To recap what we know just to make everyone crystal clear:
The Muppets are getting attention. They’re considered under the umbrella of Walt Disney Imagineering because WDI had a puppetry division and The Muppets got rolled into that. They’re actually a great fit because puppetry is a creative endeavor. The puppeteers share a lot of common principles with Imagineers, so now they are one and the same. It works. As a side note, The Muppets (well, puppets in general) are really the ONLY property that Disney has that can be true to form in the parks. Think about it. Everything else has to be translated into a three-dimensional environment. The Muppets are already in that form. The biggest issue here is to design animatronics that can mimic hand movements.
The Muppet Show is coming to Disney+. This is a HUGE deal because the rights for the original Muppet Show are a ridiculous jumble of chaos. Music rights were never acquired for use outside of network television, guest star appearances were contingent on separate contracts. Hell, just finding the episodes in good enough quality to put in a modern day streaming service was a miracle on its own. This shows there was considerable thought and investment put into this project at the corporate level. It bodes positively for the entire brand.
Joe Biden is the new president and he is getting an animatronic of himself. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. It also is nothing new to know that they re-skin the head of the existing talking president in the show to keep the costs down. Only the speaking animatronics have major motion functions in the show. The other units are placed in the background and have much less motion. We expect that to happen every time a president changes. We expect that Trump will end up somewhere in the back. As far as I say, good: his likeness is poor at best.
I heard that they want to incorporate The Muppets into the show from multiple sources I trust. This doesn’t mean changing the show so much that it’s not “The Hall of Presidents” anymore. It means slapping a narration from someone like Kermit the Frog or Sam the Eagle on the show. Mostly in the re-done video presentation. The Muppets are cheap to film: they’re puppets. A narration has to be done anyway. This can be done cheaply. I also suspect an animatronic Muppet to be possible (and probably the cheapest form of a new animatronic), but not necessarily something that has to happen. The point here would be to make the show more fun for audiences.
Nothing Disney has announced has changed anything about this rumor. I admit I got the timing wrong and made the wrong assumption about the Twitter posts. But I don’t believe my sources were wrong entirely. There is something solid to this.
Anyway, I don’t think I left anything out that needed to be said, but hopefully that clears up any confusion. Stay positive!
