I’m James Faraci, The Last Of The Americans and the views I’m about to express are that of my own & some of yours and welcome to another edition of “In Defense Of…” (Show pics of maligned pieces of pop culture while the fanfare from the Olympics play and James comes up after Vanilla Ice slides back and his right hand thumbs up and the words “In Defense Of…” appear to the left of James then cutting to clips of The Muppets in various projects from “The Muppet Show” to “The Great Muppet Caper” to “Muppets Most Wanted”)
TLOTA (Voice over): Recently, there have been rumors that The Muppets were coming back to the small screen with a re-boot of “The Muppet Show” under Bill Prady who had worked in the past with The Muppets on a few projects but he has a big set of shoes to fill. Whose shoes you may ask, well Jim Henson’s of course but after Jim Henson’s passing things weren’t easy but there were decent projects including “Muppet Christmas Carol” & a kind of a Reboot of “The Muppet Show” called “Muppets Tonight” which while it didn’t last long was pretty good. (Cut to James Physically)
TLOTA: But there was one project that didn’t seem to make an impact and did more to knock The Muppets out of prominence and nearly sent them to obscurity. I am of course talking about “Muppets From Space” (Cut to clips of “Muppets From Space” while James does a voice over)
TLOTA (Voice over): And to be honest, it is not as bad as everyone says it was. So this time I will defend probably what many Muppets fans like myself consider a REAL low point.
Muppets From Space is the first post-Henson Muppet film to have the Muppets ‘playing themselves’, after two films of most of them playing characters. And it’s not too bad. It’s not horrible, but there are plenty of things that haven’t aged well, and one or two things that weren’t good ideas to start with. The Hulk Hogan cameo will be lost on anyone not familiar with the whole WCW-NWO thing that was going on at the height of wrestling’s Monday Night Wars.
And I’m not sure how to feel about Gonzo actually being given a possible backstory, when he never really needed one before.
Still, it had plenty of fun moments with the Muppets mostly being themselves. Of the newer characters, Pepe is the biggest standout, breaking away from that dead-end vaudeville act he had with that elephant on ‘Muppets Tonight’. The ending of the movie was, of course, predictable, but it made sense.
All in all, it’s not my favorite of the first three post-Henson movies (my favorite of those would be ‘Muppet Treasure Island’), but it’s not as bad as some people make it out to be.
I’m in agreement. Muppets from Space had its flaws, but it wasn’t a bad movie by any stretch.
Exactly