The Rise And Fall Of Muppet Cinema

here's a question what is the greatest special effect in movie history is it the opening shot in Star Wars the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park the everything in avatar look those are all terrific but I think one that is just as amazing that we never seem to talk about is this we're on the way yes good we on it might seem odd to group Kermit the Frog in with the greatest achievements from industrial Light and magic or wed a digital like these are basically the same kind of simple hand puppets that have existed in some form or another for thousands of years but consider what we're seeing in this scene from The Great Muppet Caper here we have characters that we've always understood are simple puppets that we only ever see framed from the waist up because we know they have to hide the Puppeteer who has their hand up inside them and yet here they are their full bodies moving in wide shots like actual living breathing characters it kind of breaks our brains because we've always known exactly how puppets like this are done and then we see this and the rules have completely changed this movie was directed by Jim Henson the Beloved Creator and Puppeteer behind Sesame Street and the Muppet Show who devoted his life and career to evolving and expanding the potential of puppetry in cinema after winning over audiences of all ages with his collection of lovable felt characters he was determined to take this art form Beyond comedy variety shows and broaden the types of Storytelling possible with puppetry Hensen used the enormous popularity of the Muppet to get his dream project made The Dark Crystal a f fantasy epic driven entirely by puppets one of the most wildly ambitious movies of that decade and Beyond Henson's own work this period from the late '70s to the early '90s was a golden age of puppet driven Cinema from Yoda to the Gremlins to Audrey 2 to this thing this cinematic art form was evolving rapidly creating characters and creatures unlike anything that had ever been seen on screen before and then at the end of the decade with the sudden death of Hensen coinciding with the rapid advancement of CGI technology the Golden Age of Muppet Cinema came to an abrupt and tragic end what was that we Nobles it's my keep it posy button short for keep it positive there was so much death and negativity last season so Emma told me to buzz you anytime you got too bleak wa speaking of that where is Emma she's preparing for the episode by watching all the Muppet movies but anyway I mean isn't it appropriate that I fill in this time I I don't get it why cuz I'm obviously a big Muppet Enthusiast but don't worry Emma prepared some special treats for this episode hello uh hello oh hey uh I excuse me can't you see I'm busy Griffin Newman you looking for casting guys this is important how am I supposed to perform my duties as production assistant if I haven't seen every single Muppets movie is she going to be okay probably can I help you uh yeah I'm here to be a guest on the uh the Patrick Willam show oh I didn't even realize he was booking guests now honestly when they close the doors I just avoid that place like a haunted house probably smart hey oh so I got a special thing planned for the Labyrinth portion of the show can you harmonize some backup vocals uh yeah yeah yeah of course yeah great was that a ghost yeah so you want to go into the studio it's right back here through these doors okay go straight back no will get you taken care of he's a yellow guy green hair he's great right through there great thank you have fun thanks hello griffy boy you made it just wait here for your queue Patrick's going to be so surprised you no one has explained to me what I'm supposed to be doing just follow your [Music] [Applause] heart [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Patrick Williams and welcome to a brand new season of the show it's a new era with huge exciting changes because as you can see I now finally have a desk and I was able to afford This Magnificent piece of imitation wood by saving up the profits from our website authenticy props.com where true weirdos I mean fans can buy every random prop that shows up on this show you probably think this is a joke but it's not it's a real website anyway today's episode so in early 2023 we held a special event on our patreon where viewers could suggest and vote on a topic that I would then have to cover in a video and the winning topic was the rise and fall and resurrection of Muppet Cinema and now more than a year later I'm finally making it look I'm really sorry about the delay but we had a lot of important topics to get to like who's killing Cinema how AI is ruining art the deaths of various eras of film making wow last season was kind of a downer anyway when we say Muppet cinema this is a topic that could be interpreted many different ways the obvious way that I knew I absolutely did not want to do was to make an episode recapping the history of the Muppets franchise because back in 2019 the channel defunct land already