Muppets Tonight: What went wrong

BlakeConor14

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Muppets tonight was the first muppet tv show to air after the death of Jim Henson in 1996 on ABC but was cancelled after one season and the second aired over on the Disney Channel.


So today I'm looking at what went wrong.
But before we start I actually really like it.

1. New Show new host. Clifford took charge as the main character of Muppets Tonight which is good in suppose if your die hard fans like us but for regular viewers nobody new who he was. Which instantly made people switch off as the first character they look for is Kermit.

2. Lack of Classic characters. The nineties was a tough time for classic characters. No scooter or Janice. Rowlf and Dr teeth. And frank Oz was practically retired from his muppet duties so the regular viewers looking for these characters would have switched off.

3. Too many new and not funny characters.
The muppets tonight writers had to try and replace the old classic characters with new ones in there roles and it didn't work. Some characters were great (mainly Bill and Brian characters) and the rest didn't.
4. Lame pig 90s tv show parodys - that's all I need to say on this one.



Let me know your views on why Muppets Tonight didn't work
 

dwayne1115

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Muppets tonight was the first muppet tv show to air after the death of Jim Henson in 1996 on ABC but was cancelled after one season and the second aired over on the Disney Channel.


So today I'm looking at what went wrong.
But before we start I actually really like it.

1. New Show new host. Clifford took charge as the main character of Muppets Tonight which is good in suppose if your die hard fans like us but for regular viewers nobody new who he was. Which instantly made people switch off as the first character they look for is Kermit.

2. Lack of Classic characters. The nineties was a tough time for classic characters. No scooter or Janice. Rowlf and Dr teeth. And frank Oz was practically retired from his muppet duties so the regular viewers looking for these characters would have switched off.

3. Too many new and not funny characters.
The muppets tonight writers had to try and replace the old classic characters with new ones in there roles and it didn't work. Some characters were great (mainly Bill and Brian characters) and the rest didn't.
4. Lame pig 90s tv show parodys - that's all I need to say on this one.



Let me know your views on why Muppets Tonight didn't work
I think the two characters we really got out of Muppets Tonight were Bobo and Pepe.
 

LittleJerry92

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Well, for a start, it felt kind of rushed and pretty watered down compared to The Muppet Show.
 

minor muppetz

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I want to say it was too much focus on new characters (though I do like a lot of the new characters, including many who barely if ever made it past the shows cancellation) and not enough focus on old characters, as well as the lack of full musical numbers. But then again, were casual fans (not us) bothered by those? One explanation for the lack of full musical numbers was that audiences were not interested in musical numbers at the time (I would have liked the full numbers back then, I think I was also expecting an album and maybe a compilation video and kept wondering how it could be done if they cut from so many on-stage acts before they were really done).

Casual fans were probably bothered by Kermit not being the host (and wondering who Clifford was) and might have been bothered by Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and Animal not appearing that often (at the time I really only noticed Fozzie's appearances being limited, I knew Frank Oz was also a director but didn't realize his directorial career limited his Muppet involvement), but would very many of the casual fans have been complaining about not seeing Scooter, Rowlf, Robin, The Swedish Chef, and most of the Electric Mayhem? Not to mention classic characters who were a lot more minor.

Some of the writers and producers have defended their use of new characters, referring to it as a "next generation" of Muppets (maybe it should have been titled "Muppets: The Next Generation"). If "Muppets" wasn't in the title, fans probably wouldn't have reacted so negatively to so many new characters (but then would it have been canceled sooner, if it made it past a pitch or pilot stage?), but with "Muppets" in the title, fans expected to see many of their favorite characters. It is a difficult decision to make in how different from the old show to make it, what expectations to meet or defy. I wonder how the fans would have responded if it was full of old characters, had the same format, but didn't have any of the old recurring sketches (or variants of old recurring sketches).

