The Most Embarrassing Moment in Muppets Movie History

A few weeks ago I watched 2011’s The Muppets with the kids; it was the first time I’d seen it since a little after it came out. It was… fine? Mostly pretty good, and I think that, on the whole, it does a good job capturing the spirit of The Muppets (as best you can when you replace the immortal Jerry Juhl as writer with Jason Segel). I will say that, though he does a decent job as writer for The Muppets, Segel as actor is pretty distracting in his supposedly starring but really supporting role, because, even though he’s game in a lot of ways for the trademark Muppetian silliness, his face, stuck in a perpetual smirk whether he wills it or no, really undercuts the message (co-star Amy Adams, for whom expressions of wonder and openness come more naturally, fares better, while villain Chris Cooper absolutely knows what he’s doing, sneering and hamming to great effect).

But, right in the middle of the film — in fact in a pivotal turn of the plot — the film drops a gigantic turd of a scene on the audience. It’s so bad, and has remained gnawing at my mind in the time since, that I’ve decided that it has to be the worst, most embarrassing scene in Muppets film history. I want to explain why at some length, but first, a few caveats.

1. I’m only counting theatrical release films. I haven’t seen many of the made for TV films, but the one that I remember most vividly, the truly execrable 2002 film It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas has at least ten scenes more damaging to the memory of the Muppets than this one. Thankfully, no one has seen this film, and it shall henceforth be consigned to flames of woe.

2. There’s maybe one scene in a Muppets film that comes sort of close to being as painful to watch as this one I’m about to describe. That’s right, it’s the Muppet babies scene from Muppets Take Manhattan which, objectively speaking, is probably the weakest Muppet film (though I retain a strong sentimental attachment to it). Here that scene is, in all its horrifying glory:

I come to bury this scene, not praise it. But still, as “cringe” as this scene is, it has at least two things going for it: it features an original song (even if it’s a bad one), and it at least in some sense conforms to the traditional Muppet aesthetic (which always risks tipping over into cringe in its flop sweatty, do anything for a smile ethic).

Alright, enough caveats. Here’s the scene:

Now, you might be thinking, on first watch, “This? Worse than Muppet babies???” But even though, on the surface, this scene seems mediocre at worst, it’s actually (cue dramatic music) A COMPLETE BETRAYAL OF EVERYTHING THE MUPPETS STAND FOR. Or something. The montage-y bits here are fine, actually — Kermit’s list of failed “celebrities” lacks a little bite, but some of the other bits are fun, especially the Swedish chef torching his refrigerator. It’s the other components of the scene that make it so awful (and no, I’m not even talking about the appearance of Beauregard, that absolute failson of a Muppet whose presence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a scene to be considered the Absolute Worst Muppet Scene of All Time).

What makes the scene awful, then? It starts with the ears. Music montages are a time honored Muppet tactic — think of the all timer from The Muppet Movie, where Kermit and Fozzie trek around to “Movin’ Right Along.” That scene is a classic in large part because of Paul Williams’ and Kenneth Ascher’s bouncy original song, which in both music and lyrics captures something significant about the Muppetian aesthetic: that slightly corny, eager to please feel, the willingness to go in any direction, however absurd, for a laugh.

The Muppets, by contrast, chooses to utilize, in what should be a pivotal emotional scene where the Muppets reclaim their old home the theater, one of the laziest, most predictable needle drops in history: Starship’s “We Built This City on Rock and Roll.” The first problem here is that it is not an original song. Part of the charm of a Muppet movie is hearing the goofy, weird songs that get written for it, ones that usually evoke Jim Henson & co’s large debt to musical theater. Obviously The Muppet Show featured mostly covers (who has time to whip out a banger like “Mahna Mahna” every week?), but I’ve always felt that the best cover songs from the show were those that tapped into old timey vaudeville classics, or did something strange to contemporary hits, such as Muppaphone them. Otherwise you end up with, well, whatever the hell this is.

(The Muppets features two covers near the end meant to evoke the original show, during the fundraising telethon to save the theater: a barbershop [literally] cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and a chicken-warbled cover of Cee Lo’s F(orget) You [unfortunately not renamed “Cluck You”]. They’re both… fine).

Again, though, the films themselves have shied away from using pop music. Muppets from Space is the exception here, as it features no original songs and largely outsources its soundtrack to 70s funk hits (including an opening sing along to “Brick House”). But at least songs like “Shining Star” and “Celebrate” are, you know, cool.

Here we get the worst of both worlds. The filmmakers had already gone to the trouble of hiring the great Bret McKenzie (one half of Flight of the Conchords) to write original songs for the film, and while none of those songs will live on in collective memory like “Rainbow Connection” (though “Man or Muppet,” which won the Best Song Oscar, does a nice job bridging the gap between Muppets and Conchords), using an original song here would have been much more appropriate, and memorable.

That’s the other thing: even if you can excuse using a pop song here… why this one? Did Segel and director James Bobin get temporarily confused and think they were programming music for a Dreamworks animated film about sassy talking stress balls? “We Built This City” is the Sacramento Kings of rock songs: a Northern California product so forgettable that you never think of it, but one that brings great pain when you do. Starship should be grateful that Train hails from their neck of the woods, and wrote a song as bad as “Hey Soul Sister,” otherwise “We Built This City” would be in strong contention for worst song ever by a Bay Area band.

It’s such an utterly uninspired choice of music. They’re saving their theater, dammit, not sitting around in the dentist’s office! The scene cannot recover from this. Not that it tries very hard; there are some other really awful choices going on here. One is the decision to, at key points, cluster all the Muppets together center stage and have the camera spin around them. I realize that 2011 was near the height of Glee fever (Gleever?), but come on. The Muppets are simple folk, and have no need of spinning cameras to highlight their togetherness. In addition, why are the Muppets constantly shown looking up reverently at the ceiling, as if they gazed upon the Sistine Chapel? Why the cheap gravitas? You know what builds real gravitas? A touching original song! Also, I guess we need to talk about that moment when Amy Adams goes for the high note, huh? That’s when her willingness to just go for it turns sinister. Amy Adams, a great actress by all accounts, mugging it up like your aunt doing “Don’t Stop Believin’” at singles karaoke.

All in all, I know this is a small moment in the long, illustrious history of the Muppets. But this intellectual property, which means so much to so many people, has changed hands repeatedly over the years, as they’ve proven popular, but not quite popular enough (something The Muppets tries to address, in its defense). With all the bouncing around, there’s been a shocking amount of consistency: I don’t think any of the 8 feature films are anything to be ashamed of, though some are better than others. But there’s always the risk, when properties move from owner to owner, and different creators try their hands at revamping a classic (especially one so closely tied to one man, Jim Henson), that something gets lost in translation. Thankfully this scene does not bring the whole movie tumbling down around its head, like Samson leaning on the rickety pillars of the Muppet theater, but it should stand in memory (if it must) as a warning to future would be Muppetteers: do better. This city is built on felt and dad humor, not rock and roll.