did exactly that in a fantastic multi-part series that absolutely did reduce me to a sobbing mess in the final episode I don't have anything to add there ladies and gentlemen you may know him from Masters of the Universe Revolution what is going on Enchanted or as the co-host of blank check introducing special guest Newman Griffin what what are you doing here hi hey Patrick how's it going uh my agent called me and said you guys were working on a Muppet video and you maybe need someone to stop by and kind of jazz it up things have been a little slow since uh the strike so you know can't really turn down work anyway I prepared a few routines so I got options see whatever fits the vibe of the show best um okay cool what did you have in mind pitch one pitch one I do a tribute to my favorite Gonzo the great stunt spectacular eat attire while of the Bumblebee place that's that's just pitch one that's just pitch one pitch two got a killer pigs and SP back that I've been working on for a long time it's airtight at this point airtight so we just put that thing up on its feet do a little stage reading that's but you can think of that one pitch three okay and this is this one's a little out there but I think it's good I think it's really good I am secretly a very good break dancer like a sick nasty B boy so I'm saying we just break out the cardboard and I just do some stuff you know we just see what comes out look I'm not going to lie that's genuinely impressive and I would not have guessed it but um this is more of like a video essay style show you know like you know we just sit here and like I do film analysis okay so how about you just uh sit tight right there just chill out make yourself at home relax and I'll Circle back to you later on in the show to talk Muppets good good yeah fine okay where was I right so anyway I wasn't quite sure how to approach this topic until late last year when I rewatched the great Muppet Caper my personal favorite Muppet movie and I got to the aforementioned bicycle scene and I realized there that what I was most interested in exploring wasn't the Muppets themselves as much as I love them but instead what Muppet Cinema really is I'm talking about the evolution of movies driven by puppetry particularly the innovation in the 1980s led by Jim Henson moving beyond just the familiar Muppet characters into movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth this whole subcategory of puppet driven movies is what I'm going to call muppet cinema right now you might be thinking but Patrick Muppet is a trademarked word that only refers to characters in the specific Muppets franchise and to that I have two responses number one yes that is correct number two I don't care this is my show and I'm calling it Muppet Cinema so The Dark Crystal Muppet Cinema Little Shop of Horrors Muppet Cinema The Never Ending Story well I'm never ending sorry because that's Muppet Cinema as Puppeteer Lisa Amy sturs wrote in a 2013 piece for the puppetry journal in pre-digital Hollywood if your film required a fantastic character you had few choices of how to a achieve it puppets costumes or stop motion animation each of these approaches had advantages and drawbacks and the best effects were often a combination of all three often the choice involved how much of the character the camera needed to see so after the massive success of Star Wars American Cinema saw a huge boom in big budget sci-fi and fantasy films driven by the rapidly evolving special effects pioneered by George Lucas new company industrial Light and Magic there was suddenly a huge demand for Fantastical characters and creatures and often the most effective way to bring them to life was with puppets and the central figure in this new age of puppetry unsurprisingly was Jim Henson Henson is widely regarded as this nice bearded man who created a lot of beloved felt puppet characters but he was also one of the most technically Innovative and restlessly ambitious filmmakers who ever lived he was never content to repeat himself and with every project he made he was constantly working to push the medium forward since Jim Henson is the pivotal figure in Muppet Cinema let's go through a brief history of his earlier career surprisingly he had no initial passion for puppetry as a teenager Hensen was just really eager to work in the relative new medium of television and the very first job opening he found was as a puppeteer for a local TV show so he got some books out from the library on puppetry built some puppets himself learned about it and obviously got the job and then he just turned out to be such a genius at it that over the next couple decades he completely revolutionized the art form puppets had existed on TV before Hensen but he approached it differently instead of putting a traditional puppet show on TV he made a TV puppet show Designing new puppets with flexible faces that could emote in a closeup and creating visual jokes using the TV frame and editing from the very beginning his work was inherently cinematic Henson built an audience with his