The Muppet Movie (1979)

(Disney Streaming, July 2022) Essentially, The Muppet Movie is nothing more than your standard road trip to Hollywood movie, with a green frog gathering friends on his way to fame and fortune. But, of course, plot is the farthest thing away from viewers’ minds as they watch the film: the focus here is on gags, characters and cameos. How has it aged in forty years? Badly in the details, not at all in the aggregate. Much of the material is completely timeless—the Muppets are the Muppets, and there’s bound to be one in the bunch that you like. It does help that the level of humour here remains basic most of the time—time-tested material accessible to multiple generations, never too out-there but often more than the lowest level. Even the meta-fictional material, with a framing device that has the Muppets watching their own movie, is gently introduced. What has not aged so well are the cameos, which often depend on an encyclopedic knowledge of circa-1979 pop culture. Some familiar faces still make an impression (Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and Orson Welles in a delicious one-line cameo), while others will require some more context (Dom DeLuise, Telly Savalas, Elliott Gould, Bob Hope, etc.) and others are just about obscure by now. Also notable are some of the special effects required to show full-body Muppets interacting with the world. But little of those issues matter when the film by itself is just a warm bath of fun and comfort: The Muppets Movie remains funny all the way to the big-smash ending, and there’s something immensely reassuring knowing that it still finds fans even today.