Playstation One, unseen gem:
Muppet Monster Adventure!
It’s about as cool as it sounds. It’s the typical muppet pals caught in a pretty simple backstory. A friend of Kermit’s uncle dies, and the gang s invited to the reading of his will. Of course, Kermit’s friend lives in a spooky old house ontop of a hill. When the front doors open, Robin (Kermit’s nephew) faints. When he awaes he finds out that several of his comrades have been transformed into terrible monsters. But, if he collects token with their faces on them, he can gain their powers.
It’s all very Spyro-like, and I love that. As wth spyro, you have two basic attacks, and lots of chests laying around. Different kinds of chests require different kind of attacks. Anyone who has played SPyro will find this very familiar.
The graphics are pretty good, and the controls smooth. There’s a particular song in this game that I adore and you can be sure it will be uploaded shortly.
A place for anything Muppets and Jim Henson.
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Established on Frank Oz's birthday, May 25th 2011. Created by Lara.
Muppets.com | JimHensonCompany.com | ToughPigs.com | MuppetMindset.com
Submission of all kinds welcome! Ask anything!
Established on Frank Oz's birthday, May 25th 2011. Created by Lara.
Muppets.com | JimHensonCompany.com | ToughPigs.com | MuppetMindset.com
Posts tagged reviews.
First Game Up:
Here’s an extremely rare Japanese laserdisc of Jim Henson’s Dog City. Both the American and UK DVDs of Dog City cut out over 10 minutes of material with Kermit and the MuppetTelevision crew, and the US DVD has very bad audio. The Japanese laserdisc contains the entire uncut Jim Henson Hour episode, although it’s dubbed into Japanese! The same company issued Monster Maker (now on Netflix!) and was planning to issue Secrets of The Muppets and Living With Dinosaurs among others, but never got round to it. Monster Maker is not on DVD, and Secrets of the Muppets and Living With Dinosaurs, like most Jim Henson Hour material, have never been released anywhere.
Dog City is just as wonderful as I remember it - a very silly Muppet romp through a 40s film noir world populated entirely by Muppet dogs and a constant stream of puns and dumb jokes. The special doesn’t entirely shy away from the adult humor that the film noir genre necessitates, and handles references to murder, prostitution and the word “bitch” in a funny and kid-friendly way. If you like the humor of The Muppet Show you’ll like this. On a technical level, it’s shot on video but done single-camera with every trick Jim Henson had up his sleeve, including animatronic characters for some shots. Jim Henson won an Emmy for directing this, and rightly so. The special inspired an animated series, which reused the same puppets in framing segments about a cartoonist.
This special originally aired on my favorite Jim Henson production as a kid - the short-lived Jim Henson Hour, which usually gave you a half hour of MuppetTelevision (an updated, high-tech Muppet Show), and another half hour that was a journey into Henson’s amazing fantasy world, with productions like The Storyteller, Monster Maker, Song of the Cloud Forest and (the almost Twin Peaks-lite) Lighthouse Island. There was also a then-unaired episode in which Jim showed you the Secrets of the Muppets.
It was Henson at his very peak, showing all the amazing things his studio was capable of. There were great songs like “Sweet Vacation” and “The Music Keeps Rollin’ Along,” celebrity guests like KD Lang and Ted Danson, some vaguely adult humor, appearances by former Muppet Show writer and legendary British comedian Chris Langham (whose career is now dead on pornography charges), and Frank Oz popping in to play Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear. Saving the environment was a subtext of several episodes, and in general, like Fraggle Rock (which was designed to promote world peace among different cultures), the series seemed designed to open up a child’s imagination and make the next generation better people.
NBC cancelled it very quickly due to low ratings. Henson died not long after and none of the work the Henson Company has done since has really shown the same ambition that Jim had. In particular, the more complex, high-tech Muppets of The Jim Henson Hour have been abandoned in favor of a more Sesame Street-like approach with the newer characters from, say, Muppets Tonight!
The recent “The Muppets” movie treated the characters as a hopeless anachronism of the 70s and 80s, failing to make their way into modern times, and acted as if the last thing they ever did was The Muppet Show. Now, to the general public, perhaps that’s true. But Jim was always an innovator first and foremost, with films like the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Both were box office disappointments, which crushed Jim - his best work, on a technical level, often went unappreciated. It was that technical knowledge that allowed Frank Oz to bring Yoda and Audrey II to life, and it’s worth remembering that the Henson Company was at the forefront of special effects all through the 80s.
None of the Jim Henson Hour episodes were ever released on video, laserdisc or DVD, although this Dog City laserdisc and the releases of Monster Maker are technically an exception. Some productions which aired on The Jim Henson Hour have been released on DVD - all nine episodes of The Storyteller, which might be the best thing Jim ever did, are on DVD, along with the slightly less wonderful spinoff Greek Myths. The Song of the Cloud Forest (a colorful story about saving the rainforests) is also on DVD and Miss Piggy’s Hollywood was released in PAL (along with The Fabulous Miss Piggy Show, guest-starring Andy Kaufman as Tony Clifton!). Dog City is available on DVD in the US and UK, but all Jim Henson Hour framing material has been removed (including quite a lot of Kermit and Jim and Digit and Bean Bunny and etc.), and the audio on the US version is strangely terrible.
