The Great Muppet Caper

After the massive critical and financial success of The Muppet Movie in 1979, Jim Henson and the rest of the Muppet team figured another film would offer the same results, but their next venture into the theatrical space only brought in half the amount of the first film’s box office. While this 1981 sequel, The Great Muppet Caper (which released around the same time that the final season of The Muppet Show was released), was reviewed favourably and didn’t flop by any means thanks to its very small budget of only $14 million, going from earning $65 million to $31.2 million is a noticeable downtick, putting it behind later Muppet features like Muppet Treasure Island, The 2011 Muppet revival film, and even its 2014 sequel, Muppets: Most Wanted. Despite this, The Great Muppet Caper is still considered one of the best Muppet films, so its lack of earnings wasn’t from lack of quality.

After entering the picture in a gloriously over-the-top way, Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear and Gonzo the Great (performed by Jim Henson, Frank Oz and Dave Goelz) tell the audience that they’re making a movie, where they play investigative reporters who plan to travel to England to interview the prominent fashion designer, Lady Holliday (played by Diana Rigg) who recently had some of her priceless jewels stolen. After arriving in Great Britain, Kermit enters Lady Holliday’s office and finds it occupied by Miss Piggy (also voiced by Frank Oz) who forcibly managed to get a job as Holliday’s receptionist, but since Kermit never saw Lady Holliday, he believes Miss Piggy is who he’s after, which sparks an attraction between the both of them. While everyone is distracted, Lady Holliday’s obviously criminal brother, Nicky (played by Charles Grodin) plans to steal the remaining prize jewels and frame Piggy, leading to her getting thrown in jail. With Kermit learning the truth behind her charade but still housing genuine feelings for her, he along with Fozzie, Gonzo, and the rest of the Muppet crew, decide to catch the robbers during their heist and clear Miss Piggy’s name.

It’s already hard to hate anything Muppets-related, but even excluding that personal bias, The Great Muppet Caper is a wonderfully charming, technically impressive, hilarious feature that showcases the best traits of the beloved Jim Henson creations and why they’ve remained beloved icons.

The Muppet Movie was originally seen as a risk as there were fears the cast of the show wouldn’t translate as believably on the big screen, but this quickly became a non-issue, and its success gave Henson and his team the faith to release future projects. By all accounts, it’s hard to accurately pinpoint why the follow-up didn’t perform as well since it contains a lot of the same people, was in a more comfortable place as the show had been airing for several years at the point of its release, and the increased budget and technology would’ve allowed for more experimentation, more colorful cameos, and more elaborate sequences (which there are aplenty of). It was also the first time Jim Henson ever directed a Muppet feature (as he mainly operated as a producer and puppeteer on other projects and mainly led other puppet-based features like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal), so the very essence of this series and its cast couldn’t have been more centre stage, and that very factor might be what made it slightly divisive. As opposed to the first film which had a very simple but defined narrative of the crew meeting for the first time and travelling to Hollywood to become stars, this movie is not as interested in following a specific narrative and instead goes for broke on wacky antics and comedic escapades under a very loose and easily bendable plot.

While the film has been criticized for having too many things going on in its narrative, it’s not the kind of film that relies on its plot to be entertaining, with that coming from the witty scripting, the marvellous effects work, and the very likeable characters, all of which are on full display all around. While the script written by The Muppet Show regular, Jerry Juhl, alongside newcomers Tom Patchett, Jay Tarses, and Jack Rose, isn’t knee-slapping funny or contains the same level of brilliant wordplay and ferocity present in the show, there is an earnestness behind its honest form of humor that makes it hard not to find appealing, and there are still plenty of moments that are genuinely hilarious throughout. The story just feels like an excuse for jokes, it doesn’t really waste time on developing arcs or emotional moments, and the characters are only built up as much as required for the film to keep going (with it relying more of people’s outside knowledge of these characters acting out this scenario to keep their attention), but this just provides more opportunities for the Muppets to just be themselves and offer a visually-pleasing, quick-to-grasp, timeless comedy that can work for all ages in any time period.

