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The SmarK DVD Rant for The Great Muppet Caper: 50th Anniversary Edition
So back in the days of my youth, there resided a well-worn copy of the Muppet Movie soundtrack in our car’s cassette player, back in the days when you could buy cassettes in music stores. So it’s not without a certain amount of nostalgia that I plugged in the recent DVD release of the Muppet Show’s first season and was delighted to find out that the humor and atmosphere carried over to my adulthood just as well as they did when I was a pre-teen. And hey, what would Disney milking the Muppet legacy be without another rerelease of the movies? So while more people prefer the more whimsical Muppet Movie these days, I had always been a fan of the sequel as a kid, and I was curious to know if the held up today.
The Film
Opening with a self-referential credits sequence where Fozzie and Kermit comment on the credits currently rolling by, the backstory is quickly established by our heroes introducing themselves as identical twin reporters, with Gonzo as their photographer. The identical twin gag provides much of the movie’s running jokes, like passers-by being unable to tell the difference between a bear and a frog because “bears wear hats.” It also sets up a great sight gag about their father. Anyway, they immediately blow the story of the year about valuable jewels getting stolen from behind their backs, and thus off they go to England to interview the victimized Lady Holiday. And although it’s England, they manage to find a sleazy hotel to stay in, populated entirely by transplanted American Muppet weirdos.
Meanwhile, high fashion designer Lady Holiday (played as such a broad parody of self-important designers that she’d fit right in on America’s Next Top Model) hires adoring fan Miss Piggy as a receptionist, and delivers some exposition about her bad brother so heavy-handed that they actually have her stop and say that she’s delivering exposition. There’s cutely self-referential and then there’s clunky. Of course, crack reporter Kermit mistakes Piggy for Lady Holiday, and the romantic sparks fly. All the expected Muppet cameos start flying (Swedish Chef and the Muppet Newscaster being my favorites) and a bevy of reasonably-catchy musical interludes lead to John Cleese being tragically wasted in a bit part as the befuddled resident of Piggy’s fake apartment, 17 Highbrow Street. The whole sequence was begging for an outburst of Fawlty-like brilliance from John, and he just played it so low-key that the expected payoff never came. Not that a joke about how the British are so polite that they worry about accidentally recommending a supper club instead of a restaurant to burglars isn’t funny, but this could have been so much more.
While dining at the Dubonnet Club, and thus giving Fozzie the funniest line of the movie (“A place like this is so classy, there oughtta be pretzels on the table”), the plot finally starts going somewhere after 45 minutes, as the crooked Nicky Holiday (Charles Grodin, another wasted casting choice) and a group of evil models engineer the theft of Lady Holiday’s necklace. Using the old-timey showstopping number as a distraction was a nice touch, however. Sadly, Miss Piggy’s secret is revealed to Kermit in a heavy-handed Cinderella allusion, and the movie grinds right back to a halt again as Peter Falk does a walk-on cameo very unlike Columbo, and it’s more filler music.
So with the big fashion show comes the big frameup, as Nicky plants the evidence on Piggy despite being madly in love with her. Piggy proceeds to steal the show as a swimsuit model, and then we get the most head-scratching moment of the movie, as Jim Henson’s big centerpiece is a Busby Berkeley synchronized swimming musical number of all things. This just goes on WAY too long as the movie falls further and further away from the original spirit of the Muppets — human emotions and quick sight gags.
Thankfully, with the musical numbers finally out of the way, the plot gets to moving again, and the real fun begins in the final 20 minutes, as we get a series of stupid (in the good sense) gags like Fozzie and Kermit trying to break into the Mallory Gallery as pizza delivery twins and Beaker getting cruelly sacrificed in order to break a circuit. And of course Miss Piggy gets the big stunt-laden moment to save the day with some motorcycles and ass-kicking karate for the climax.
Funny moments aside, this movie just didn’t work most of the time, which I think came from Henson veering away from what made his Muppets work in the first place, a problem which would sadly continue until (and after) his death. It’s a decent movie for the nostalgia set and for kids, but it’s lacking the magic the Muppets had in their prime, trying to a funny genre spoof instead of just being funny.
The Video
And what the heck happened here? An absolutely awful job by Disney, looking like they basically dumped the VHS transfer onto DVD without any cleanup work done at all. Grain is everywhere, colors are blah, and it’s just generally no better than the videotape version. Major disappointment here, although it’s available in both anamorphic widescreen or full-screen on the same disc.
The Audio
It’s in “Dolby Digital 5.1”, but forget about hearing anything from speakers other than the center channel for the duration of the movie. It’s clearly just the original mono soundtrack with no upgrade done.
The Extras
What extras? You get a five-minute unfunny interview with Miss Piggy, and the usual bevy of forced previews from Disney. The dumbest of these has to be “The Wild,” which is a note-for-note ripoff of Madagascar, down to the funny penguins and lion leaving the New York Zoo for the wild. I mean, it was an OK movie, but do we really need another interpretation of the same story? I hope Dreamworks sues their asses off.
The Ratings:
The Film: **1/2
The Video: *
The Audio: *
The Extras: 1/2*
