The hosts at the hotel frantically scoured the building for us, texting our phones, worried we left him behind as we packed up the car and headed home.
The “him” in question was Kermit the Frog. We weren’t quite in “Home Alone” territory, but the staff of the Passover program in Niagara-on-the-Lake, at which my wife and I were scholars-in-residence for the week, knew we couldn’t leave Kermit behind.
Kermit is one of the dolls that doesn’t really belong to a specific one of our kids, either — he’s more of a shared treasure. And now that I’ve been watching the Muppets with my kids, seeing them through a child’s eyes once again, I can understand why the Muppets seem to have a stronger hold on their all-ages audience than your average animated hero.
Muppets are people, too.
So to speak. The magic of life-sized puppets gives a realness cartoons can’t match, even when, as with Roger Rabbit, they share the screen with actors. The large, plush Kermit we found, thankfully, before leaving the hotel has material in his limbs that make him able to hold a pose, which means that, from a child’s perspective, the doll is basically identical to what’s on the screen — minus, of course, its ability to walk and talk and ride a bicycle.
This is the genius of Jim Henson’s creations. And it’s especially welcome in an age of CGI everything. It isn’t mere nostalgia, nor does it make one a Luddite, to recognize the benefits of a previous technological incarnation. Digital music has never matched the sound of vinyl, but that doesn’t mean the reduction in cost and concurrent expansion of music at your fingertips wasn’t worth it. It does mean you might want to keep records around.
Similarly, study after study has found that reading a dead-tree book is better for retention and concentration (and your eyes) than an e-reader. But the digitizing of books en masse has meant that, as with music, there is more available and it is less costly than in previous eras, plus it helps attract younger readers.
The almost-human Muppets owe their honorary personhood to more than puppetry. “For nearly its entire history, [the “Muppet Show”] has set its cast of characters in the real world, employing self-referential humor to skewer the entertainment business,” Reid Nakamura wrote for the Wrap in 2015. It goes beyond that, too. Nakamura adds: “When Kermit and Miss Piggy ‘announced’ the break-up of their long-time relationship at the Television Critics Association summer panel last month, the press (including the Wrap) reported on it as though it were news beyond just a TV series plot development.” And “characters have also participated in interviews with outlets that otherwise would not interview fictional characters.”
There’s one more element to the Muppets’ indelible mark on our imaginations: music. Early in 1979’s “The Muppet Movie,” Kermit and Fozzie Bear hit pause on their road trip and nap in their car outside a church. They are suddenly awakened by loud, bluesy, big-band rock. They open the church door and peer inside, with Fozzie remarking: “They don’t look like Presbyterians to me.”
The scene inside is a jam session from Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the Muppets beloved “house band.” Dr. Teeth and his crew have a distinctly American sound. “The Muppets are like old-school vaudeville, and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem Band plays the kind of whirligig circus rock that died with The Band, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead,” wrote music critic Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, who now works for NPR, in 2014. Electric Mayhem, in both their covers and their originals, carried the “swampy American sound of Dylan and The Band’s basement tapes, the druggy jams of the Grateful Dead, the caustic humor of Randy Newman and the honky tonk of Jimmy Dean in a time capsule.”
And then, of course, there’s the singular musical achievement of “Rainbow Connection,” a startlingly beautiful and philosophical solo song performed first by Kermit, strumming a banjo and sitting on a log in the swamp, contemplating life.
The strength of Electric Mayhem was in the band’s penchant for collaboration. “If influence is the number of people who know a band and the number of influential people who collaborate with that band, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem Band is one of the most influential living groups in American music,” Naddaff-Hafrey wrote. “Depending on your definition of living.”
If you grew up with the Muppets, then chances are your definition of living is expansive enough for them to make the cut.
Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
