BW Media Spotlight

Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In The Muppets Take Manhattan Miss Piggy fantasizes about what her and Kermit’s life would be like if they met as babies. This leads to a dream sequence music video in which baby versions of Piggy and Kermit are joined by baby Fozzie, Rolf, Scooter, and Gonzo. (I don’t know why those four were chosen.) Somebody got a brilliant idea during production because only two months later (and it takes longer than that to put a cartoon together) Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies premiered on CBS’s Saturday morning line-up and stayed there for seven seasons. I think only Superfriends lasted longer.

The show followed baby versions of Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo (with stuffed chicken Camilla), Rolf, and Scooter, joined by Animal and original character Skeeter, Scooter’s twin sister, to add to the female cast. Although there were other girl characters in The Muppet Show for them to use. Janice only appears once as a teenager and both Sue Ann and Miss Mousey were also available but never used. Adult versions of Statler and Waldorf popped up in the later seasons as did Bean Bunny while Honeydue and Beaker were always recurring characters who would visit the nursery to play with the others. Even Robin showed up as a tadpole. The show sparked a trend of kid versions of classic cartoons at both kid and baby stages. And their imagination-fueled adventures (often using clips of movies and TV shows for some visual appeal) may well have inspired the tales of the Rugrats, though I can’t confirm that.

Recently in 2018 Disney decided to revive the concept for their Disney Junior lineup. Even though they now own Marvel and the Show branch of the Muppets (Sesame Workshop, formerly the Children’s Television Workshop, owns the Sesame Street Muppets and I think Jim Henson Productions still owns the rest) they opted not to bring Skeeter back. (If you were here for my review of the Muppet Show comics this is why, in her appearance, everyone called her “Scooter’s sister” and not by name.) Rolf and Scooter are also absent and Camilla is one of a group of baby chicks who live in the backyard. Instead of using one of the established female characters the Disney version created their own character to round out the cast, the art-loving penguin Summer. So how well does the new version fare? Is it like other remakes or is it relatively faithful to the original while doing it’s own thing? Well, they posted an episode to the Disney Junior YouTube channel so let’s find out.

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