A man is trapped underwater in a diving bell. His body crushed in a painful position, as limited oxygen is pumped into his lungs through a rubber tube. He is kept down there for three hours at a time, over a span of five days. To add to the discomfort, one arm is held vertically above his head and locked into place. He could have died.
This is the opening scene to The Muppet Movie, and if you cannot recall it, it’s because none of this happens on screen. Instead, the viewer soars down from the heavens and slowly focuses on a frog, sitting on a log in a swamp. The frog is strumming a banjo and earnestly singing The Rainbow Connection, a north star of a song so beautiful and true that it remains a standard 40 years later. It’s a scene so magical that you don’t think at all about the man in the diving bell, his trapped arm bringing that frog’s dreams into life.
That man, you may have guessed, was Jim Henson, a wide-eyed creative who, by the age of 43, had invented children’s educational television with Sesame Street and, with The Muppet Show, steered five seasons of high-rating primetime television that happened to star puppets.
The Muppet Movie was his first leap from the relative safety of the television onto the big screen. While there are enough technical film-making feats in this film to wow even the most hardened cinephile, the true achievement lies in its emotional heft. Until the first Muppet movie, the Muppets were slapstick buffoons, dropping one-liners between explosions and on-stage mishaps. Here, Kermit’s wide-eyed romanticism is the key.
Luckily for Henson, the story doesn’t stay in the swamp long: a talent scout rows up to Kermit and fills his head with dreams of show business. But while fame and fortune are nice thoughts, it’s the promise of making millions of people happy that sings to Kermit – so he packs up his banjo and sets on a cross-country road trip to Hollywood.
As Kermit goes Kerouac, he accumulates a ragbag band of misfits with similar dreams of wanderlust and stardom. There’s the hapless standup comedian Fozzie Bear; a musical group of 60s burnouts with names like Floyd Pepper and Dr Teeth; a Randy Newman-style piano man (who happens to be a dog); and a certain diva pig, who Kermit obviously falls madly in love with. Not to mention cameos from the likes of Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Orson Welles.
But Kermit also attracts the attention of evil Doc Hopper (Charles Durning), a southern businessman who thinks Kermit is the perfect talent to advertise his range of delicious frog legs. Kermit is disgusted, but Hopper will stop at nothing to secure his talents. It’s not easy being green.
This is a Muppet movie, but it’s also a film made in the late 1970s by a bunch of young hippie creatives; this means a lot of oddball humour, sly Hare Krishna jokes, and the liberal breaking of the fourth wall – at one point Kermit is rescued from certain doom by characters who simply read ahead in the script. And of course, it is also a musical. When Gonzo, the blue, feathered creature of an ambiguous species, croons the line “there isn’t a word yet/for old friends who just met”, you may find yourself welling up.
This is the first movie I can remember really loving and it’s been a lifelong love affair. There’s something about Kermit’s belief in his own destiny, his willingness to follow the siren call beckoning him towards a larger, scarier life that is very captivating to a child. Even as an adult, I would follow Kermit anywhere. He believes, and makes everyone around him believe, too. And when Kermit briefly loses belief, the others keep believing until he does again, too. This film is about fate, frogs, friendship – but, above all, it’s about belief.
Of course the Muppets make it to Hollywood, despite facing the multiple mishaps that make for a good road movie. As stated, this is a Muppet movie. Things tend to end well in Muppet movies. To this point, the film closes with a big, musical, happy ending, in which the entire crux of the film comes into focus: Kermit, flanked by his new friends, all singing to the camera: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.”