own little 5minute Daily Show on a local Washington DC Network which led to him being hired to make tons of national TV commercials as well as doing lots of talk show and variety show appearances from there Henson helped develop Sesame Street heavily populated with Muppets he and his team created which is to this day probably the most important and influential children's TV show of all time but he wanted to prove that puppets weren't only for children so after doing a couple of Standalone tv specials in 19 76 he played the music he lit the lights and he launched the Muppet Show it's the Muppet Show with our very special guest Dar Miss Juliet FR over its run the Muppet Show would become literally the most popular TV show in the world but once he felt he had perfected it Hensen wanted to move on and in a move that would be copied by the likes of Michael Jordan and Seinfeld he ended the show at the PE of its success he knew the show could live forever in reruns but he didn't want to just spend the rest of his life doing the same things over and over again with the Muppets because he had his sight set higher on major Motion Pictures the more I rewatched Muppet media while researching this the more obsessed I became with how these puppets work not like on a technical level that part is usually pretty obvious but I mean how they work cinematic ically as Dr Alexander Sergeant puts it puppet driven films occupy ainal status between animation and liveaction they are essentially cartoon characters with simple designs that can easily be drawn or could easily be turned into animation they have clean lines bold colors big shapes and big personalities with memorable voices and yet they exist within physical space acting live against human actors but unlike animated characters whose smallest movements take hours if not days to create puppets can improvise and physically interact with things around them they have the energy and spontaneity you can only get with human performers no what are you doing go away now I know my abc next time cookie monst next time Cookie Monster with you I'm leaving I love you I love you too thanks and despite the limited movement of their eyes or faces they're designed in such a way that when performed well they feel completely real and can communicate a vast range of emotions Kermit can't even blink his mouth is just a thing that flaps up and down and yet he can express anger and joy and heartbreak and believably interact with liveaction humans with great design and great puppeteering both physical and voice we just accept them as real it seems like they can do pretty much anything we don't tend to think of the Muppets as special effects like puppetry has been around for thousands of years and we all generally understand how it works there's an upper body made out of felt with a hand up inside it operating the mouth so the shots are usually framed to hide the Puppeteer with the puppet's lower body off camera or behind a counter or in the cryp Keeper's case a big spooky throne but from the early days of his career Henson was obsessed with pushing the medium forward and putting things with puppets on screen that had previously seemed impossible after making his new more expressive kind of hand puppet he built huge full body puppets like big bird with functioning eyes then puppets so big they required two full people inside them in EMT Otter's Jug Band Christmas he had wide shots of Puppets rowing a boat down a river which was done with radio control systems invented for the project for the opening of The Muppet Movie they had a wide fullbody shot of Kermit the Frog singing and playing the banjo while sitting on a log in a pond a scene that was executed by having Hensen himself in a diving bell underwater Puppeteer and Kermit minutes later in the movie Kermit rides a bicycle through a wide shot and of course that entire movie puts the Muppets in real locations for the first time making literally every scene a new kind of challenge like figuring out how to have fuzzy bear drive a real car even a really simple shot like this is actually an incredible special effect like it seems totally normal and then you look a bit closer and you go wait a second how does that work where is Jim Henson hiding CGI doesn't really exist yet so they can't just paint him out is this black magic did Henson sell his soul at the crossroads to gain control over inanimate objects is it a remote control animatronic who can say but because the narrative around Henson and his company focused so much on the puppeteers as performers their technical breakthroughs were generally ignored by the same movie fans that were obsessing over the work that industrial Light and Magic was doing they didn't get any coverage in magazines at the time that wrote about special effects as Sant writes in his essay crafted wonder the Jim Hensen company was celebrated as a team of innovative performance artists yet they were not considered as effects artists this would change over the following years as Henson's team would deliberately avoid the words