The fucking Muppets aren’t entertaining. At all. Not even a tiny little bit. First of all, who is their intended audience, even? Not kids, really, because they contain a bunch of references to stuff that kids really won’t get. Kids don’t really know how a rock drummer is supposed to behave. They won’t find Kermit and Miss Piggy’s couple dynamics relatable. They don’t understand that Fozzie Bear is supposed to be an old-fashioned standup comedian. It’s all a bunch of weird cultural callouts, from a very specific 1950s-through-1970s American time period. Even kids in the mid-1970s didn’t actually understand what they were seeing.
But, on the other hand, none of that shit is appealing to adults. At least, it shouldn’t be. The pig woman is low-key horny all the time, but isn’t being satisfied by the naked frog guy? That’s funny to you? Those old guys are trolling everyone from the fake balcony seats, but they can’t ever actually put together an actual joke? You can’t understand what either the chef or the scientist guy is saying?
STOP ME IF I GET TO SOMETHING THAT’S ACTUALLY FUNNY, RIGHT?
It just isn’t fucking funny. Any of it. And it’s really not cute. It’s allllll just fucking stupid, from start to finish.
I don’t get what the appeal was ever supposed to be, and I’m pretty sure it only got popular because a large number of people were simultaneously afraid that they were missing the joke, missing references, missing SOMETHING, and they didn’t want to be seen as stupid, soooooo they agreed with the small number of shitheads, who were like “BRILLIANT! THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE PUPPETRY FOREVER!”
Puppetry is a shit-tier medium, anyway. Yeah, I said it. Real controversy I’m kicking up, huh? Yeah, you all KNOW puppetry sucks. It originated during the Classical and Medieval periods, when people desperately needed entertainment, but couldn’t stand to look at the faces of the other villagers for one more second, even if they’d written a play, and it was the only thing you could go and see, other than your walls.
The only SENSIBLE reason that the fucking Muppets are actually beloved is that people in the English-speaking world all watched Sesame Street, and that show is tangentially associated with the Muppets. And that’s fine. But it’s actually a kids’ show. And it’s not really the same exact thing as the Muppets. The two franchises are related, but Sesame Street actually teaches kids the alphabet and shit.
And fuck Jim Henson, himself. He was just some guy with a beard and a MASSIVE EGO. You’d have to have a giant fucking ego to shit out that kind of nonsense, with such utter confidence. If only he’d been able to actually write comedy or drama, he probably WOULD have been a great man. But he couldn’t, so he wasn’t. He was just a weirdo with a puppet fixation, who had a knack for jamming his foot into Hollywood’s door, before anyone could close it on him. More’s the pity.
Stop lionizing a deeply and pathetically unfunny, uninteresting man, just because he died tragically. Lots of people die tragically. It doesn’t retroactively give them talent.
EDIT: hmmmmmm, it seems as if my UNPOPULAR OPINION, which I posted in the place for UNPOPULAR OPINIONS is immediately proving to be pretty UNPOPULAR. Please keep this in mind, when you’re getting ready to type your personal attacks.
Aight, lemme see if’n I can’t match the goofy ass rant energy here…
Motherfucker, we had lawn darts… 6" long finned metal spikes that you threw across the yard at a hula hoop. Think Cornhole, but with giant stabby things… We shot each other with bb guns, on fucking purpose… You know why?
Because TV had maybe ten channels. VCRs didn’t even exist. If you wanted to watch a movie, you dug through 15 pages of schedules in a little comic book looking deal that came in the Sunday paper (and if you didn’t get a Sunday paper, well fuck you…) looking to see if it was gonna show that week and when, and hopefully you were able to watch TV whenever the hell it was gonna be on, which never once fucking happened to anybody ever…
We had cartoons on Saturday morning until a bunch of singing Mexican kids came on, and then it was whatever was on the damned thing. You got days of our lives, Dallas, some fucking nutjob recruiting for shit like jonestown (there was always one on one of the channels), mr ed, or the fucking muppets… We watched the fucking muppets because it wasn’t in fucking black and white, didn’t have a talking horse or a bunch of goofy ass Germans making bad jokes, and we really didn’t give a fuck who shot JR because we didn’t even know who the fuck he was…
Knight Rider and A Team were “prime time”, wich didn’t mean it was what everybody was streaming, it meant it showed in the hours betweern school/work and bedtime when people had time to watch. There was exactly ZERO ability to make anything appear on that fucking TV except whatever 10 options you had at any given time, until the Atari came out.
The Muppets were our Biden. Not great by any metric whatsoever, but the alternatives were all crap, so it was what we went with and we all enjoyed the lack of shitshow alternatives…
Three things. Four really, but I’m leaving the fourth un-numbered:
You make a bunch of excellent points, unironically.
I will take the “match the goofy ass rant energy” remark on the chin. Hands up, dead to rights, you got me on that one.
Most importantly, it’s refreshing to see anyone of your generation unreservedly admitting that all sane people have to choose Biden…or else, well, you’re not actually sane.
On the other hand, your generation also voted for Ronald Reagan. If you’re one of those voters, you can eat my Millennial ass. I know ass-eating is more of a Gen-Z thing, but I’m young at heart.
Important to note, that had people never tried trickle-down economics, then we wouldn’t have data telling us about its effects. This is kinda just how the “march of history” works, its how the data that can be used to fill textbooks gets generated in the first place.
It’s like wishing a lab experiment had never been done just because it resulted in disproving something. It’s good that it disproved something, that’s helpful.
If we aren’t both in a concentration camp in five years, I’ll continue to agree with this comment. If we are, well, it doesn’t really matter.
Now that was funny!