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acroyearWarning: this is a ramble, just a collection of thoughts as they came to me. Maybe they'll be a point at the end, maybe not.
What was the generation that decided that anything produced by any previous generation except their own wasn't worth remembering?
This question's been rambling through my head for the last few days as I've been watching my way through the Muppet show season 2 (which very nicely, unlike season 1, has NO CUTS in it! :) ).
There's a lot of backlogged discussion on the web about Disney's acquisition of the Muppet characters and their inability to actually DO anything with them. Constantly, they're listed as being weaker characters only good for the baby boomer (and their children, all like me now in their 30s) rememberence and nostalgia market. Any attempt to bring them into the trendy 21st century, from Muppet Family Hour to Muppet Wizard of Oz has inevitably fell short, with the characters more rehashing their own old jokes rather than building on their personalities from within.
Now this is a difficult thing for any long-term creative performer or creator to do - to constantly come up with something new that is at the same time distinctively themselves. Very few have really ever pulled it off. Shakespeare was one of the few to only ever get better, but even he quit while he was ahead. Stravinsky, certainly, constantly borrowing from other composers and combining ideas and meanings in way that was uniquely Stravinsky, even to the point of adapting a composition style that he had for 40 years been the total antithesis of (Schoenberg's serialism).
In contemporary times, its much harder as its so easy to relive the recent past that the new present has to fight a LOT of built-up memories and emotional attachments. Some performers basically quit writing in that form (Genesis, Moody Blues) and go on to merely be touring acts rehashing old material. Still others, like Yes, are constantly accused of imitating themselves, and poorly at that. An extremely rare can continue to go forward, but often, like U2, only by alienating their original audience in exchange for a new audience. Very few people bought BOTH decades of their greatest hits.
So now we have the Muppets, in a bind. On one hand, they do have a core old audience willing to continue to pay for their old material, but the other hand that's not really profitable for Disney for the price they paid (and certainly wouldn't be for the price they first offered after Jim's death), nor does it really ensure immortality to the characters in the Mickey Mouse sense. Nostalgia dies when the generation it rests in dies.
Now one of the biggest issues about the Muppets, one that one only realizes when one sees these classic episodes for the first time after a long period of detachment, is their extreme respect for tradition and the past. The Muppet Show was absolutely pure Vaudeville, 100%. There was no denying the format at all.
Then there's the guest stars. There's a phrase you rarely ever hear today: "multi-talented". It simply doesn't exist. Any time a performer who has gotten to be famous in one genre of entertainment attempts to crossover into another, its treated with the same detached "well, he'll never really be any good at it" as Bo Jackson's football / baseball attempt, or Michael Jordon's later retirement from basketball to play baseball. They're never really treated as if they put their full heart into it. Musicians turned actors like Jon Bon Jovi, Justin Timberlake, half the guest stars of the Highlander TV series (except the guy from Fine Young Cannibals - HE was GOOD), are never really even looked at for major roles. They're just "singers trying to be actors", and elsewhere there are actors who try to be singers.
The two biggest exceptions to all of this are Madonna, famed for totally reinventing herself on a regular basis and Will Smith (once he gets past apologizing for Wild Wild West ;-) ). Madonna really is the only performer today whose career can be said to rival the Vaudeville stars of yesterday who were able to move through stage, recorded music, movies, and tv at will over their entire lifetime and well past any sane person's retirement.
Still others who are truly multi-talented have some of their talents hidden by the Hollywood machine that needs them to be seen as one thing and one thing only, that their on-screen persona seem to be their real at home one. (Scrubs is a major exception, btw). My case in point: Jesse L. Martin and Jerry Orbach. Had you just seen a season of Law and Order 5 years ago, you would never have imagined that both of them have incredible stage singing careers to their name. Both would have been prime muppet show guest stars if the show was still on today, as opposed to, say, Prince who in his appearance on the Muppet Hour years ago was just playacting...like Prince. He had nothing new to offer but no legacy to live either, so the whole thing fell flat.
But then there's another point.
The Muppets in the 1970s lived across *multiple* time periods. A show would regularly combine a Vaudeville comedy act, a modern pop-rock song (done by Dr. Teeth and/or the pigs), a 50s/60s "oldie", a classic movie musical number from the 40s, classical music (usually on piano, but Dr. Teeth does a cool Chopin jazz jam!), and more. This show was timeless, literally. Every generation alive at the time had something to watch for, even if it meant enduring three minutes of jokes they didn't get or a song they didn't know.