puppet and muppet when promoting movies to focus the attention on the production design and technical advancements the London branch of Henson's company would later be rebranded the Creature Shop and design effects and characters for other Productions like Return to Oz dream child and of course the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the remote controled puppet rigs that fos Ficus had first developed for EMT otter eventually became so Advanced with so many complex mechanical facial controls that they finally felt it wasn't even really accurate to call them puppets anymore so Henson's team dubbed them animatronics adapting it from the existing term audio animatronic which referred to the automated robot characters in Disney theme parks and this is the term that stuck around to this day and would be applied to the landmark puppet rigs that Stan Winston would build for the Terminator movies and Jurassic Park the next major advancement in Muppet Cinema was not technically a muppet at all the Muppet Show filmed in London at elre Studios and in 1976 right across the street George Lucas was shooting the first Star Wars Henson and Lucas became friends and when a Star Wars sequel came around and needed a small alien Jedi Master character Lucas naturally went to Hensen while Henson didn't have the time to work on it directly he spared some of his best Muppet designers as well as Frank Oz his best Puppeteer to perform Yoda the Great great challenge here was that he had to be totally realistic in a way the other Muppets didn't he needed textured skin facial muscles that moved a lower body and blinking emotive eyes and most importantly he needed to carry dramatic dialogue scenes whether deliberate or not acclimating the audience to Yoda was done similarly to The Muppets themselves in The Empire Strikes Back Yoda Begins the movie as a chaotic Bish funny little guy who wins the audience over by making them laugh so they already like him when he gets more serious despite not being a hence in production Yoda was a testing ground for new technical puppet Innovations specifically the use of complex motorized facial controls and most importantly he proved that Muppets could work in more serious material because that was Henson's next big plan speaking about her father Father Jim years later Cheryl Henson said he was always interested in the idea of going Beyond The Muppets there was a sense of wanting to find something wanting to work on something that had more depth to it by agreeing to deliver a sequel to The Muppet Movie Henson secured financing for the dream project he had been developing for years this was going to be a hard turn away from the wacky comedy stylings of The Muppets The Dark Crystal was going to be a dark fantasy epic and in the riskiest move of all it would have a cast entirely of Puppets it would be the first liveaction movie ever made without a single human being on screen this was the ultimate test of Muppet Cinema and honestly one of the most wildly ambitious blank check movies of all time you say did you say blank check yeah yeah mean like when the director experiences Mass massive success early on in their career and has given a series of blank checks make whatever crazy passion products they want exactly and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby what nothing Hey listen do do do you have any kind of General etm when we're getting to my break dancing routine cuz I I really got some moves burnning a hole in my pocket you know my fellow B boys call me kiot and I'll tell you why it's because I'd be devastating them windmills look just be patient Griffin uhhuh I'm sure we're going to get to it okay cool so in the Dark Crystal literally everything is handmade from the sets to the mat paintings to the characters themselves it was the ultimate realization of Henson's dream of showing that puppets can do more than just comedy for children it tells the story of the planet thw and a young gelfling named Jen who was raised by a peaceful race known as the mystics who must fulfill a prophecy to repair the crystal of Truth before the evil skus gained the power to rule the planet forever originally Hensen wanted the mystics and skus to speak in unsubtitled madeup languages believing that the power of the imagery would be strong enough that the audience would understand the story without dialogue but alas Hensen ever The Optimist had too much faith in audiences and after disastrous test screenings he realized that he needed to redub the the whole movie with English dialogue if you've watched any fantasy movies from the 1980s you've probably noticed that they have a very particular aesthetic which was largely defined by cinematographer Alex Thompson who worked on Excalibur Legend and Henson's own Labyrinth these movies tended to be very theatrical and very stylized and were often shot entirely on sound stages The Dark Crystal has a similar aesthetic but what it does is it erases the gulf between the real humans and the stagy artificial environments that exist in other films here there