Showing posts with label Miss Piggy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miss Piggy. Show all posts

Sunday, May 22, 2016

It's time to Dim The Lights...For Now

It looks like the most recent incarnation of "The Muppets" on has bitten the dust.  I admit, I'm a little surprised.  Upon its debut last fall, while receiving mixed reviews from the fans (and from right wing mothers), was pretty well received by the "average consumer".  Ratings were good.  But apparently, they weren't good enough, and, so they dismissed their show runner and hired a replacemtn to steer the show in a new direction.  I, unfortunately, never saw what happened with the new show runner, if the new direction was better than the original, because I didn't make it that far in the series.



When I saw the preview, I was pretty excited.  It was fresh, it was different, and it was modern.  The muppets take on "The office comedy of manners" genre?  I'm in.  And yet, when I saw the first episode, I didn't feel that it quite lived up to its potential.  It was just another "The Office", but with versions of the muppets, slightly altered to fit into this format.   It was like an animated series that had no need to be animated.  The muppets were not needed here.  By the second and third episodes I was watching to support the company, to make sure it was as successful as it could be so that more projects with the muppets would be greenlit.  I was not watching for my own enjoymen.  Watching the show had become a duty, a fan's obligation. I became lax in my viewing, and lagged way behind, never quite catching up.    

Why didn't it work?  A lot of friends that I'd talked to mentioned "how mean the muppets were to each other", and it's true.  They are dismissive of each other, they mock each other, and the sitcoms writers expect the audience to laugh at their failures.  Fozzie and Scooter got particularly rough treatment, being written as "losers" in a way they never had before.  In a way, the muppets at their core, ALL of them, were underdogs.   But they had also always been optimists, dreamers who didn't let their current circumstances get them down.  And news flash-  the muppets have always been kind of mean to each other.  There were "hamhock" jokes tossed about, blatant name calling, karate chops, upstaging, heckling.  Loads of it. They were part of the slings and arrows that the characters faced.  But what they had also always had, was a gigantic overwhelming larger than life love of "SHOWBIZ".  All of them loved what they did, in spite of what it cost them emotionally.  And Kermit, because he felt responsible for all of these misfits, struggled and corralled to make that dream come true for them.  The muppets always reflected ourselves, our struggles to find purpose, and we commiserated.  And the product of their struggles was what we got to cheer, and enjoy.  This kooky, off-beat nostalgia.  I mean the show wasn't desperately grabbing for relevence.  It was a vaudeville show, in the seventies, highlighting novelty songs from the turn of the century, for chrissake.  

  
And then, something happened, and it happened before the death of Jim Henson.  The muppets realized their own success.  They became products, they became "cute", and they capitalized on it.    And they have struggled ever since.  And recently, in a desperate attempt to keep the relevance they won in the new films (which incidentally was a huge hit because it appealed to the Gen X Nostalgia for them) they mutated themselves into this genre.  

And Miss Piggy???  At heart, she, like Fonzie and Kermit and the rest, had always been an underdog.     She was never "on top", but always fighting for the recognition she felt she deserved.  Sure she was angry, but it came from a place of resentment.  It was resentment at being under appreciated and misunderstood- unrecognized for being the star she thought she should be.  It was that very essence, what Frank Oz was eluding to when he said that Miss Piggy was "A truck driver who thought he was a woman".  She was a fish out of water.  And then, sometime in the eighties, Miss Piggy, the character who played the television persona (how's that for meta?) realized that America appreciated her.  And the grande dame act started to come from a different place.  It was now coming from a place of privilege.  But she never lost her heart, until the most recent Muppet Movie, and this new show.  Which have taken the "Actress behind the character" and made her, the character.  

This show needed to make her an underdog again, and aware of that.  Losing her frog, seeing her leap through hoops trying to win him back would have been very satisfying, and if she hadnt done it with such a sense of entitlement, she would have.  If she had lost her job at the talk show, been demoted, and then had to fight her way back up, she would have seemed quite so mean -spirited and smarmy as she came to be perceived.  Yes, she could be bitchy, but that was the frosting on the cake.  It had never really been "the cake".

