New Collectibles • 12/26 - Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street Book and Audio CD Narrated by Caroll Spinney • 11/11 - Everyday Heroes DVD Box Set • 11/4 - Fraggle Rock Complete Series, The Christmas Toy and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Chrismtas • 11/1 - Elmo Live Talking Plush • 10/28 - It's Hard Out Here For a Shrimp • 10/22 - Build a Whatnot at the Muppet Whatnot Workshop • 10/14 - Elmo's Christmas Countdown DVD • 2009 Calendars: Muppets | Fraggles • 9/30 - Abby in Wonderland DVD and Sesame Street Playground CD • 9/9 - Henson's Unstable Fables: Tortoise vs. Hare DVD • 9/2 - Jim Henson's Doodle Dreams Join the Muppet Central Mailing List

Muppet cars will zoom at NASCAR this summer

By Christopher Graham
February 21, 2002

This summer Muppet RaceMania is back! No I'm not talking about the sequel to the 2000 Playstation game, instead this time the Muppets will race in the ranks of NASCAR.

This years Tropicana 400 to be held in Chicago on July 14, 2002 will be featuring cars with your favorite Muppets like Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Pepe, and several other Muppet characters with special paint schemes. These specially painted cars will be raced by NASCAR's best like Dale Jarrett, Ricky Rudd, Bobby Labonte, Jimmy Spencer and Johnny Benson with each car featuring a different Muppet character.

The best part is these specialty cars will be available to purchase in limited addition die cast cars. These will be exact replicas of the original vehicles and are available for pre-order trough RacingUSA-Online. Although the paint schemes will not be released until next month (specialty paint schemes are usually used as a gimmick to draw more people to the race), it's a good idea to purchase these cars now because they tend to go fast.

These specialty cars are in honor of the continuing celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Muppet Show. NASCAR, over the past 10 years has become Americas number one spectator sport (averaging around 100,000 people at a typical race). This should be the one race to catch this year if you're a Muppet fan. One could only hope these cars will be at future MuppetFests for fans.