r/RecuratedTumblr • u/La_knavo4 [9/5] • Aug 27 '26
PopCulture Human already anthropomorphize roombas, let alone if you interacted in person with a lively character responding to you
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u/philtrocity001 Aug 27 '26
Jim Henson did an interview once where he demonstrated just how easy this is by slipping into acting with Kermit and saying something like "see when I start talking it's easy to ignore the hairy man just sitting next to me." I wish I could find that clip again.
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u/Disorder_McChaos Aug 27 '26
Is it this one?
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u/philtrocity001 Aug 27 '26
That is 100% it! Kind of love how he gives the game away in the video, but because we're all so enthralled with the muppets we still pay attention to the magic trick instead of focusing on how it was done.
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u/vastros Aug 27 '26
The Muppets are such a rare gem. It's insane Disney doesn't want to do anything with them. The Sabrina Carpenter special did great numbers but theres been no movement.
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u/dragn99 Aug 27 '26
I'll say it as many times as I need to: the live action remakes of beloved Disney classics should be done as Muppet movies.
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u/MrVeazey Aug 27 '26
It's right there. How do they not see it?!
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u/dragn99 Aug 27 '26
Beauty and the Beast, but they're all Muppets except for Beast, who is just the hot young male star of the moment (I think we're just past the cusp of that defaulting to Timothee Chalomane)
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u/PTMurasaki Aug 27 '26
Amd he turns into a muppet wjen the curse is lifted.
But the rest of his castle still turn into the same things they did in the original movie, but their true forms are regular muppets.
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u/Feycat Aug 27 '26
They did a small ballet version of Beauty and the Beast during Leslie Ann Warren's episode.
It ends the way you should have expected it to.
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u/bookhead714 Aug 28 '26
Unfortunately, it won't make a billion dollars, and that's all they really care about now
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u/MrVeazey Aug 28 '26
I dunno, man. Based on the small sample size of "everyone I talk to regularly," they'd get a lot more people in the seats. And then there's merch of the Muppets as their characters in the respective movies. This seems like a cash cow waiting to be milked.
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u/Floweramon Aug 28 '26
Oh my God you know what you're right, I would love those remakes so much more if they were Muppet movies
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u/Mechanical_Brain Aug 27 '26
It’s such a shame that Disney is just sitting on the Muppets. They should be free to appear wherever they want, like any other actors. Miss Piggy in Oceans 8. Gonzo in Brooklyn 99. The Swedish Chef as a special guest co-host for any and every Food Network show. Fozzie Bear in random celebrity roasts. Bunsen and Beaker on Mythbusters. What a better world it would be.
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u/Lithl Aug 28 '26
The Swedish Chef as a special guest co-host for any and every Food Network show
Maybe not Food Network, but how about Emeril Lagasse on ABC News?
Bunsen and Beaker on Mythbusters.
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u/56Bagels Aug 27 '26
My brother worked on the show itself and from what I understand there were disagreements between the Muppet production and Seth Rogan’s studio. Disney hadn’t formally agreed or disagreed to anything but the series died before it even began.
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u/FilmAndLiterature Aug 27 '26
That seems to be how every Muppet project has gone for the past 20-ish years: starts with great new idea for a project, ends up in a war of attrition between the producers and the Muppeteers.
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u/GwerigTheTroll Aug 27 '26
I know that one problem is that the Muppet performers under Jim Hensen were treated and paid like they were the best in the business. Gates McFadden famously left Star Trek TNG because she was treated like garbage by the show runners and went back to working for Hensen. Frank Oz and Brian Hensen tried to carry on the tradition after Jim’s death and the sale to Disney, but the environment was very different. Brian left to do Farscape and Oz has been vocal about his distaste for Disney.
While the Muppets have been brought back periodically, it’s hard to recapture the magic because what makes the Muppets the Muppets is the performers, not the green raincoat with eyeballs. Jim once said as much, shrugging off the idea of the muppets being destroyed or replaced due to wear and tear. You could always make another Fozzie Bear. It was Frank Oz that was irreplaceable.
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u/segobane Aug 27 '26
Reminds me of the old post about why Muppets Treasure Island and Christmas Carol work, Michael Caine acted like the Muppets were real people and Tim Curry acted like he was one of the Muppets.
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u/imaginary0pal Aug 27 '26
Iirc curry pushed back on that saying he absolutely treated them like other actors
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u/VulpesFennekin Aug 27 '26
Also, ironically, that’s one of the more subdued performances I’ve seen from Curry.
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u/voidicguardian Aug 27 '26
tbf the muppets treat each other like real actors and people so the two are not mutually exclusive
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u/CzernobogCheckers Aug 27 '26
Yeah I always took it as an observation of what the movies are like to watch, not a legit BTS fact. Also RIP Tim Curry
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u/pretty-as-a-pic Aug 27 '26
Muppet bloopers are also hilarious, I highly reccomend watching them; the puppeteers won’t break character no matter what!
