Hacker Cinema
The Muppet Movie
1979 · Film · 97 min
Directed by James Frawley
The Muppets gather to watch their newly-finished big-budget rich-and-famous feature film: a talent agent persuades Kermit the Frog to leave the swamp to pursue a career in Hollywood. On his way there, he meets a bear, a pig, a whatever (his future muppet crew), and some special celebrity guest stars, while being chased by the desperate owner of a frog-leg restaurant!
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5 comments on Hacker News
When I graduated from eighth grade, we had to choose a graduation song. A classmate laughingly suggested Pink Floyd's “We don’t need no education” and I seconded it. Our teacher dismissed the idea in a way that offended me, so I turned it into a big argument about freedom and dignity. It became a shouting match.
The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead.
I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate.
I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision.
I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.
Grover too? To me, they're almost entirely separate. Kermit is the only one I remember who regularly appeared in both. I think there's a very brief Big Bird cameo in the Muppet Movie, but I cannot recall any other significant character from one show appearing as more than a brief cameo in the other.
This seems like such a weak argument. Life is full of shared cultural experiences that people don't have free access to. We talk about restaurant meals, about attending concerts, about attending sporting events (or watching them on PPV), about seeing plays, about fashion. These things all have equal or better claim to cultural importance than an MCU movie, but we all understand them to to cost money --- for some of them, like the theater, it would be deeply problematic if they didn't cost money: that's how people survive while continuing to produce the culture.
To me, the farce is laid perfectly bare by the fact that people pirate fonts. Fonts. Different fashions for the shapes of letters. Nobody can reasonably claim a right to Mrs. Eaves or Chaparral, or any kind of cultural deprivation for not being able to typeset their zines in Nueva or Myriad, but they're pirated just like everything else. They're so relentlessly pirated that it took well over a decade to get most "commercial" fonts on the web at all, and even today, using them is a mess, because we can't trust people not to pilfer them while writing comments about how they're striking a blow for open culture.
The reality --- and I think we all understand this in our viscera --- is that things get pirated when they're easy to pirate. People do it because they can, and then rationalize it back to "ethics" so they don't have to confront the fact that in some small way (often, very small, but not always), they're inflicting harm on other people. At the very least, they're inflicting harm against the concept of ethics.
Do it if you want! I can't judge! I once wanted to watch The Muppet Movie ahead of its release, so I torrented it. I felt bad and bought the pre-release on iTunes at the same time. Something snagged in Apple's backend, and for the next 8 years or so iTunes haunted me continuously to redeem the pre-release, but errored when I tried to so as to make the popup disappeared. I deserved it, and (a little) more.
Here in LA we have summer movie screenings at the Hollywood Cemetery by a group called Cinespia, and they project the founder's collection of movie posters on the screen before the show. He has a ton of amazing Polish posters but my favorite one is always the Muppet Movie: http://www.polishposter.com/images/2450.jpg
That would be the "most popular" films of 1979, as rated in recent years.
Here's imdb's biggest films of 1979 by US box office:
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=1979,1979
Alien is thrashed by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Moonraker. Apocalypse Now is thrashed by The Muppet Movie.