Does Disney know what to do with the Muppets? Granted, I am not 100% sure anyone has known what to do with the Muppets since Jim Henson died, There’s been some good Muppet material since then, but a lot of it is throwbacks to how the Muppets used to do things. That’s often fine. I have a fondness for the characters, but something about the characters feels like it’s missing something, and not just because they are, as Family Guy once referred to them as, “wrong sounding”. All I know is when I log into Disney+, the Muppets don’t have their own hub the way Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar do, and I would think there should be enough Muppet material out there to justify such a thing.
Regardless, Disney opted to do some corporate fusion by having the Muppets do a Halloween special set in a Disney theme park attraction.
It’s Halloween, and the Great Gonzo is skipping the annual Muppets Halloween party to go to a mansion said to be haunted. It was the last known location for Gonzo’s favorite magician, the Great MacGuffin (clever name), and Gonzo wants to see the missing magician’s last known place. Along for the ride is Pepe the King Prawn, convinced the whole thing will be a big Hollywood affair with a lot of huge celebrities. However, as warned by the driver of their hearse/limo (Yvette Nicole Brown) that she drops people off there every year, but none of them ever return. Gonzo is now more psyched than ever, and some cryptic clues from the mysterious Ghost Host (Will Arnett) offer the Muppets’ performance artist a chance to really see what he considers a lot of cool stuff. Pepe, on the other hand, is scared out of his mind about almost everything that’s going on in there.
As it is, the pair will need to do something that neither of them have considered all that much before sunrise. Otherwise, neither of them will be getting out of the mansion ever. Gonzo seems largely oblivious to this concern, much to the frustration of many of the spectral residents of the mansion, many of them played by familiar Muppet characters redesigned to look like characters associated with the Disney theme park attraction.
By the by, I am only vaguely aware that the different characters in the Mansion attraction have names and backstories, but I couldn’t tell you what they were off-hand. I have been to Disney World, and I rode the Haunted Mansion both times, and it is a rather memorable ride, so I did recognize a lot of the little tricks the ride uses in the special, but it was only afterwards when I went to Wikipedia to check the spelling of names that I learned that Taraji P. Henson’s murderous bride that romances Pepe had a name (Constance Hatchaway apparently).
As post-Jim Henson Muppet productions go, this one was fun. There are a lot of Muppet stand-bys with familiar characters doing familiar bits, often while acknowledging that the Muppets themselves are aware they are performing in a TV show. The writers even managed to recreate a Muppet Show mainstay, “At the Dance,” in a way that would look familiar to anyone who is familiar with both The Muppet Show and the Haunted Mansion attraction. And, as expected, there are lots of famous faces hanging around, including the recently deceases Ed Asner, there to mostly do a quick bit and then dance a bit with the Muppets for the closing credits. Essentially, it’s fun.
On a side note, as much as Gonzo is a great character, he does often get the main focus for these specials and many times in various movies that have come out since Jim Henson’s death, often with Rizzo the Rat as a sidekick. There does seem to me to an obvious reason, that being that Gonzo’s puppeteer Dave Goetz seems to be the only one of the old Muppet performers who is both still alive and not retired from puppeteering. He’s the last connection to the Muppets’ glory days, and I am generally always glad to see the Great Gonzo. True, the other characters (aside from that “wrong sounding” thing) are still more or less the same characters, but there’s still something that an old Muppet fan like me thinks is not quite right, and I think, beyond his puppeteering skills, that Jim Henson brought something else to the table, something intangible that even Jim’s son Brian can’t quite seem to recapture outside of doing something very much along the lines of what Jim did the first time. I don’t know if there is an answer to that, but there’s a part of me that would love for someone to figure it out. As it is, maybe something like Muppets Haunted Mansion is a step in the right direction. Only time will tell there.
Grade: B+
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