But today, in the great channel-changing world in which we live in, Hollywood simply won't allow that to ever happen again.
Everything is targeted en masse to *one* demographic with the idea of getting that one demographic to grab the remote control and never let go. Things the family can enjoy together are gone. Things the family can use to have one generation teach the other generation a bit of their history and their lifestyles are gone.
Instead, the family at home is balkanized, fighting for the remote or living their evening in separate rooms with separate tv's, each tuned to their own "sure-fire hit" that's only a hit with one market.
Back in the 70s, my mom would explain to me as a kid who some of these older performers were and where some of those songs came from, where I might have seen them before on an old "saturday matinee" movie on TV or even when Bugs Bunny made fun of them in my weekly ritual of 90 minutes of the Bugs Bunny Road Runner show at the time. The songs on it were songs I wanted to learn to sing not because they were easy or more often trite like typical "kids campground songs" (On top of speghetti all covered with cheese...). They were songs that had heart. They were songs that resonated. They were songs where the love and the fun was so deep in them that it couldn't help but be carried over in any performance.
And those songs are gone.
Worse still so is the idea of anybody ever writing them.
Consider the recent Broadway output - either pure musical slapstick (Producers, Spamalot - and keep in mind those were well-established properties), more shows from movies (any Disney musical aside from Aida - itself an established story), or shows that assemble classic rock music together (Abba, Elton John, Queen, and Billy Joel). Where's the NEW MUSIC? Where's the NEW heart?
Is it really that impossible for someone (aside from Andrew Lloyd Weber who's only ever rehashed Puccini as the Brits like to say) to really write a new show worth producing, a NEW idea with new songs worthy of attention, but not so "adult" as to make the story intolerable (Miss Saigon, for example), where the shock value gets attention but no lasting impact.
Or have we gotten so attached to our icons that we've closed the door on our creative future, even in our icons ability to continue to grow?
That's what happened to the Muppets, with a rare exception or two. Their late-80s Muppet Hour was ok, but often just seemed a rehash of the past, not building upon it. The beautiful Storyteller segments certainly were an exception, but in that show they were very out of place. They deserved respect on their own, only America was already getting too jaded to give it to him. Aside from Muppets in Space, every Muppet film has been a parody/rewrite of an existing work, trying to capture the success of Muppet Christmas Carol. Few have worked and often its because today's entertainment scene has so little respect for the past that the format of modernizing an old story while still respecting it simply doesn't work anymore. After three decades of entertainment where most of it was intentionally designed to show disrespect for the past, we've finally done it.
We've created this period of ultimate creative irony.
On the one hand, nothing we can do is anything but a rehash of a pre-existing success. There seems to be nothing new to create anymore.
On the other hand, the cultural distance between the present and even the near-recent past has meant that any such recreation will inevitably fall short as sacrifices to the original are made to ensure "accessibility". Messages are beaten over our heads by copying a familiar story or pattern rather than re-expressing the meaning from within.
Or sometimes things are made accessible only by increasing the distance and disrespect, like the Shrek series were every joke is meant to tear apart our childhood dreams and fantasies, our childhood nostalgia, to constantly stick reality in there so roughly that nothing of sentimentality is left...and then the film makers constantly wonder why people but don't really ever get "awwww"'ed when Shrek finally does become a nice guy and win the girl (again) at the end of each? They seem to not realize that by taking the heart out of every other aspect of the film in favor of the cheap gag, they take the heart out of the audience and cheapen the characters they have.
In fact, its this aspect that has me worried about the reception Enchanted will get this winter. Can the inevitable "happy ending" really work after having followed Shrek into ripping every aspect of the classic Disney princess stories apart for the camp they could have been (but WEREN'T because Disney knew better than that!)?
Yes, there are exceptions today. And yes, Pixar's made most of them.
Pixar really has done it. They've made original stories, each with recognizable aspects of the things before them and the things we have today, keeping them rooted in a respect for the past, but each expressing their heart from within rather than mimicking the heart they see on the sleeves of others. They're one of the few creative people out there actively creating their own nostalgia. Now in their case, its an extremely ironic one itself - they've created a new nostalgia for the concept of nostalgia itself. Toys, superheroes, childhood aquariums, route 66, the monsters in our closet? All the things we were once nostalgic for are the targets of their films. Which is one reason why their movies might be getting harder to sell - we're running out of shared experiences we feel nostalgia for. But at least they've created a new nostalgia for the children who watch.
