The other day someone sent me a message with some Kermit the Frog skit in them and it really filled me with a sense of nostalgia back to a simpler time when I was a kid and everything except going to church and school was a lot of fun.
I loved the Muppets and the ones that transitioned over to Sesame Street in particular. The Muppets have made a ton of movies over the years and some of them are pretty fantastic. There is one film in particular that really stood out in my mind though and it was The Muppets Take Manhattan.
It was not uncommon for the Muppets to appear in films that feature a bunch of human actors as well but this was the first one that I recall seeing on such a grand scale. Kermit and a lot of the characters were regularly interacting with people on Sesame Street and of course The Muppet Show regularly had guest stars, all of which were human as well. As I am sure you recall these shows functioned in a variety show type of way that was similar to Saturday Night Live but a lot more child-friendly.
There were actually 2 movies prior to this one but I was too young to remember any of them and to this day I am not certain I have ever seen any of them. "Manhattan" was released in 1984 and since I was still very young, it was one of the few movies that me and my friends were allowed to see in theaters without supervision. Of course it was at this time that my Mom introduced me to petty crime because we snuck our own snacks into the theater with her supervision and advisement. This way we were able to bypass the extremely overpriced concession stand.
Many things happen in this film but the basic premise is that the Muppets are going to do a show on Broadway in NYC but while traveling around the city Kermit gets hit by a car and gets amnesia and doesn't know who he is or why he is there. This results in him getting employed at a marketing firm where the slogans they come up with for a fictional product called Ocean Breeze Soap is just hilarious. I promise I am not copy/pasta ing this and can recall it to this day 30 years later.
The pitches that this group of geniuses come up with are..
- Ocean Breeze Soap: For people who don't want to stink
and
- Ocean Breeze Soap: It's like a long journey on the open seas except there is not boat involved and you don't actually go anywhere
Those make me giggle to this day.
Kermit is the star of the show and it can't happen without him so a citywide search begins utilizing all the cast from the Muppets and even a few appearances happen from characters that were normally reserved just for Sesame Street skits. When they do eventually find them Kermit's memories are not jarred by seeing them and he is also unaware of the fact that Miss Piggy is his lady. It is by making Piggy upset that she smacks Kermit and the head trauma snaps his memory back.
I know it isn't much of a story but that is kind of how kid's movies were back then.
The thing that makes me so happy about this film is the fact that it was fun for adults as well and I think that was the overall appeal of the Muppets for everyone then as well as now. It transcends age.
One of the numbers in the film featured all of the major characters as babies and this particular skit was so popular that it ended up spawning an animated cartoon series called Muppet Babies that was extremely popular for many years.
Although this is peanuts by today's standards I recently discovered that the overall production cost of "Manhattan" was in excess of $6 million and was considered a very risky production. It ended up making $25 million at the box office, which probably wouldn't cover The Rock's fee for doing a film in 2020.
If you somehow managed to not see this film back in the day, it still stands up today and it also gives a bit of a time machine look into what life was like back in the 80's. New York is very different today, that is for sure.