is an aesthetic consistency That You Don't See in The Neverending Story or Legend since everything is at the same level of heightened theatricality it removes the line between the real and the special effects because here literally everything is a special effect Sergeant writes that it would be fair to describe The Dark Crystal as the Jim Hensen company's Snow White the film represents a comparable Technical and Commercial Leap Forward for the art of puppetry on screen as Disney's feature debut provided for cell animation Snow White the first featurelength fully cell animated movie was a massive critical and commercial success as well as the highest grossing movie of 1937 it made Walt Disney a major player in the film industry and legitimized animation as a major valid part of Cinema and it did that because in addition to being a huge technical achievement it was just a really good well-told story with catchy songs that appealed to a really wide audience The Dark Crystal was likewise a huge technical achievement but it stumbled a bit on the second part the story in the movie is pretty standard fantasy stuff there's a bland nice protagonist who's told that he has to fulfill a prophecy by going on an adventure so he does there's no real character development and not a lot of emotion and it doesn't help that as great as the puppets are the gelflings our protagonists have a more subtle humanlike design than the rest of the characters and end up stiffer and less expressive than everything else they're kind of dull augra though augra is a legend augra rules no complaints about a at all if anything should have had more augra John Stevenson a designer who worked on the film has said that he thinks it would have worked better if the gelflings had been played by human children although Frank Oz who co-directed the movie vehemently disagrees now whatever the dark crystals issues I think it manages to transcend a lot of them just by being so God damn astonishing to watch like I don't even have time to worry about the story when I'm spending all 90 minutes shouting at the screen how did they do this The Dark Crystal did feature some characters performed with similar hand puppets to The Muppets but most others were operated by different means often complex fullbody puppets are puppets that require dancers to contort their bodies and operate multiple arms with each hand like the documentary about the making of the movie is nearly as entertaining as the movie itself just to witness the level of craft and Artistry on display and discover how how the hell they pulled this off their entire puppetry process had to change for this one movie as Hensen explained I've never done any performing that difficult in my life and the things that were the hardest were really ordinary things The Muppets can just go bouncing across a room but when you have some characters that you have to believe in as living creatures the movements are much more complex and subtle like do you cut your eyes before you turn your head or after little things like that things you normally wouldn't think about the Dark Crystal was a moderate financial success mostly thanks to Henson's Relentless promotion but it wasn't widely embraced by the public the way his previous work was and it definitely did not do for Muppet Cinema what Snow White had done for animation but Henson remained dead set on pushing Muppet Cinema forward so he followed up The Dark Crystal with Labyrinth another astonishing work of imagination and Technical Brilliance pretty much every scene in Labyrinth introduces some incredible new puppet character some amazing set some impossible effect like the part where the giant gate closes and forms a huge mechanical robot that's operated by this little puppet guy in its head it's amazing but once again the movie is not as narratively satisfying as you want it to be despite the combined efforts of Monty pythons Terry Jones George Lucas a producer on the movie and I kid you not Elaine May the script never manages to provide much characterization or motivation for Sarah its main character Labyrinth is a movie that I still quite enjoy but mostly as a thing to look at not because I'm emotionally invested in the story for all of Henson's genius featurelength dramatic narratives were not his strength with Labyrinth he tried to tone down the ambition of the The Dark Crystal a little bit adding some liveaction humans this time in an effort to make it more palatable to wide audiences but despite his efforts the movie was ultimately deemed a failure it was a critical and Commercial flop and the proverbial final nail in the coffin of Henson's ambitious Muppet C godamn it Nobles sorry Patrick but failure coffin nails that's not a very py way of talking yeah I'm sorry I actually got to agree with nobl on this one Patrick no I mean I don't want to use harsh words myself but you are being a bit of a morbid Marvin you know well can you at least turn the volume down on the buzzer it's on the lowest setting it only gets louder I swear to God when I get my hands on that