{"id":357069,"date":"2026-02-26T09:29:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T09:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/357069\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T09:29:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T09:29:11","slug":"the-muppets-body-horror-might-seem-extreme-but-children-need-to-learn-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/357069\/","title":{"rendered":"The Muppets\u2019 body horror might seem extreme, but children need to learn \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A frog, a pig, a bear, some chickens, a bespectacled human man made of felt, a piano-playing dog, Seth Rogen<\/a>, an eagle, a non-specific drumming organism, a Swedish gastronomist and a brainy boffin walk into a theatre. The frog and the pig seem to be in some sort of sexual relationship. The Swede has a felt body but human hands. The boffin toys with the very fabric of nature. His assistant is in hell. The chickens can sing, but like chickens might sing if chickens really sang. <\/p>\n

These are the Muppets<\/a>. They are all, understandably given their freakish condition, in show business. And they are very, very old. They have been around for a long time. Indeed, I believe the frog, the pig, the bear, some chickens and the piano-playing dog are, in fact, among the major arcana in the standard Tarot deck. Though they are largely forgotten now, except by your dad every time he\u2019s watching Oireachtas Report. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like the bloody Muppet Show,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat obscure pop cultural reference are you making now, father?\u201d you say, your eyes flicking up temporarily from your AI-generated memes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d he says with tears in his eyes. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is Oireachtas report?\u201d asks your child, her eyes flicking back from the neura-link feed going straight to her brain. <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d you say with tears in your eyes.<\/p>\n

It is said that the Muppets will return for the end-times and it is also said that Seth Rogen will get around to remaking all Generation X-beloved franchises at some point. And so it is that Seth Rogen has brought back the Muppet Show, for one show only, to Disney+<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The raison d\u2019\u00eatre of these Muppets, after all, is the entertainment of what they presumably call \u201cflesh Muppets\u201d (you and me). It begins with Kermit the Frog (I\u2019m thinking of changing my name to \u201cPatrick the Human\u201d) wandering around the old Muppet Theatre (\u201cD\u00e1il Eireann!\u201d shouts your dad) reminiscing about days of yore as melancholy piano music plays. It turns out this is actually being played by Rowlf the Dog, who makes a meta joke about elegiac montages. The Muppets always loved a good meta joke. <\/p>\n

Now, the Muppets\u2019 whole thing is the staging of old-fashioned variety shows and therefore they need guest stars. In this TV special they have, for example, commandeered a very Muppet-like blonde ingenue with whom they caper and banter and lark and yodel. It is the Carry On franchise\u2019s Babs Windsor and it\u2019s nice to see the charismatic diva back on television with her excellent comic timing and ability to control a rowdy barroom brawl (Babs beats up a bunch of Muppet barflies at one point). She also has a surprisingly good voice (editor\u2019s note: this is not Babs Windsor, it\u2019s Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>). <\/p>\n

Babs Windsor and Miss Piggy engage in some respectful competition over frocks and, I think, the erotic ownership of Kermit the Frog (editor\u2019s note: it\u2019s still not Babs Windsor, it\u2019s Sabrina Carpenter). Babs Windsor goes on to sing Islands in the Stream with Kermit on a boat in a swamp surrounded by an all-Muppet ecosystem, only for Kermit to be doused in the water and violently replaced with his porcine love, Miss Piggy. The Sapphic undertones are clear. It\u2019s the nineties, after all. Miss Piggy and Babs Windsor are clearly in love. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s more! There is a Bridgerton spoof in which pigs wear wigs and I now feel pigs should wear wigs and when I am minister of agriculture in Ireland\u2019s Own Muppet Show (\u201cThe Oireachtas!\u201d screams your father), I will make this happen. <\/p>\n

There is a popular science segment in which the calmly spoken, bespectacled but eyeless scientist Dr Bunsen injects his panicky, theremin-voiced assistant Beaker with a serum that cause his eyes to pop out of their sockets only to be replaced by new eyes, which in turn pop out of the sockets and are propelled across the auditorium. <\/p>\n

One of the many disembodied eyes propels itself into the mouth of comedian Maya Rudolph, who is in the audience with her gentleman lover, a Muppet monster. Maya Rudolph promptly chokes to death, which the Muppets take reasonably calmly (the time of man is, after all, at an end). Then, as her corpse is being removed from the premises, she is revived when a bit of the set falls on her stomach and Beaker\u2019s projectile eye pops from her gullet. <\/p>\n

Look, this bit of body horror might seem extreme to you, but children need to learn. As usual, the Muppets are protected from criticism by anticipatory barbs from hostile audience members Statler and Waldorf. \u201cThe show\u2019s not half bad!\u201d says Statler, lining up his comedy partner for the punchline. \u201cIt\u2019s all bad,\u201d says Waldorf, taking it home. <\/p>\n

Some journalists are inspired by Woodward and Bernstein. As one-time \u201ccritic of the year\u201d, my journalistic role models are Statler and Waldorf. I love them. And I love The Muppets. I think there should be more Muppet Shows, chaotic, musical, gag-filled variety performances for all the family, featuring cartoonish celebrities and animated felt effigies of weirdly-voiced humans and not-remotely-to-scale animals wearing clothes (On that, incidentally: Miss Piggy wears frocks, Kermit is totally nude and Fozzy Bear just wears a hat and a scarf; I don\u2019t know where I\u2019m going with this, but it\u2019s something to think about). And it was nice to see Babs Windsor again (editor\u2019s note: stop it. It\u2019s Sabrina Carpenter. I\u2019m taking this to HR).<\/p>\n

\"TyraTyra Banks, Reality Check: America\u0092s Next Top Model. Photograph: Netflix<\/p>\n

The Muppets are disturbingly good fun in a good way. Reality Check: America\u2019s Next Top Model<\/a> (Netflix<\/a>) is largely just disturbing. It focuses on the cut-throat brutality of reality TV in the lawless noughties. In particular, it looks at America\u2019s Next Top Model reality TV show hosted by supermodel Tyra Banks. Banks, the presenter and co-producer of the original show, makes for a cold and steely interviewee, unaccountably dressed like Kermit the Frog in his reporter guise (a trench coat), she seems completely untouched by criticism and by the abuses perpetuated on the young women who took part in the series. During its run, young women were manipulated and verbally abused. Racial stereotypes were perpetuated. In the most upsetting instance, a drunk young woman was sexually assaulted on camera and nobody from the production team intervened.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I\u2019m not sure what I feel about retrospective deep dives into morally dubious pop cultural phenomena. I\u2019m sure they deliver some sense of justice for victims but, as with true crime documentaries, they also allow viewers to be voyeuristic all over again, with an added sheen of moral purity.<\/p>\n

As my colleague Laura Kennedy recently noted<\/a>, these documentaries can give viewers an unearned sense of ethical superiority, when the main difference between the bad old noughties and the 2020s is that the abusive treatment of young women has just moved to social media. Part of me thinks we should just rewind television to an earlier era of television entirely. With that in mind, Disney+<\/a> also has many series of the original Muppet Show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A frog, a pig, a bear, some chickens, a bespectacled human man made of felt, a piano-playing dog,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[1887,18,117,19,17,127,12474,974,23567],"class_list":["post-357069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-disney","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-netflix","tag-patrick-freyne","tag-sabrina-carpenter","tag-seth-rogen"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116136232681335521","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}