The Muppets Take Manhattan

Though it is the first disappointing Muppet project since their brief stint on the debut season of Saturday Night Live in 1975, this third official Muppet movie still delivers some terrific production numbers, inspired zaniness, and bittersweet moments. Structured somewhat like an old-school Warner Brothers backstage musical, with Kermit and Miss Piggy in place of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, the film begins with the Muppet gang as they all graduate from college and hatch a plan to take their senior revue to Broadway. But the naively optimistic crew quickly learns that New York is a tough town, and it's hard to find a producer willing to take a chance on a quaint, old-fashioned show, especially one with a frog and a pig as the stars. After trying in vain to get their little musical launched, the old friends end up going their separate ways while Kermit stays in NYC to try and find a backer. He gets a job washing dishes at a diner and befriends the owner's young daughter, a waitress and budding fashion designer named Jenny. Then, in a twist that only happens in the movies, just as he finds a young producer who wants to put on the show, the frog suffers a blow to the head that gives him amnesia.

By 1984, the original Muppet performers were already starting to drift apart. The team never officially broke up, but The Muppet Show had ended its five-year syndicated run back in '81, which was also the year the second Muppet film, the delightful The Great Muppet Caper, was released. Muppet creator Jim Henson had started new companies and his new creature shop in London, catering to a wide range of media enterprises, including his own cinematic passion project, The Dark Crystal. Muppetter Frank Oz had, by this point, performed Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and he was itching to start a directing career (something Henson helped enable by inviting him to co-direct The Dark Crystal). Many of the Muppet performers still worked on Sesame Street, the new HBO series Fraggle Rock, and other Henson-related efforts, but this film was the first time they were all back together on a project since The Muppet Show had gone off the air. It would turn out to be the last time as well since Henson would die of a streptococcal infection just six years later. Then, just two years after Henson's death, original muppeteer Richard Hunt passed away from AIDS. Thus, The Muppets Take Manhattan is not only the last installment in an unofficial trilogy; it was the last of the original Muppet projects. Because of this, the song "Saying Goodbye," which the characters perform after they decide to go their separate ways, is especially poignant.

The film features all the original Muppet performers that were not solely associated with Sesame Street—Henson, Oz, Hunt, Jerry Nelson, and Dave Goelz—plus a few members of the newer crop of performers—Kathryn Mullen, Karen Prell, and Steve Whitmire. Whitmire, who would eventually go on to take over performing Kermit, joined the Muppets in 1979. His most famous original character, Rizzo the Rat, plays a prominent role in this movie. With Henson in pre-production for a number of projects, Oz took on the role of director and screenwriter, as both he and Henson felt the script commissioned from Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses was too shallow. Patchett (who later created ALF) and Tarses (who created the sitcoms The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The Slap Maxwell Story, and Buffalo Bill) had collaborated on The Great Muppet Caper script with longtime Muppet writer Jerry Juhl and old-school gagman Jack Rose. But Oz felt too much of the humor of their first draft came at the expense of the character relationships, so he did a major rewrite of the script.

The Muppets Take Manhattan certainly gets those character relationships right, though the film is nowhere near as emotionally powerful as The Muppet Movie and lacks the pace, energy, great celebrity cameos, and frequency of laughs found in The Great Muppet Caper. The story just plods along, with lots of pauses and silences that would have been filled with funny bits of business in any prior Muppet production. Likewise, the songs by Jeff Moss, jaunty as they are, can’t hold a candle to the iconic tunes concocted by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher for The Muppet Movie or Joe Raposo for The Muppet Caper.

The star cameos fall a little short in this film as well, though it's great to see Dabney Coleman doing brilliant physical comedy when his conman producer character takes Gonzo and Camilla the Chicken hostage. Likewise, watching Gregory Hines mediate an argument between Kermit and Piggy makes me wish we’d gotten dozens of Gregory Hines comedies to go along with his amazing comedic performances in History of the World Part I and Running Scared. It's also fun to see some brief by very New York cameos from the likes of Mayor Ed Koch, Joan Rivers, Liza Minnelli, and Vincent Sardi Jr.

What stands out the most in this movie are its individual set pieces. The most impressive of these is a fantasy sequence in which Miss Piggy imagines what it would have been like if all the Muppets had known each other when they were toddlers. The "I'm Gonna Always Love You" number is a real showstopper that was so beloved it inspired the popular Muppet cartoon show Muppet Babies. The sequence where all the rats take over the kitchen of the diner is also a hilariously impressive engineering feat. But the film’s innovations are all technical rather than narrative, and the movie builds to a fairly disappointing conclusion—though, at the time this came out, the hype around whether or not the wedding scene between Kermit and Piggy was a legit marriage ceremony was treated almost like a Brangelina or Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez level tabloid story. That extratextual dimension gave the picture's ending a little more heft in 1984, but none of it is actually baked into the picture itself.