OK film fans, it's Saturday and my day has been full of song, wine and women. Well, actually I was doing a little house cleaning, car fixing and UFC watching, but you know, basically the same thing. And since I've been ranting vociferously over the past few days, today seems like a good day for some mindless fun.
It's common nowadays for children's films to be filled with winks, asides and jokes intended solely for the adults in the audience. But this wasn't always the case. Most of the early canon of children's films, which are predominately Disney films, are based off of fairy tales created as parables intended to teach rudimentary social norms. Tonight's film is perhaps the first incarnation of children's films aimed at entertaining the adults as much as the children.
The Muppet Movie is one of the few children's films from my youth that is not only still very funny, but moving as well. The film brought all of the characters from the hit TV show onto the silver screen and into the real world. Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzy the Bear (my favorite!) and the rest of the cast not only made the transition to the big screen easily, they jumped out of the TV right into the real world. The premise is simple; a big Hollywood agent, Dom De Luise, hears Kermit singing and playing the Ukulele and, as luck would have it, Hollywood is currently looking for a singing frog. Kermit sets off on a road trip of epic proportions, encounters all of our favorite friends from the show and teaches us wonderful lessons about perseverance in the face of obstacles, the importance of belief in yourself and your dreams.
The groundbreaking trend here is the infusion of stars in cameo roles. Nowadays, it's always in the form of voice overs, but here, since this is puppets interacting with the real world, we get actual star presence sprinkled through the film. At the time it was a veritable who's who of comedy stars including appearances by Steve Martin and Richard Pryor in addition to the great Madeline Kahn, Mel Brooks, Bob Hope and motherf---ing Orson Welles! Let's see you top that Shrek.
Anyway, the true purpose of this post is really just to reminisce about how much I loved this film as a kid, how much it has stayed with me for all these years and the fact that writing this blog allows me to post one of my favorite scenes of all time. Life's like a movie, write your own ending...
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