And now the show has been cancelled.  And, while I'm always sad when the Muppets aren't a rousing success, I now have hope that they will go back to the drawing board and try again, and maybe next time ( and there WILL be a next time) they will get a little bit closer to what it was that made us all love them.


Sunday, October 10, 2010

Top Divas, #6... and why gays REALLY love our divas

6.  Miss Piggy

Miss Piggy is framed for the theft of a jewel and languishes in jail in Jim Henson's 'The Great Muppet Caper'.   (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

She's fierce, determined, extremely confident, a fighter, she is all the grande dames of the theatre bundled up in to one compact little package.  And like any great star, she started out as a minor character and rose to the ranks of cult icon.  She pays tribute to all the great female archetypes at the same time lampooning them.  She proclaims herself to be the greatest star all the while, she grimly acknowledges her physical inadequacies.  She leaps into every great female role ever created, be it Scarlett in "Gone With the Wind", Cleopatra, or Joan of Arc.  She begs, demands, struts, coyly flirts and climbs to the top, over countless bodies, if she must.  But she's not all toughness.  She has a very tender and a surprisingly vulnerable side.  She is the cliche of the soul who's great bravado masks her deep insecurities, which one can only expect from the underdog that she is.  I mean, who would expect a pig from her humble beginnings to win the love of her life, great fame, and personal contentment?  She wills it so, with brutality, humor, and panache.

I was one of many young boys who saw her and instantly fell in awe.  People wonder why we love those great women like Judy, Bette, Barbra, Liza.  I think it's because we appreciate their immense talent and admire the way they reached those heights without the benefits of great physical beauty.  What they had went deeper, but just was just as worthy, more worthy, than the obvious beauty.  Not that these women weren't physically beautiful, but it sometimes took a closer look to see.  And once seen, complemented by those inner gifts, everyone who sees it realizes this is the real thing, more deserving of appreciation than the cookie cutter mold.

As a soft, more artistic, "sensitive" boys growing up in the world we, most of us, realize we will never be the kind of man our fathers want us to be.  We don't fit the accepted mold. We have talents, but not the kind that is considered fit for men.  We have flair, creativity, sensitivity, open emotions.  But what can we do with those gifts that are often seen as liabilities by those who's approval we want to win?  And then we see these women in similar circumstances.  Women who didn't fit the mold that men expected them to.  They had obstacles to overcome, but overcame them because they had something more than that beauty.  A gift that a lot of  men would love to deny because they couldn't mash it down or denigrate it as a commodity for their personal use like they could with physical beauty.  They were feminists all, the great divas.  They make it well known that they are as good as any man, by proclaiming, not that their gifts are the same as the patriarch, but uniquely theirs and equal to any man's.  And as a kid growing up who related to their gifts more than those of the straight man, I took faith in their fight to be heard.  They seemed to be saying to me that their successes and rewards could be mine if I only had faith in my own unique strengths.  Strengths that I might be the only one to see for the time being. 

We don't relate to Garland because her life was rough and our lives are rough.  That story is just another way to keep us down.  The idea that we related to her weaknesses and love to exalt in them, to wallow in them.  No.  We relate to her because she is overcame great odds to rise to great heights.  There was something deep inside her that she didn't always believe in, but that was apparent to everyone who met her.  It dragged you toward her.  And I'm not talking about her voice, but her strength of spirit, her absolute willingness to expose her open veins and emote authentically about her full experience of life.  She sang about things people don't always want to hear about.  It's that power of self expression as well as the immense instrument that allowed it that make us love her.  Her fall from grace only reminds us that such self expression and naked sincerity can come with great cost and if you truly want to follow the diva's path you may have to pay a heavy price.  However, that price may very well be one you are willing to pay for the reward of artistic and personal fulfillment.

And isn't it ironic that such an icon as Miss Piggy stemmed from the minds of men.  Starting out as kind of a joke on women, she evolved into a fully realized, three dimensional character in spite of what they saw her as initially, she had her own ideas.  The art that was the character proclaimed to her makers that she was something more, as much as the character itself proclaimed this to her fellow muppets.   And soon the artists were under the control of their art as much as she was under theirs.   Now that's a diva.

Cursive

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