Naked Muppets: a 5-year FLASHBACK blog!

(Originally posted January 30, 2008)

Jim Henson's Muppet Show is very popular but there are some important problems with that thing that I got to talk about.

It seems that while most of the Muppets wear pants and other clothes, a select group of major characters choose to walk around naked.  The top offenders are Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Rowlf the Dog, and Sam the Eagle.  No one knows for sure why this is the case, it is a secret that Jim Henson took to the grave.

My guess is that the reason for the permitted pantslessness is that those specific characters are "animals," whereas the majority of the Muppets are remotely human, and it would be weird and uncomfortable for the Swedish Chef or Dr. Bunsen Honeydew or the guy that reads the Muppet News Flash to appear on the show without any clothes on.  The obvious exception to the rule is Miss Piggy, who is of course a pig (hence the name).  It's probably a lot trickier to craft a female pig puppet's anatomy than it is to hide a simple frog or bear penis, so I can understand why this exception was made.

Basically what I want to know is why the top Muppet stars are animals and most of the rest aren't.  Did they build the first few puppets and then just run out of ideas?  I have some that I think would be good:

- a goat that is a sleazy lounge singer

- a mole that passes out scripts and costumes (he would always mess up because of his poor eyesight)

- a parrot that is also a mime


If anyone from the Jim Henson company reads this and wants to use my ideas then okay but it will cost you a LOT.  I can be flexible about the pants thing if you are really sticklers about it.


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