The Muppets’ Latest Commercial Is Further Proof That Disney Totally Fumbled the Henson Brand
While most viewers found the Super Bowl part of this year’s Super Bowl to be largely underwhelming, at least the event’s commercials were interesting. Still terrible, but interesting.
In addition to Ben Affleck’s regularly-scheduled Dunkin’-themed mid-life crisis, we also got a When Harry Met Sally reunion, a Jeep ad featuring Harrison Ford, Bill Murray flashing his email between canine hallucination, and a spot in which Seal sings about Mountain Dew with his face CGI’d onto an actual seal’s body. Try watching even just 10 seconds of this thing without concluding that television was a mistake and humanity is hopelessly doomed.
Thankfully, one commercial featured Jim Henson’s beloved, timeless Muppets characters. And, as an added bonus, no computer technology was used to fuse their bodies with the faces of popular ‘90s entertainers.
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The Booking.com ad finds Kermit, Piggy and Animal taking a beach vacation together, while Statler and Waldorf complain about a bachelorette party at their hotel, and the Great Gonzo jetpacks around Las Vegas. The whole thing only lasts for about 30 seconds. Had it gone on any longer, it’s entirely possible that one of the Muppets would have fallen victim to a phishing scam.
Even though many of the other commercials featured big name (human) stars, as Variety recently reported, the Muppets ad ended up being the “most watched Super Bowl spot” on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s been on YouTube for over a week at this point, and has amassed a staggering 94 million views.
Given the characters’ obvious popularity, this does make it all the more glaring that their current corporate overlords, the Walt Disney Company, seemingly don’t want to much with them, beyond lending them out to travel websites it seems.
Disney doesn’t currently have any Muppets projects on the go, following the cancellation of 2023’s The Muppets Mayhem. And fans are extra annoyed at the Mouse House right now because they announced the imminent closure of the Muppet*Vision 3D attraction. Making it extra clear that Disney should be arguably investing in Muppet-related content far more than they are right now, a new trailer for Marvel’s Thunderbolts also dropped on Sunday, and it proved to be less popular than the Muppets ad.
Thunderbolts reportedly cost Disney around four times as much to make as the previous Muppet movie. Just saying.
Of course, Booking.com’s Super Bowl ads have historically been popular even without the Muppets. And just because the masses happily checked out a 30-second YouTube video, doesn’t mean that they’d necessarily pay to see a Muppet movie, or invest their time in a full Muppet series.
But it does at least prove that these characters still have cultural relevance and should be doing something on TV that isn’t a commercial. Although, at least this commercial was pretty fun, unlike the ad in which Denny’s turned Miss Piggy into a cannibal.