buzzer I'm going to smash it into a million million happy little pieces that's more like it so Labyrinth obviously does have its devoted fans and one of them is is Jake torpy my friend who got murdered by an evil robot coconut and is now a ghost who haunts the studio I promised Jake that he could say a few words about one of his favorite movies so Jake anything you want to share with us well I'm glad you asked Patrick I'd like to do a tribute to one of my favorite characters from the film Labyrinth you know him you love them that's right I'm talking about the lorm come inside never nice cup of tea me love me love me love me love me love come he's a good worm stuck in big maze nowhere to go H Commander he's a good wor Toby's missing he's my baby bro come and he's a good worm hey Mr L worm take me to the J enough that Griffin we're not break dancing now either Emma where are you you not you to me this is one of the great what if moments in cinema history if the Dark Crystal had been a snow white level success would it have popularized a new kind of movie would we have Decades of all puppet movies released by Major Studios right now would we all be complaining about the announcement of the augra prequel trilogy in the Dark Crystal Cinematic Universe of course not that's a absurd no one would ever complain about more augra she's the best now while we've been pretty focused on the work of Jim Henson here the Golden Age of Muppet Cinema expanded Beyond just him like the Star Wars movies were the biggest things around and they prominently featured Yoda Jaba the Hut and of course that lovable Scamp salacious crumb in 1984 Wolf Gang Peterson's fantasy film the never-ending story featured a whole collection of elaborate puppet characters like falor rockbiter Gort and Mora I love those guys Frank Oz one of Henson's closest collaborators co-directed The Dark Crystal with him then solo directed The Muppets Take Manhattan but his first movie away from Henson's company was the adaptation of the off Bradway musical Little Shop of Horrors in which Audrey 2 the giant man eing alien plant was basically the third lead of the movie and it remains one of the most expressive and effective movie puppets ever built a bunch of people from the Labyrinth team worked on that project including lead designer Lyall Conway who had worked for years designing and building characters in Henson Productions like Dark Crystal dream child and Return to Oz in the80s puppets were also huge in horror movies featured prominently in Aliens the thing and Child's Play and of course who could forget the story of the friendly alien who was stranded on Earth and had to find his way home that's right I'm talking about Al while Muppet Cinema seemed to dominate the 1980s quietly in the background computer generated images had been developing Steam and then at the turn of the decade it abruptly changed everything in Lisa Amy st's essay that I mentioned earlier she writes about how in 1993 she was cast as one of the puppeteers in the liveaction Flint Stone's movie for the dinosaur character Dino during the movie's pre-production Jurassic Park opened and when sturs went to work the very next day she saw that the puppet she was supposed to operate had been replaced with a CGI character earlier I quoted the same piece where she wrote that in pre-digital Hollywood if your film required a fantastic character you had few choices of how to achieve it puppets costumes or stop motion animation and seemingly overnight CGI replaced all three techniques for stop motion it makes the most sense since they're a similar process the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are the Ed 209 and RoboCop are both animated elements created in post- production and composited into the liveaction footage but puppetry and CGI are fundamentally different philosophies and this meant replacing tangible onset performances with animation created separately I do have to point out that Jim Hensen himself the king of Muppet Cinema had already embraced CGI by the end of the 80s his last TV show The Jim Hensen hour introduced a new CGI Muppet named Waldo C graphic and the opening of Labyrinth featured the very first realistically animated CGI animal in movie history Hensen died tragically at the age of 53 in 1990 so we'll never know how he would have adapted and responded to this huge change in film effects technology when you look at what happened to Muppet Cinema after 1990 it's clear how much Hensen was singularly pushing it forward the art form's Evolution was so tied to him that his death pretty much halted its Evolution and in the '90s his company mostly just went back to producing the kinds of Muppet movies and TV shows they had done in the 70s and early 80s look I want to be very clear I am not here to say that CGI sucks it's just another tool and it's has been used brilliantly in more films than I can possibly count like when you look at characters like Gollum or Caesar or Davey Jones or everyone's favorite guy Jake Sully no one is going to argue that they would be better if