Since the show was just about to wrap up its final season, the general public had plenty of time to warm up to these characters, and considering they still remain staples of pop culture despite not having a major project released in years (Disney can be thanked for that), they are going to be timeless for as long as entertainment exists. Seeing them in their own movie already worked quite well and their personalities were so defined by this point in time, they could’ve delivered any kind of story and been able to mesh whatever style and genre pretty nicely as long as they retained their humor and charm, but this movie decides to play around with things a little bit by having them act out a movie within a movie. Even if it never goes as far as physically going beyond the fourth wall (which the Muppets are all too familiar with shattering on a regular basis), it’s made clear right from the get go that Kermit, Fozzie and the rest are merely acting out a tale rather than living out their regular lives, and this set up both does and doesn’t open up fresh avenues for humor. While they do draw attention to the fact that they’re making a movie several times throughout and some of the crossover between reality and fiction can be funny when it plays up an obvious disconnect (Kermit and Fozzie play identical twins), it might’ve benefitted from showing more of the filmmaking process to really hammer home this element.

Sometimes playing into this ‘’acting out a movie’’ component can result in a good laugh, like Kermit and Miss Piggy breaking character to criticize each other’s acting abilities, but outside of these brief moments, it doesn’t feel too dissimilar to what would normally be seen on their own show, so nothing feels upgraded to a cinematic level. With that in mind, the characters are still so charming, so well realized and so simple to understand, that even when acting out a pretty hack story, they can still make it entertaining. Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo act as effective stabilizers to the world of chaos around them, the supporting characters are given just the right amount of screen time to play up their familiar traits but not to the point that they feel overused, the celebrity cameos aren’t as prolific or as funny as the first feature but small surprises from people like John Cleese, Joan Sanderson, Robert Morley, Peter Falk, Jack Warden and Peter Ustinov are memorable, Diana Rigg is just the right amount of over-the-top ritzy to make it humorous without fully losing credibility, Charles Grodin as the pointedly clear villain plays a pretty basic part, but his conviction to it results in some decent laughs (his dedication to believably conveying his arousal for a pig puppet is probably one of the best parts of the film) and Miss Piggy is given more of the spotlight this time around, and (as to be expected of her) she really makes the most of it, being part of some of the best laughs, some of the most technically impressive set pieces, and some of the most memorable musical numbers, it’s a wonderful showcase of a very iconic character.

It’s always wonderful to witness the incredibly lively and expressive puppet work that Jim Henson has birthed into the world, creating such memorable characters that always feel alive even though they are very clearly made of fabric, and the ways in which the Muppets films keep improving upon the technology is just as much fun as what’s unfolding in the story. The first film was already technically impressive and used its cinematic presentation and budget to push the boundaries even further, and you can feel The Great Muppet Caper doing that as well, but maybe to a less overt extent. While there isn’t a giant Animal head crashing through a roof in this one, there are still a lot of scenes that feel like they’re trying to show off how they’ve progressed, whether it’s through the expansive choreography handled by Anita Mann, the set design by Harry Lange which juggles back and forth between squalid and naturalistic, to glamorous and sparkly, or the musical numbers which are fittingly done very well. With songs written and composed by Joe Raposo (who created a lot of songs for Henson’s sibling series, Sesame Street), these numbers might not be incredibly memorable, but still have fun melodies, quirky lyrics, and a lot of eye-catching choreography surrounding them to make them very enjoyable parts of the flick (One of the major numbers, The First Time You See Her was even nominated for an Oscar and it’s fittingly the best song in the movie, so it continues the trend of Muppet music being good enough for a potential golden award).

The Great Muppet Caper may not have had a glowing box office like its previous feature, but the fact that it’s still heralded as one of their greatest films, shows real strength for the brand. It doesn’t have the sentimental emotions of the first film or even the apparent referential humor present in the films that directly portrayed classic stories like Treasure Island and A Christmas Carol, but the ever-present charm of the cast, catchy song sequences, and a plentiful number of funny moments, helps it remain as a Muppet adventure worth investigating.