerate EM.TV & Merchandising for $680 million. But financial problems at the company forced them to sell the characters back to Henson in 2003 for a mere $78 million. (Disney was also in the running for the characters.) The following year, as Eisner was in the process of getting ousted from Disney, he squeezed in a purchase of the Muppets, along with the characters from “Bear in the Big Blue House.” The original deal Eisner had attempted in 1989 was for the entire Jim Henson Company; in this new deal the Henson Company would remain independent, maintaining the rights to projects like “The Storyteller,” “Labyrinth” and “The Dark Crystal,” titles that have since become the company’s crown jewels.
“In the months before his death in 1990, my father Jim Henson pursued extensive discussions with The Walt Disney Company based on his strong belief that Disney would be a perfect home for the Muppets. As such, the deal we announced today is the realization of my father’s dream, and ensures that the Muppet characters will live, flourish and continue to delight audiences everywhere, forever,” said Lisa Henson in a statement in 2004.
Once acquired, there was the general feeling that Disney didn’t know quite what to do with the characters. And the incoming CEO Bob Iger, whose tenure was defined by his eventual acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and the 21st Century assets, was unenthused by Eisner’s purchase of the characters.
In 2009, Disney released a Muppet music video for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” At the time Disney owned Queen’s catalogue, so it was the kind of synergistic handshake the media giant is famous for. It has since racked up more than 192 million views on YouTube. That same year, at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, Calif., the company announced a new film called “The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made,” to be directed by Oz from a script that he, Henson and Jerry Juhls worked on back in 1985. That idea was soon set aside, with the company instead going with a pitch from Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, with director James Bobin hired in early 2010. Oz did not return for the new project, eventually titled, simply, “The Muppets.”
When “The Muppets” was released in 2011, it was a hit with both critics (Stephen Holden in the New York Times called it a “endearing, silly, smiley-faced movie”) and audiences. It made almost $172 million on a budget of a reported $40 million. It would eventually win the Oscar for Best Original Song (for “Man or Muppet,” written by Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie). Not bad for the first theatrical Muppet movie since 1999’s disappointing “Muppets from Space,” which earned $22 million globally on a budget of $24 million. Work began on a sequel to “The Muppets” in 2012, the same month the movie won the Academy Award.
The Muppets, it seemed, were back. What could go wrong?
A painful decade
“Muppets Most Wanted,” originally titled “The Muppets … Again!,” was quickly put in development after the success of “The Muppets.” Segel chose not to participate in the sequel, saying that his goal of returning the characters to their former glory had been accomplished. Director Bobin, screenwriter Stoller and, crucially, songwriter McKenzie, did come back for the follow-up, which borrowed a heist movie structure from 1981’s “The Great Muppet Caper” and introduced Kermit’s evil doppelgänger Constantine (performed by Matt Vogel, who now performs Kermit).
Released in the spring of 2014, it is in many ways a better, more Muppet-y voice than “The Muppets” and wisely sidelined Walter, the extremely boring new Muppet character that was introduced in that earlier film. But the film got a more mixed response from critics (Justin Chang of Variety said that the movie “looks and sounds eager to please but immediately feels like a more slapdash, aimless affair, trying — and mostly failing — to turn its stalled creativity into some sort of self-referential joke”) and did far worse at the box office, making just $80.4 million worldwide on a budget of $50 million.
A year after “Muppets Most Wanted,” a new series, also titled “The Muppets,” originated from “The Big Bang Theory” co-creator Bill Prady and veteran writer and producer Bob Kushell. The show was quickly shuttled through development, with a 10-minute proof-of-concept being delivered in May 2015, which impressed ABC executives enough to greenlight the show for that same fall.
After a strong start, with over 9 million viewers, the ratings started to dip precipitously. By November, Kushell had already left the series, with Kristen Newman replacing him. (Kushell was outed as sexually harassing female staff on “The Muppets” in Maureen Ryan’s book “Burn It Down.”) A new villain was introduced and the final six episodes of the series were meant to serve as a soft relaunch of the show, should it continue. It didn’t. In May 2016, ABC announced that the show had been canceled.
2019 seemed like a time for transition and opportunity.
This was the year that Disney launched Disney+, its direct-to-consumer streaming platform, and the year that the characters moved internally at the company, going from Disney Interactive, a division that oversaw videogames and the company’s consumer-facing websites, to Walt Disney Imagineering, known for their design of theme park attractions and cruise ships.
But even after the transition to WDI, the Muppets remained in flux.
That year, “Muppets Live Another Day,” a new series from Josh Gad and writers Adam Horowitz and Eddy Kitsis and fresh songs from Bobby Lopez and Kristin Anderson-Lopez, the Oscar-winning duo behind Disney’s “Frozen” films, was seemingly set up to succeed.
It did not.
The outside creative team clashed with the Muppet performers, who felt that they knew more about the characters and what the characters should or could do, according to a person close to the project. This sentiment had bubbled up before, when the Jason Segel movie replaced the Jerry Juhl movie and during the tumultuous production of the ABC “Muppets” show. Now it had led to the cancelation of a new series before it had even been shot.