That's a tough thing for the Muppets to do today. Jim's heart was just so insanely huge that it was infectious, and all it took was the right man to put it into words (Jerry Juhl), and the right people to put it into song (people like Paul Williams), and it just worked. When he died, it was bad enough. Then losing Richard Hunt just made being in the Muppets team painful for years, a pain some in the original crew might not have recovered from.
But what the Muppets need today is someone with heart - not someone to come along and say "lets use the Muppets to duplicate this story", but someone to come along and say "I have a vision for where these wonderful characters need to go and grow", and then have Disney let that person go do it. Will it happen? I trust Iger, given the attention he's giving the parks and the care to which he's letting Lasseter rebuild the animation team. But that's the thing: he's got Lasseter and Dejas, and Keane and Clemmens able to pull for him and pull it together (though dammit, they never should have let Saunders go).
There's nobody out there that we know of to come along and do the same for the Muppets: pull together the old team before they get too old and get them to teach HEART rather than heart on the sleeve to a new generation. Thing is, it can't be Frank Oz. He's creative and he's got visions, but the Muppets aren't part of that vision. He's not even doing the puppetry anymore - Eric Jacobson has now taken over Frank's characters including Bert, Grover, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie. Now, that's not a bad thing - it's a very GOOD thing that the torch can be passed successfully, like with the voice of Mickey Mouse. It also won't be Brian and Lisa and Henson's family, as they're more interested in pursuing Storyteller and Farscape and Dark Crystal like projects with the Creature Shop in the UK.
So who can do it? Who can come into the Muppet world at Disney (or better still, come from it) and give this next generation of performers the heart it needs to make them immortal again?
But more so, can it be done at all? Or will the Muppets' respect for the past anchor them down in a world where the past and nostaligic feelings are merely things to be exploited and discarded by a media concerned about taking the next dollar from someone else rather than truly creating their own.
What was the generation that decided that anything produced by any previous generation except their own wasn't worth remembering?
This question's been rambling through my head for the last few days as I've been watching my way through the Muppet show season 2 (which very nicely, unlike season 1, has NO CUTS in it! :) ).
There's a lot of backlogged discussion on the web about Disney's acquisition of the Muppet characters and their inability to actually DO anything with them. Constantly, they're listed as being weaker characters only good for the baby boomer (and their children, all like me now in their 30s) rememberence and nostalgia market. Any attempt to bring them into the trendy 21st century, from Muppet Family Hour to Muppet Wizard of Oz has inevitably fell short, with the characters more rehashing their own old jokes rather than building on their personalities from within.
Now this is a difficult thing for any long-term creative performer or creator to do - to constantly come up with something new that is at the same time distinctively themselves. Very few have really ever pulled it off. Shakespeare was one of the few to only ever get better, but even he quit while he was ahead. Stravinsky, certainly, constantly borrowing from other composers and combining ideas and meanings in way that was uniquely Stravinsky, even to the point of adapting a composition style that he had for 40 years been the total antithesis of (Schoenberg's serialism).
In contemporary times, its much harder as its so easy to relive the recent past that the new present has to fight a LOT of built-up memories and emotional attachments. Some performers basically quit writing in that form (Genesis, Moody Blues) and go on to merely be touring acts rehashing old material. Still others, like Yes, are constantly accused of imitating themselves, and poorly at that. An extremely rare can continue to go forward, but often, like U2, only by alienating their original audience in exchange for a new audience. Very few people bought BOTH decades of their greatest hits.
So now we have the Muppets, in a bind. On one hand, they do have a core old audience willing to continue to pay for their old material, but the other hand that's not really profitable for Disney for the price they paid (and certainly wouldn't be for the price they first offered after Jim's death), nor does it really ensure immortality to the characters in the Mickey Mouse sense. Nostalgia dies when the generation it rests in dies.
Now one of the biggest issues about the Muppets, one that one only realizes when one sees these classic episodes for the first time after a long period of detachment, is their extreme respect for tradition and the past. The Muppet Show was absolutely pure Vaudeville, 100%. There was no denying the format at all.