I think Jim Lewis said in his Muppetzine interview that fans like the old characters because they're familiar with them and wanted to have more of a challenge, which I feel they shouldn't have done. I think somebody else (Kirk Thatcher, perhaps?) said in a Muppet Mindset interview that characters like Lew Zealand and Uncle Deadly are limited (but Lew Zealand has done plenty of non-fish stuff, in fact he didn't use or reference fish in The Great Muppet Caper, the movie where he had the biggest role, and Uncle Deadly doesn't seem like a one-note gag character, not to mention in the years since he has managed to become a major character), but also pointed out that The Muppet Show introduced new characters all the time. But the difference is that with The Muppet Show, there was no real set grouping of what Muppets are THE Muppets (people might have thought of Kermit and Rowlf, and maybe the Sesame Street Muppets, but probably not many others), with TMS locking those Muppets into peoples minds as The Muppets (even if there were occasional further uses of the Muppets name in titles that significantly introduced new characters, like Muppet Sing-Alongs or Muppet Time or the Muppet Workshop toyline). By the time Muppets Tonight came out, fans had higher expectations of which Henson creations are The Muppets (of course, there also seems to be clueless fans who mistakenly refer to the Sesame Street characters as Muppets as if they think the Sesame Street Muppets are The Muppets). The Jim Henson Hour also had a lot more new Muppets than old ones, but I think most people thought of the show as The Jim Henson Hour more than they thought of the first half-hour as MuppeTelevision.

I guess one of the biggest benefits of The Jim Henson Company selling the Muppets to Disney is that they needed to create a distinction in which Muppets are The Muppets, and it seems less likely that a new Muppet show would have so many new characters and very few old ones (though Statler and Waldorf: From the Balcony had several, and The Muppets Kitchen introduced a new character as the lead Muppet, and it seems America's Next Muppet would have brought on some new characters), and we barely got any new Muppet characters on the French Muppet TV or the 2015 series (while it's great we got so many classic characters, I do kinda wish they'd introduced a few more new characters than they did). I remember when the 2002 series was announced (and also when EM.TV announced a series in 2000), I felt confident that Henson would have learned from its "mistake" and not introduce so many new characters at the expense of limiting the classic characters, but I wonder if I am right. Announcements for the 2002 series said that there would be new characters (which kinda worried me about them introducing too many new characters), but the pilot script primarily featured classic characters (I don't remember any new characters in that script). I think the company started to be a lot more aware of the fanbase during the early 2000s, but I can't help but think that if Henson was in charge of the 2015 series, we'd have gotten a lot more new characters and maybe less old ones.

And another thing about Disney and new characters: although they do have Puppet Heap building the puppets now, I can't help but think Disney wants to save money by using whatever puppets are still in working condition. In the last decade we've seen a lot of scarcely-used puppets built around 1996, and I think some of the classic minor characters used in recent productions were the same puppets as before (it was confirmed that they still used the original Lips up until it broke in 2015). I sometimes wonder if the current Bobo and Big Mean Carl puppets are the originals or not (they would have had to have rebuilt Pepe by now - and the Making of Muppets from Space book shows a picture of several identical Pepe puppets being built). The fact that the last two Muppet movies pretty much celebrated their history and that many recent Disney movies have had more nostalgia focus might have played a role as well (and in one of Steve Whitmire's posts, he said that the current head of the Muppets Studio had a "no Muppet left behind" mindset).

It makes me wonder about Sesame Street, if Henson was more interested in creating new characters than Sesame Workshop was, considering we haven't really had many new Sesame Street characters since Henson sold them to SW. I think we did continue to get a number of new characters for about a year after the sale, but those characters didn't really last, so maybe that played a part in it, or maybe it's because the format change happened only a couple years later, making it a bit difficult to really develop a lot of new characters. Though it seems like we've suddenly gotten a lot more new characters in the last few years, ironically after the producer decided to focus on significantly less characters AND the show got shortened to a half-hour (which would mean even less time to devote to characters). Since then we've gotten Julia, Rudy, Rudy's father (not sure how major he is), four new characters from Smart Cookies, Gonker being carried over from The Furchester Hotel to the domestic show (but who knows if he'll continue to be part of the show for much longer?), and the sudden return/recasting of Herry Monster.
 

Muppet Master

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Muppets Tonight came at a time when the muppets were in a disarray. With main characters like Kermit neglected & minor ones like Clifford put in the spotlight, it simply had no appeal to mainstream viewers. Personally, I think it was a solid series.
 

MartyMuppets

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I think it had potential for sure. In my opinion the 13 episodes in which Statler and Waldorf are depicted as watching the show from an old folks retirement home and making sardonic jokes about how bad it all is, feel very much like a contemporary variation of The Muppet Show.

