They did what now?

[jeriendhal]

Apparently in The Muppets, the effects department digitally erased the rods manipulating the muppet's arms.

WHY?

Still want to see the movie though.

Comments

[seawasp]

Um... because the ideal in puppetry (or Muppetry) is to have the puppet move without anyone actually seeing that a person is moving it?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Point. But with the Muppets you don't even notice the rods after the first ten seconds anyway. Or at least I didn't when I was a kid.

[seawasp]

Perhaps, but the idea is almost certainly to remove the problem of those first 10 seconds, especially for audiences who may never have seen the Muppets before (or not since they were so little they can't remember). Which is a fairly good-sized audience compared to what it would have been in my distant youth.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Darned kids these days. I can't argue with that. The Muppets status as a cultural icon (seperate from their Sesame Street incarnation) has been on the wane, or even completely off the map at times, since the death of Jim Henson took the wind out of the company. Disney has been floundering ever since buying JHP and the rights to Muppets, trying to figure out what to do with them. The plot/metaplot of "We're still relevant, darn it!" in The Muppets only reflects that.

Though I'm not sure how to bring them up to full relvancy in our current culture without another weekly series along the lines of the original Muppet Show to make them truly prominent in kids' conciousnesses again. The variety show format is long dead anyway, and I don't see how they could work as a sitcom.