Then there's the guest stars. There's a phrase you rarely ever hear today: "multi-talented". It simply doesn't exist. Any time a performer who has gotten to be famous in one genre of entertainment attempts to crossover into another, its treated with the same detached "well, he'll never really be any good at it" as Bo Jackson's football / baseball attempt, or Michael Jordon's later retirement from basketball to play baseball. They're never really treated as if they put their full heart into it. Musicians turned actors like Jon Bon Jovi, Justin Timberlake, half the guest stars of the Highlander TV series (except the guy from Fine Young Cannibals - HE was GOOD), are never really even looked at for major roles. They're just "singers trying to be actors", and elsewhere there are actors who try to be singers.
The two biggest exceptions to all of this are Madonna, famed for totally reinventing herself on a regular basis and Will Smith (once he gets past apologizing for Wild Wild West ;-) ). Madonna really is the only performer today whose career can be said to rival the Vaudeville stars of yesterday who were able to move through stage, recorded music, movies, and tv at will over their entire lifetime and well past any sane person's retirement.
Still others who are truly multi-talented have some of their talents hidden by the Hollywood machine that needs them to be seen as one thing and one thing only, that their on-screen persona seem to be their real at home one. (Scrubs is a major exception, btw). My case in point: Jesse L. Martin and Jerry Orbach. Had you just seen a season of Law and Order 5 years ago, you would never have imagined that both of them have incredible stage singing careers to their name. Both would have been prime muppet show guest stars if the show was still on today, as opposed to, say, Prince who in his appearance on the Muppet Hour years ago was just playacting...like Prince. He had nothing new to offer but no legacy to live either, so the whole thing fell flat.
But then there's another point.
The Muppets in the 1970s lived across *multiple* time periods. A show would regularly combine a Vaudeville comedy act, a modern pop-rock song (done by Dr. Teeth and/or the pigs), a 50s/60s "oldie", a classic movie musical number from the 40s, classical music (usually on piano, but Dr. Teeth does a cool Chopin jazz jam!), and more. This show was timeless, literally. Every generation alive at the time had something to watch for, even if it meant enduring three minutes of jokes they didn't get or a song they didn't know.
But today, in the great channel-changing world in which we live in, Hollywood simply won't allow that to ever happen again.
Everything is targeted en masse to *one* demographic with the idea of getting that one demographic to grab the remote control and never let go. Things the family can enjoy together are gone. Things the family can use to have one generation teach the other generation a bit of their history and their lifestyles are gone.
Instead, the family at home is balkanized, fighting for the remote or living their evening in separate rooms with separate tv's, each tuned to their own "sure-fire hit" that's only a hit with one market.
Back in the 70s, my mom would explain to me as a kid who some of these older performers were and where some of those songs came from, where I might have seen them before on an old "saturday matinee" movie on TV or even when Bugs Bunny made fun of them in my weekly ritual of 90 minutes of the Bugs Bunny Road Runner show at the time. The songs on it were songs I wanted to learn to sing not because they were easy or more often trite like typical "kids campground songs" (On top of speghetti all covered with cheese...). They were songs that had heart. They were songs that resonated. They were songs where the love and the fun was so deep in them that it couldn't help but be carried over in any performance.
And those songs are gone.
Worse still so is the idea of anybody ever writing them.
Consider the recent Broadway output - either pure musical slapstick (Producers, Spamalot - and keep in mind those were well-established properties), more shows from movies (any Disney musical aside from Aida - itself an established story), or shows that assemble classic rock music together (Abba, Elton John, Queen, and Billy Joel). Where's the NEW MUSIC? Where's the NEW heart?
Is it really that impossible for someone (aside from Andrew Lloyd Weber who's only ever rehashed Puccini as the Brits like to say) to really write a new show worth producing, a NEW idea with new songs worthy of attention, but not so "adult" as to make the story intolerable (Miss Saigon, for example), where the shock value gets attention but no lasting impact.
Or have we gotten so attached to our icons that we've closed the door on our creative future, even in our icons ability to continue to grow?
That's what happened to the Muppets, with a rare exception or two. Their late-80s Muppet Hour was ok, but often just seemed a rehash of the past, not building upon it. The beautiful Storyteller segments certainly were an exception, but in that show they were very out of place. They deserved respect on their own, only America was already getting too jaded to give it to him. Aside from Muppets in Space, every Muppet film has been a parody/rewrite of an existing work, trying to capture the success of Muppet Christmas Carol. Few have worked and often its because today's entertainment scene has so little respect for the past that the format of modernizing an old story while still respecting it simply doesn't work anymore. After three decades of entertainment where most of it was intentionally designed to show disrespect for the past, we've finally done it.
