Jim Henson Didn’t Believe That Evil Should Exist in the Muppet Universe
The Muppets’ big-screen adventures tend to feature great villains, from Tim Curry’s Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, to Kermit’s evil doppelganger Constantine in Muppets Most Wanted, to oilman Tex Richman in 2011’s The Muppets — although the latter was obviously only created as part of the Muppets’ secret communist agenda, at least according to Fox News.
The very first Muppet movie, appropriately titled The Muppet Movie, pitted Kermit the Frog against a Col. Sanders-esque fast-food magnate named Doc Hopper, who wanted Kermit to be the face of his fried frog leg franchise.
Hopper, who slaughtered countless frogs that never even got the chance to learn the banjo and/or produce a TV variety show, is an irredeemable crook. But that wasn’t always necessarily the plan. According to Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones, Henson and fellow Muppeteer Frank Oz got into “a slight dustup” over the portrayal of Hopper. Specifically, Henson believed that Hopper, at his core, wasn’t a “bad guy” and that, throughout the course of the story, his character should have been “redeemed” in some way.
The redemption arc wasn’t just an interesting potential plot point, it was seemingly a part of Henson’s creative mission statement. “Even the most worldly of our characters is innocent,” Henson told The New York Times in 1979. “Our villains are innocent, really. And it’s that innocence that I think is the connection to the audience.”
Oz, who Jones notes was “nearly as cynical as Jim was idealistic,” responded by calling the idea “bullshit,” and in the end, that pithy argument ultimately won. Plus, it would have been a little hard to redeem Hopper after he hired an apparent Nazi scientist to experiment on Kermit.
Henson and Oz’s debate was seemingly represented in the climax of The Muppet Movie when, for a brief moment, we’re led to believe that Doc Hopper might have had a change of heart, following Kermit’s earnest speech about the value of dreams and the importance of friendship. But instead of letting the Muppets go, he instead instructs his goons to “kill ‘em.” Thankfully, a genetically-enhanced Animal saves the day.
Henson’s suggestion may seem quaint in retrospect, especially since so many subsequent Muppet movies have featured bad guys, one of whom was literally named “Badguy.”
But it’s perhaps worth noting that one of the best Muppet movies, if not the best, involved a seemingly villainous character who ends up being redeemed by the end of the movie: The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Then again, Ebenezer Scrooge never tried to eat Bob Cratchit’s family.
