The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

Over the course of his extraordinary career, Charles Grodin found himself in all manner of surreal situations. Grodin was the most reluctant of Hollywood movie stars, a brilliant crank with little taste for the compromises and casual cruelty of show business yet he was a movie star all the same, with all of the wonderful weirdness that entails. 

In 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper that meant being called upon to express real sexual desire for Miss Piggy, to ache with real romantic longing for a fashion-conscious pig made of felt and controlled by master puppeteer Frank Oz. 

There were many, many different directions The Muppets could have gone after the extraordinary breakout success of 1979’s The Muppet Movie yet they inexplicably yet delightfully chose one as perversely non-commercial as an absurdist, meta London-set comic caper centered around a love triangle between Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog and Charles Grodin. 

The Great Muppet Caper cost more than The Muppet Movie yet made roughly half as much money not because it is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, or because the novelty of Jim Henson’s creations running joyfully amok on the big screen had lost its novelty or freshness. 

No, The Great Muppet Caper under-performed commercially because it is a brazenly bizarre motion picture full of winking meta-textual humor, vaudevillian exchanges, weird overtones of bestiality, extended meditations on the conventions and cliches of classic Hollywood musicals and at least one Esther Williams-style water ballet with a pig taking the place of the queen of the aquatic musical. 

Late in the film special guest star Peter Falk encounters a forlorn Kermit the Frog sitting on a park bench bemoaning his fate and launches into a long monologue about how the frog must be sad because the dry-cleaning business he owns and operates is going through all manner of upheaval and it's playing havoc with his psyche. 

The weird stranger couldn’t be more wrong in his assertions, or more unnecessarily confident. It’s a bizarre digression that defiantly adds nothing to the film or advances the plot in the least and consequently begs to be left on the cutting room floor as the least essential of sequences. 

Kermit, in fact, responds by indignantly scolding Falk’s character for wasting everyone’s time with nonsense when he needs to get back to the movie we’re watching. It’s as if the filmmakers were throwing down the gauntlet and announcing as loudly and clearly as possible that they were going to be as silly and absurd and digressive as they wanted to be and if jokes or allusions or references flew over the heads of children, they did not mind a bit. 

The Great Muppet Caper opens with Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear and Gonzo in a hot air balloon ruminating sardonically on the nature of opening credits as the opening credits fly by. 

Then they crash-land on a crowded city street and celebrate their existential fate as unlikely heroes of cinema, reveling in deliberate artifice as they perform a joyous production number about the bliss of being in not just a movie but a musical. 

This opening breaks the fourth wall to such an extent that it stays broken throughout the length of the film. We’re seemingly never more than a moment or two away from Miss Piggy looking directly at the camera with those unmoving yet weirdly expressive Muppet eyes and addressing us, the audience, as a trusted confidante. 

The Great Muppet Caper consequently has the curious quality of feeling at once purposefully old-fashioned, a sly, subversive throwback to MGM musicals with giant sets and giant casts and impossibly lush production values and boldly contemporary, a whip-smart, marvelously meta commentary on the conventions of film that is constantly acknowledging that it’s a movie. 

That gleeful post-modernism is a holdover from The Muppet Movie and The Muppet Show but The Great Muppet Caper takes it to loopy new extremes. Jim Henson’s directorial debut seemingly can’t go ten minutes without winking at the audience but those meta-textual flourishes never feel artificial or strained. 

On the contrary, they feel organic and earned because they are part of the innate tapestry of The Muppets in myriad mediums. 

In The Great Muppet Caper Kermit and Fozzie are investigative reporters and also, quite possibly, identical twins. How is that possible? Well, the movie has layers upon layers upon layers of artifice, so it is explicitly established that the Muppets are actors in the film rather than just the characters they are playing. 

There’s layers within layers within layers, friends, but it leads to some of my favorite gags not just in the film but of all time involving Kermit and Fozzie as the least likely identical twins in the history of the universe. 

Kermit and Fozzie’s noses for news leads them to London, where they, along with photographer Gonzo the Great, end up in a rundown establishment ironically named The Happiness Hotel occupied by a motley crew of Southern-fried and just plain fried Muppets, including Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. 

The Happiness Hotel seems to inhabit the little known “Alabama” portion of London. Then again The Great Muppet Caper’s cast is overflowing with Americans of both the flesh and blood and felt variety, and seems perversely uninterested in explaining why England is so overrun with Yankees. 

For a British film, The Great Muppet Caper is American to a purposefully absurd degree. For an American movie pitched at American audiences, however, it’s awfully British not just in its setting but also in its characters, themes and humor. 

When John Cleese is onscreen The Great Muppet Caper briefly takes an inspired detour into Monty Python territory while the abundance of old-fashioned one-liners and rimshot-worthy wisecracks is equally rooted in the ancient traditions of American vaudeville and English Music Hall. 

In London, Kermit falls for an aspiring model played by Miss Piggy, who in turn finds herself being pursued by bow-tie-wearing cad, lad of leisure and all-about ne’er do well  Nicky Holiday (Charles Grodin). 

The glib playboy’s motives are anything but pure, however. He wants to steal his sister Lady Holliday’s (Diana Rigg) jewelry collection, most notably the Baseball Diamond. 

Grodin finds the perfect tone for the material, at once weirdly committed, arch and ironic. Because the world is sometimes a beautiful and sublime place, much of Grodin’s dialogue is addressed directly to Miss Piggy, sometimes while stroking her face sensually. 

That Grodin didn’t win an Academy Award for his delivery of  “Forgive me, Miss Piggy!” and “Miss Piggy! How could you?” alone is crime. 

Like The Muppet Movie and Labyrinth, The Great Muppet Caper isn’t just an unusually creative and entertaining movie: it’s a goddamn miracle. I am perpetually in awe of Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s talent. They were one of our all-time great comedy duos, right up there with Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy and The Great Muppet Caper is one of their true masterpieces. 

The world that Henson and Oz and the other Muppeteers created in their television shows and movies is so rich and vast and wondrous that you could spend your whole life happily getting lost in it. 

As the hands, voice and soul of Yoda, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Sam Eagle, Cookie Monster, Bert and Grover, Frank Oz can lay claim to being one of the best, most important and beloved performers of the twentieth century. 

Oz and Henson had something special, something unique, something that, alas, died with Henson. Their creative chemistry is the rocket fuel that ignites The Great Muppet Caper’s absurd flights of fancy. 

I haven’t seen The Great Muppet Caper since I had the pleasure of seeing it in the movie theaters as a five year old. Re-watching it in the sad shadow of Charles Grodin’s death I instantly found myself transported happily back to my childhood. 

That’s the beauty of The Great Muppet Caper; it’s wonderfully adult and sophisticated in its humor yet nevertheless touches something deep within us that is child-like and pure and wants desperately to believe that the world of Sesame Street and The Muppets is real. 

So do yourself a favor and watch or re-watch The Great Muppet Caper on Disney Plus for free. Your inner kid will thank you for it and your outer adult will be happily overwhelmed with entertainment and imagination as well. 

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