We've created this period of ultimate creative irony.
On the one hand, nothing we can do is anything but a rehash of a pre-existing success. There seems to be nothing new to create anymore.
On the other hand, the cultural distance between the present and even the near-recent past has meant that any such recreation will inevitably fall short as sacrifices to the original are made to ensure "accessibility". Messages are beaten over our heads by copying a familiar story or pattern rather than re-expressing the meaning from within.
Or sometimes things are made accessible only by increasing the distance and disrespect, like the Shrek series were every joke is meant to tear apart our childhood dreams and fantasies, our childhood nostalgia, to constantly stick reality in there so roughly that nothing of sentimentality is left...and then the film makers constantly wonder why people but don't really ever get "awwww"'ed when Shrek finally does become a nice guy and win the girl (again) at the end of each? They seem to not realize that by taking the heart out of every other aspect of the film in favor of the cheap gag, they take the heart out of the audience and cheapen the characters they have.
In fact, its this aspect that has me worried about the reception Enchanted will get this winter. Can the inevitable "happy ending" really work after having followed Shrek into ripping every aspect of the classic Disney princess stories apart for the camp they could have been (but WEREN'T because Disney knew better than that!)?
Yes, there are exceptions today. And yes, Pixar's made most of them.
Pixar really has done it. They've made original stories, each with recognizable aspects of the things before them and the things we have today, keeping them rooted in a respect for the past, but each expressing their heart from within rather than mimicking the heart they see on the sleeves of others. They're one of the few creative people out there actively creating their own nostalgia. Now in their case, its an extremely ironic one itself - they've created a new nostalgia for the concept of nostalgia itself. Toys, superheroes, childhood aquariums, route 66, the monsters in our closet? All the things we were once nostalgic for are the targets of their films. Which is one reason why their movies might be getting harder to sell - we're running out of shared experiences we feel nostalgia for. But at least they've created a new nostalgia for the children who watch.
That's a tough thing for the Muppets to do today. Jim's heart was just so insanely huge that it was infectious, and all it took was the right man to put it into words (Jerry Juhl), and the right people to put it into song (people like Paul Williams), and it just worked. When he died, it was bad enough. Then losing Richard Hunt just made being in the Muppets team painful for years, a pain some in the original crew might not have recovered from.
But what the Muppets need today is someone with heart - not someone to come along and say "lets use the Muppets to duplicate this story", but someone to come along and say "I have a vision for where these wonderful characters need to go and grow", and then have Disney let that person go do it. Will it happen? I trust Iger, given the attention he's giving the parks and the care to which he's letting Lasseter rebuild the animation team. But that's the thing: he's got Lasseter and Dejas, and Keane and Clemmens able to pull for him and pull it together (though dammit, they never should have let Saunders go).
There's nobody out there that we know of to come along and do the same for the Muppets: pull together the old team before they get too old and get them to teach HEART rather than heart on the sleeve to a new generation. Thing is, it can't be Frank Oz. He's creative and he's got visions, but the Muppets aren't part of that vision. He's not even doing the puppetry anymore - Eric Jacobson has now taken over Frank's characters including Bert, Grover, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie. Now, that's not a bad thing - it's a very GOOD thing that the torch can be passed successfully, like with the voice of Mickey Mouse. It also won't be Brian and Lisa and Henson's family, as they're more interested in pursuing Storyteller and Farscape and Dark Crystal like projects with the Creature Shop in the UK.
So who can do it? Who can come into the Muppet world at Disney (or better still, come from it) and give this next generation of performers the heart it needs to make them immortal again?
But more so, can it be done at all? Or will the Muppets' respect for the past anchor them down in a world where the past and nostaligic feelings are merely things to be exploited and discarded by a media concerned about taking the next dollar from someone else rather than truly creating their own.
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 05:31 am (UTC)At some point, it is time to move on and move forward with new stories with different characters. You just lauded Pixar for doing original stories. They don't go back and use the same characters in different stories, they create new worlds with every story.
In the same way, the Creature Shop should be out there doing new and interesting projects with different characters using the same technology. Certainly, Henson wasn't just about Muppets. Certainly, Brian Henson is going down a similar path that Jim went with The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 02:25 pm (UTC)I had wished after Muppets from Space that theyd done a series of them living in that big house. Kermit having to babysit all these wackos,etc.