But with the other nine episodes when the two old men appear in other venues at random, things start to slowly fall apart. They stop focussing upon the Muppets Tonight show primarily and introduce sub-stories that take place far away from KMUP Studios and intersperse sketches back at the show Clifford is trying to put on. In Coolio's episode there is hardly anything to do with him as guest. He does do things but the show is not primarily about him guest starring on Muppets Tonight, but about Grouper, whatever his name is, taking over and trying to run things his way. There isn't even scenes where Clifford opens the show or ends it introducing Coolio as their guest. Imagine if any Muppet Show had omitted Kermit's welcome to the audience and/or farewell bringing out the guest one last time. It would have felt so wrong and it does so here for sure. Some episodes don't even have official guest stars to speak of.

In my opinion what started as a new and updated Muppet Show evolved into an elaborately fancy sketch show anthology type sitcom. This was a huge mistake deviating from the premiss established by Jim in the original. My theory is that devoted fans generally wanted to see the same sort of thing with their beloved Muppet characters, even if naturally the basic setting needed to be altered to accomodate modern times..
 

minor muppetz

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But with the other nine episodes when the two old men appear in other venues at random, things start to slowly fall apart. They stop focussing upon the Muppets Tonight show primarily and introduce sub-stories that take place far away from KMUP Studios and intersperse sketches back at the show Clifford is trying to put on. In Coolio's episode there is hardly anything to do with him as guest. He does do things but the show is not primarily about him guest starring on Muppets Tonight, but about Grouper, whatever his name is, taking over and trying to run things his way. There isn't even scenes where Clifford opens the show or ends it introducing Coolio as their guest. Imagine if any Muppet Show had omitted Kermit's welcome to the audience and/or farewell bringing out the guest one last time. It would have felt so wrong and it does so here for sure. Some episodes don't even have official guest stars to speak of.
I thought it was better with Statler and Waldorf watching from a variety of locations than just watching in a nursing home.

Interesting about Coolio, that one also announced Don Rickles as a guest, and was the only episode to really announce two different guest stars (a few episodes had a celebrity in enough plot to qualify as a second guest star, but wasn't announced as a guest), and I feel it hardly had anything to do with Rickles as a guest while I thought Coolio was treated more like a guest star. I guess it doesn't help that the Disney Channel promo for the episode focused on Coolio with no mention/footage of Don Rickles. And that episode also had special appearances by a number of celebrities who weren't announced as guest stars.
 

MWoO

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To me it seemed that they never got to finish a lot of the bits. I watched all of Muppets Tonight when it was new, even taped them to re-watch them (oh, the pre-YouTube mid 90's how I miss you). There are very few bits that were as memorable as say Pigs In Space or Vet's Hospital. A lot of stuff just went by quickly. I do fondly remember Tales From the Vet and to some extent Bay of Pigs Watch.

The show also suffered from a lack of Fozzie and Piggy. Frank Oz had not yet turned his characters over, but he also wasn't always available to be a regular. So, Fozzie and Piggy were thrown into bits here and there, but weren't regulars. One of the episodes I like the best is the Whoopie Golberg episode, which was very Piggy heavy (no pun intended...well maybe pun intended).

The show did give us some great new characters though. Pepe, Bobo, and Johnny are my favorites. I wish Jonny would make a come back. Part of the reason I enjoyed Happy Time Murders was because Phil Phillips looked a bit like and sounded exactly like Johnny (Since Bill performed both). Some of the characters blended in quite nicely with the classic characters and became classics of their own.

It seems the Jim Henson Hour suffered from a lot of the same issues Muppets Tonight did. Too few classic Frank Oz characters, too many new characters, rushed bits, etc. Though I did love JHH (or at least I do now, as I didn't know it existed when I was a kid). It seems Jim Henson wanted to steer away from The Muppet Show character and try inventing new ones to replace them. He knew his little troupe was breaking apart and he didn't want to recast at the time. Seems like, besides Kermit being recast and a few others, Brian Henson felt the same way with Muppets Tonight.

Either way, I loved the show then and I still do now. I just want one Muppet project to really be a success. There are only so many times I can watch the old stuff. I really need to see SOMETHING from Disney. This may be the driest Muppet spell we've seen in a LONG time.
 
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