I was gonna post this on the Muppet Central forum, but I felt like it was hard to find a context to post it in so I'm not just randomly posting my thoughts and also, I got a little worried of what they might think of me and think I'm mad, but I still feel like sharing my nerdy muppet-y thoughts so I thought I'd post them h'yah

The latest news in Muppet fandom is that the new Muppet flick is currently filming and I, like everyone else is very excited and I hope before it's release in X-mas 2011 (hopefully it'll be released at X-mas here in the UK too), we'll get see a clip or teaser or two. But I do certain worries and also current gripes with the way certain characters/performers are being treated.

In other words, here's the rant I wrote -

I really don't want the new movie to mainly involve what these days is the main group of characters, Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Rizzo and Pepe, with slightly secondary characters Bunsen & Beaker and Statler & Waldorf and Animal to an extent really, followed by the usual appearances of The Swedish Chef or Sam. And I don't want to feel lucky to even see other characters like Scooter, Rowlf, Robin, The Electric Mayhem, etc right there on the screen or manage to get a line or two out of them. I don't mean this to sound harsh if it does but I feel that these days there's just no excuse for it. I don't know if it has to do with scheduling since Matt and David work on Sesame Street but so does Steve, Eric and Bill I believe. These characters have new performers now and lately I've started having this feeling and annoyance that they are not being used more and not allowing these performers to grow more into the characters, for lack of a better term and for us to get used to them. Now, I don't mean that last bit in a negative light but I truly want to see and hear more of David Rudman's Scooter and Janice, Matt Vogel's Floyd, Robin or Crazy Harry and Bill Barretta's Rowlf. A lot of thought has been brought into choosing who these character's new performers should be and why and that's great but it feels like a bit of waste if you're still not going to use them much.


I want to see more of Bill, David and Matt working with these characters partly cos I feel they have gotten better and better with each appearance they've made. The latest viral videos have been great and I've felt a sense of that old Muppet Show feeling from them but if they do more viral videos I don't want to see yet more videos featuring The Swedish Chef, Animal, Bunsen & Beaker etc, I don't hold any resentment towards these characters of course, I love them and they're there for a reason and great characters too but the Muppet Family is a big family with a wide variety of characters to choose from and like I said earlier, they have new performers now. I really want to see The Electric Mayhem and/or Rowlf do a song for a viral video or a number going wrong with Kermit and Scooter trying to keep it going and all together. Something like that that harkons back to The Muppet Show days and 70's/ 80's peroid like recent viral videos have.

At the end of the day, it just feels somewhat like "hey, these characters have new permanant performers now but we're still not going to use them much because we can't be bothered trying to intergrate them back into the mix properly and we're just going to shove the usual current group down your throat, the bunch who are currently on most or all the merchandise at the mo".

It bugs me aswell that so far this year there's not been one new appearance of my favourite character Scooter. Once David Rudman came to play him, it felt like they were starting to fully bring him into the mix - in 2008, he made an apperance on Studio DC: Almost Live and then Letters To Santa. In 2009, he was at the D23 Expo, appeared on the Bohiemian Rhapsody video and then the 12 Days of Christmas song with Jimmy Fallon. You would think that more would follow the next year, but no, we got less - less than less really