“Even looking at the original run of ‘The Muppet Show,’ we can see in the first season, when you had people who came in from the outside, who were not Jerry Juhl, outside writers coming in and doing it who were really wonderful, competent, funny guys, but just didn’t quite have a handle on the Muppets,” explained Jones. “That first season, because of it, is very shaky. Had you done that first season on Netflix 30 years later, they’d have probably pulled the plug on it.”
There was even friction on the new “Muppet Show,” but according to a separate source. But the Muppet performers and outside creative talent quickly banded together, knowing how special a really-for-real revival of “The Muppet Show” would be.
More streams
In 2020 “Muppets Now,” a series of short form vignettes with celebrity guests, originally meant for YouTube and social media, was hastily repackaged into half-hour-long episodes and streamed on Disney+. It lasted a single season.
A year later the first-ever hour-long Muppets Halloween special, “Muppets Haunted Mansion,” streamed on Disney+, perhaps the plutonic ideal of what a partnership between the characters and the Disney Parks would look like, outside of actual attractions. (It was also the first to be conceived and made real by new leadership at Muppet Studios, the division within WDI.) The special was fun and anarchic, but while additional specials were planned, including one centered on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, they never materialized.
The characters were back in 2023 with “The Muppets Mayhem,” a series centered around the Electric Mayhem. It was developed by “The Goldbergs” creator Adam F. Goldberg, alongside Jeff Yorkes and longtime Muppet performer Bill Barretta. Again, the show was charming but failed to generate much interest. It too only lasted a single season.
In 2024, at D23, an all-Disney fan event, the company announced that there would be a new land based on “Monsters, Inc.” coming to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, part of Walt Disney World. The artwork made the exact location of the land vague, but as TheWrap exclusively reported, they were earmarking an area that held Muppet*Vision 3D, the last project Henson personally worked on and arguably the greatest theme park-housed 3D attraction of all time.
Soon enough, the Muppets would be ported over to Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, replacing Aerosmith. Fans were outraged. Actor and singer Andrew Barth Feldman made a whole music video, filmed within the park and dedicated to the attraction, at times both hilarious and touching, in the best Muppet tradition.
Last year Brian Henson told us that camera crews had captured the Muppet*Vision theater and the movie with VR cameras, to be released at a later date for Apple Vision Pro and other VR headsets.
In November, Rob Lake Magic with Special Guests the Muppets, the Broadway debut of the characters, closed a week-and-a-half into an engagement that was supposed to stretch through January. It probably didn’t help that the show was critically panned. Steven Suskin, of New York Stage Review, wrote, “There’s no danger here, no moments of wonder; if there’s any suspense to the evening, it’s a question of when’ll he bring on the Muppets (briefly) and how’ll he work them into the act (barely).”
That same month the Jim Henson Company, which was moving off of its historic Hollywood lot (it was sold to filmmaker McG and musician John Mayer) sold off more than 400 original pieces at auction. The company was celebrating its 70th anniversary, seemingly by cleaning out its closet.
The sale of precious Muppet artifacts by the company still owned by the Henson family was the end of an especially dreary year for the Muppets, one in which you could feel the desperation starting to settle in. Would anybody care about the Muppets again?
New Show, New Era
Oddly, the biggest hit of the past 10 years for the characters was “Muppet Babies,” a made-for-Disney-Junior remake of the beloved 1984 series (itself based on a sequence from “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” also released in 1984). The new series, which jettisoned the original conceit of the characters entering into popular television series and films (with footage that has made licensing those early episodes a nightmare) but maintained the themes of togetherness and imagination, ran for 71 episodes between 2018 and 2022. The original hand-drawn animation of the original was replaced with bright CGI.
The popularity of the Disney Junior “Muppet Babies” and its cultural impact —remember the controversy when Gonzo dressed up like a girl? — outweighed anything that had been attempted with the characters in live-action.
But that could change soon.
First, the new “Muppet Show” is an absolute home run. Directed by Alex Timbers, the series manages to modernize the format without contaminating what came before. Carpenter, as the guest host, is an absolute hoot, too. It feels like both a throwback and the start of something new that could potentially stretch out for years to come.
A co-production of 20th Television, Disney Branded Television, The Muppet Studios and Seth Rogen (who appears on the show) and his partner Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures, it’s clear that this new “Muppet Show” is very important to virtually every aspect of the company. These characters need to be embraced, once again, on the kind of scale that the original series provided. That will equal more plush being sold on the Disney Store website and more series coming to Disney+. (There are tons of specials and other Muppet-related material that hasn’t shown up on the service)
Less than a month after “The Muppet Show” premieres, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith will shut down to begin its transformation to a Muppet-themed rollercoaster. It is expected to open sometime this summer.
It does bode well that Iger, who never really wanted the characters and had no idea what to do with them, is finally going to leave the company at the end of 2026. Josh D’Amaro, his heir apparent, has made noise about bringing more Muppets material into the parks – and if he’s running the company, hopefully the characters will beyond the Disney Parks.
But there will need to be more than fuzzy feelings of nostalgic bliss to keep the characters alive. If nobody watches this new “Muppet Show,” who knows when the larger Disney company will give the characters another big, bold, splashy push?