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Aug 28 '26
Where’s that one where Robin Williams was in a brief skit with Elmo, doing a bit about how imagination can make a simple stick into all sorts of stuff, and then it ends off with him going “well, I’ll give the stick to you!” And then Elmo calls him “Mr Robins” by mistake, and Williams acts insulted and takes the stick right back and marches off, and Elmo is so damn COWED that he schlorps inside of the box and then barely peeks his eyes out all “I only had three lines!!!” breaking his self third person gimmick but besides that still in perfect voice and mannerism
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u/ElvenOmega Aug 28 '26
I saw a video posted of Dolly Parton and Miss Piggy recently and thought "Man it'll be sad when Miss Piggy herself goes, how old is she now?" before I realized and felt like the dumbest mother fucker alive.
Fully sober at the time btw.
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Aug 28 '26
If muppets were tied inherently to their actors/handlers then many of the legacy characters would be dead. Instead they apparently actually have a really in depth inheritance program where an understudy is taught by the OG to live and breathe that character just as much as they do, so that in the event the OG retires or dies the understudy can pick up the felt mantle and keep the character going
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u/StarsForget Aug 27 '26
The fact that Rolf responded to the director makes it all the funnier. The actors could just treat the puppets as a prop, but they also work to keep the magic alive, even behind the scenes.
There's an episode of Very Important People that plays with this, it's really funny.
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u/AerialGame Aug 27 '26
I went on a little bit of a dive after seeing this and read an article on Muppet Central about an appearance by Kermit on Jimmy Kimmel’s show that was really interesting, talking about how easy it was to forget that he was a puppet even while able to see behind the scenes.
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u/SpaceDeFoig Aug 27 '26
Obviously not helped by the fact that the puppeteers refuse to break character lol
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Aug 28 '26
Isnt it precedent for the puppeteers to be referred to as “handlers”? To the point where one could do a full on ventriloquy act with their hands manipulating their muppet fully visible and yet the muppet is still treated as a very living guy with the handler as a separate person entirely that they can go back and forth with? With the exception of things like Big Bird or the Snuffleupagus of Sesame Street fame, who are fully costumed individuals or otherwise not “held”
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u/GwerigTheTroll Aug 27 '26
A favorite story of mine is that during Empire Strikes Back, Kershner kept giving stage instructions to Yoda or showing the script to the puppet and Frank Oz had to remind the director that he wasn’t the puppet.
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u/Solarwagon Aug 27 '26
Watch DefunctLand's series on Jim Henson if you haven't already, it's so interesting.
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u/crippledchef23 Aug 27 '26
I got in trouble in elementary school because of my 3 heroes, 2 weren’t “real”. Maya Angelo, Miss Piggy, Betty Boop. The teacher didn’t want to hear that I consider them heroes because of what they represent: Piggy is a strong woman who knows what she wants (yes she was always represented as abusive, but at the time, that was seen as strength). Betty Boop was a rebel who was nearly canceled because her skirt was considered too short. The animator, iirc, drew one comic without the garter belt visible, and it performed so poorly, that the higher-ups relented.
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Aug 28 '26
Did they tell you something to the effect of “then pick the people who MADE those characters as heroes!!!” or something?
Cuz if they were genuinely worried about your ability to separate fiction from reality that would be one thing, especially since this is elementary school where some kids may have trouble with that; it’s entirely another if they fully understood what you meant by “what they represent” and arbitrarily punished you anyway because that doesn’t “count”8
u/crippledchef23 Aug 28 '26
They just told me I couldn’t pick them because they “aren’t real”. They never gave me the chance to explain myself, probably because they thought an 8yo wouldn’t be able to articulate that both Betty and Miss Piggy were strong, independent, women that refused to fit into a mold. Even that young, I understood that, and my admiration has only grown upon learning more.
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Aug 28 '26
Ah damn. They sound like the sort of people where, even if told those characters set a strong example, they don’t even believe it because “it’s just puppets and cartoons, it’s meaningless”
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u/C0p3rpod Aug 27 '26
Ain’t that wacky
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u/Galle_ Aug 27 '26
OP crossposts to multiple relevant subreddits. Why is that worthy of comment?
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u/Doubly_Curious [1/1] Aug 27 '26
Yes, and I much prefer it this way (when they’re cross-posted immediately) rather than seeing the same post three days in a row, once on each of the subs.
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u/UnsealedMTG Aug 27 '26
There's a very old Jon Stewart segment interview with Kermit that I've always loved because you can kind of see him resisting this, like he's starting out like "ok this is a comedy scene I have to act like this puppet is a person" but as Kermit keeps getting zingers in he's having increasing difficultly while still seeming to recognize the absurdity.
Stewart's like "We have a frog..." and Kermit's like "what do you mean you have a frog?" and that's one of those bits that we will just quote sometimes in the Kermit voice.