The Newest Muppet Movie Is Like Coming Home
Nostalgia is a funny thing, and it can often blind people to quality (or the lack thereof). And when you’re talking about nostalgia, The Muppets loom large for at least one generation, and it would be easy to assume that any praise you hear for the newest movie is based on a long-instilled affection for the characters.
The thing is, if that were true, then everything the Muppets have ever appeared in would be praised highly, and that is so not the case. Muppets From Space was pretty bad (I mean, c’mon, they didn’t even have original songs!), as was the Wizard Of Oz tv special. Yeah, after seeing that one, I was convinced that the spirit of the Muppets had died along with Jim Henson.
But I was wrong.
You know where it turns out the spirit was hiding? Inside the kids who grew up with Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and yeah, even the babies like me who watched Muppets Tonight, the ones who were still soaking up culture when the Muppets were at the height of their cultural currency. One of those kids was Jason Segel. Another was James Bobin. And Nicholas Stoller. And Bret McKenzie. And I’d bet that Amy Adams, Rashida Jones, Emily Blunt, Jim Parsons, Kristen Schaal, Sarah Silverman, and more were Muppet kids, too. And while it might be enough to make a few jokes, have some celebrities interact with the Muppets, and make a few nods to the past, that’s not what this movie did. Instead, they reached deep, and the result is a film that asks the question, Has the world become too cynical for The Muppets?
I’m only 21 years old, and already I’ve been worn down by life. I have plenty of dark days. I have plenty of self-doubt. It’s a struggle to keep looking forward when I feel myself weighed down by regret. It would be easy to let life turn me sour, but I struggle to keep that from happening because there are people who depend on me. My life is given meaning by the people in it, and I have learned that I am only as strong as the people I surround myself with. That idea is the heart of this film, and it’s articulated right from the start with the preposterously catchy phrase “I’ve got everything that I need right in front of me” from the opening song. I think the scene that really does it for me is at the end, when the Muppets fail to raise enough money to save their theatre, and Kermit addresses the (ridiculous number of) Muppets:
Listen, everybody, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, and you know why? Because we tried. And if we failed? We failed together, and I don’t know if that’s really failing at all. And I don’t care what anybody says, I don’t care if nobody believes in us…because you know what? I believe. I believe in you. And you. And you. You know, what’s important isn’t this building or a name…it’s each other. So I say, fine, we’ll start over and work our way back to the top, let’s walk out there with our heads held high…as a family. Because that’s what we are.
Life’s not always a happy song. It can be pretty shitty and people can be rotten. Just look at everything going on in the world right now. Everything is not great, and nothing is certainly grand. But family, man, that’s what it’s all about. In one of the most emotionally naked scenes in the film, Kermit finds himself walking down a hallway lined with pictures of all the other Muppets, singing a song called Pictures In My Head, and it’s from the grand tradition of Muppet Songs That Make Me Weep. There is something so direct about the lyrics, as if Kermit (played here by Steve Whitmire, who does a fabulous job of capturing not only Henson’s vocal style but also the small details in performance that always made Kermit feel so real) is speaking directly to the audience:
‘If we could do it all again
Just another chance to entertain
Would anybody watch or even care
Or did something break we can’t repair?”What really pulled this movie together, what really made it a Muppet movie, was the heart. The sense of humor here is warm and playful and occasionally surreal and meta, and there’s not a mean bone in its body (even when they mess around with Jack Black). It’s not malicious, and that in itself is a breath of fresh air.
By the end, I finally had a different understanding of nostalgia and its value. I think it’s weird that generations wallow in their childhood , but then I look around at the world we’ve inherited, and I think back to the promise of what things would be like when we were young, and I realize that people reject the present in favor of the past because of disappointment and disillusionment. The Muppets is spilling over with an optimism that is uncommon in our pop culture today, and beyond that, there is a pure joy at the act of entertaining others that reaches some place inside us that most movies or TV shows never even acknowledge, and they do it well (I’m looking at you, Glee). The Muppets is an affirmation that we can indeed occasionally find our way home again, and that some things just shouldn’t change.
Before seeing The Muppets for a third time yesterday, I went and saw the movie Being Elmo and, boy, if you haven’t seen it yet than you should. You really should.
I know a lot of people are against Elmo and find him annoying or whatever, but I’m not. I’m from the Elmo generation. I grew up learning and loving Elmo, and not once have I ever disliked him. And after seeing Being Elmo I don’t think anyone can really hate the furry red guy. But the movie is so much more than just Elmo. It’s about Kevin’s childhood, his ascent into puppetrey, his work with Jim and Captain Kangaroo, his relationship with his daughter, building puppets, his work with Sesame Street, and so much more. It’s a lovely piece, with a lot of familiar Muppeteer faces. It’s truly an inspiring film.
I recommend it to all!
THE MUPPETS IS ONE OF THE BEST MOVIES I’VE EVER SEEN, YOU ALL NEED TO SEE IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
I’VE NEVER LAUGHED SO HARD AND SO FREQUENTLY AT A MOVIE THEATER BEFORE. BEST CAMEOS EVER. FOR REAL. MIGHT BE MY NEW FAVORITE MOVIE EVER OF ALL TIME. GO SEE IT. IT’S NEARLY FLAWLESS.
This is what we like to hear. :)
