WORLD TOUR Day 28 - New York, NY
BEFORE: Liza Minnelli makes a cameo appearance in this film, completing a trifecta, so I don't even need to exploit the Sesame Street connection to link to this film. All part of the plan. This is my last film set in New York for now. I saw "The Muppet Movie" back when it first came out, then I kind of never followed up with their other movies until I watched "Muppet Treasure Island" earlier this year. I guess I felt I sort of outgrew them, but if I had a kid right now, I'd probably be re-discovering them right about now.
THE PLOT: Kermit and his friends go to New York to get their musical on Broadway only to find it's a more difficult task than they anticipated.
AFTER: In 1984, the Muppet performers came to Manhattan to make a movie about the Muppets coming to Manhattan to make a Broadway show about coming to Manhattan to make a Broadway show about Manhattan. Wait....yep, that's right. It's like Muppet "Inception". Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
A lot of New York scenery in this one, from Central Park to Madison Ave., the Empire State Building, Sardi's restaurant, and the NY Public Library. The Muppet gang even sleeps in lockers in the Port Authority, because they don't seem to know any better - about the only things they don't do are turn tricks on 42nd St. and shoot up in the bathrooms at CBGB's. A lot of the action takes place in a fictitious diner called Pete's, which has rats for waiters and cooks. Probably not too far off for some NYC eateries - but rats cooking in a movie? That's a terrible concept.
I'm not sure I follow the logic of this film - the gang has trouble getting their play produced, so once they run out of money, they all have to go to different cities to find work. How did they know they'd find jobs in those other cities? Aren't jobs plentiful in New York? I would have loved to see them explore New York City a little more by working as cab drivers, tour guides, hotel bellhops, etc. It kind of feels like a missed opportunity.
This film got a lot of press at the time for the "wedding" of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy - rumors abounded that the wedding was "real", as real as it could be for characters made of cloth with ping-pong ball eyes, anyway. The wedding takes place on stage as part of the play-within-a-movie, and the actor was a real minister - hmm, still not a real wedding, since Mayor Giuliani later outlawed all interspecies marriages in New York, so this would have been annulled ipso facto.
Points off for introducing the dreadful concept of the "Muppet Babies", which lived on in a Saturday morning cartoon a few years later. I don't see the need to cutesify everything further, Marvel Comics does this with the X-Babies, an infant version of the X-Men, and it's just craptacular.
That's going to wrap up September, and films about NYC since I'm off to a new city tomorrow. I've been mostly programming in pairs, so it shouldn't be too hard to guess what (and where) tomorrow's film will be.
Also starring the voices of Jim Henson and the Muppeteers (Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Richard Hunt) most last heard in "Muppet Treasure Island", plus Juliana Donald, Lonny Price, Louis Zorich (last seen in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels"), with cameos from Art Carney (last seen in "Firestarter"), James Coco, Dabney Coleman (last seen in "North Dallas Forty"), Gregory Hines (last seen in "The Cotton Club"), Linda Lavin, Joan Rivers, Elliott Gould (last seen in "The Devil and Max Devlin"), Brooke Shields (last seen in "Furry Vengeance"), John Landis, Gates McFadden, and Mayor Ed Koch.
RATING: 6 out of 10 slammed doors
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