they were puppets these characters require a range of subtle emotional AC and depth that even the best puppetry simply can't do when it comes to the difference between these two effects approaches the best and simplest explanation I've heard comes from one of the cardor digital VFX artist React videos my take on CGI is this at the end of the day CGI is a fancy cartoon you know it can look really nice you can hit strong emotions but it's still a quote unquote cartoon that's the effect that it has versus a practical effect is more theatrical it's more and I mean that like the literal sense of being on a stage and it's a thing that's real that you can hold in your hands and act with there's a certain level of coordination and authenticity that you definitely don't get with CG essentially what we're talking about here is the difference between theater and animation puppets are a form of theater that have existed for way longer than movies have the Muppet Show was literally set in a theater so in the 90s a shift occurred from what I'm calling the Muppet era to the cartoon era it's easy to understand why filmmakers were eager to embrace the new technology and move away from the theatrical feeling of 80s fantasy movies and the limitations of puppets with their limited movement after Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park totally changed the game game that kind of hyperphoto realism in effects became the goal everyone was aiming for and this pursuit of realism goes directly against the Muppet era of the80s as sturs wrote the Hensen company and others use more abstract control mechanisms to amplify the power of caricature they want to deliberately exaggerate our abstract puppet motions to achieve dramatic effect in a way that would not be efficient our possible with full body motion capture the puppets from the Golden Age of Muppet Cinema whether the Muppets themselves or Audrey 2 or the Gremlins or Hoggle from Labyrinth are characteres with exaggerated designs and movements they are not realistic but they are believable but in an era where realism was the top priority there was just no longer a place for these Hollywood became resistance to anything that didn't seem realistic even when it hurt the movie itself like in the first Harry Potter movie would the troll have looked better if it were a fullbody puppet like the ones in Labyrinth absolutely but that was not in style anymore so they used CGI instead that wasn't quite up to the task during post production the 2011 prequel to The Thing confusingly also called The Thing completely replaced the elaborate onset animatronic effects with CGI and the CGI here isn't even really bad but from small Clues like the movement and the lighting we just know subconsciously that what we're looking at isn't real and it immediately loses the visceral impact that a tangible onset effect would have which is a major problem when you're making a horror movie the effects in the 1982 version aren't realistic but we funded Mally believe them we know they're happening there on set and sometimes that's more important last year the director of the 2011 thing spoke about this saying I know this is a debated topic but looking back we were caught in a cross Zone where animatronics were old-fashioned and the CGI wasn't good enough we made the wrong decision to do it in post- production when it came to making the monster design of the computer I regret that now by 20 2 even Yoda one of the most important characters in Muppet Cinema would be reborn as a CGI character the irony is that CGI replaced puppetry as an attempt to achieve greater realism to have a greater range of motion and no longer be limited by what the camera needed to hide and eventually it made liveaction movies feel more like cartoons than ever before so now the big question is is there still a place for puppets in the cartoon era is one better than the other Griffin yeah maybe you have some thoughts on this didn't didn't you play a CGI squirrel in the Enchanted it was a chipmunk uh his name's pip he's the narrator of the film disenchanted still streaming on Disney plus uhhuh so do you think that character would have been better if it was a puppet um I I I don't think that's a question I should answer without my lawyer present okay so uh uh no comment from Griffin but as I was saying honestly there's no simple answer to this question there's been such a major aesthetic change in mainstream movies since the80s moving away from the heightened theatrical Vibe of fantasy movies from that era that like it's difficult to imagine puppets like the ones from The Never Ending Story fitting into something like Lord of the Rings which makes such an effort to ground the fantasy with real locations and realistic visuals and really prioritize naturalism another part of the reality of the move away from puppetry is that puppets add on a lengthy pre-production process to design and build them all and they require the filmmakers to know exactly what shots and angles they're going to use ahead of time since the puppets are built to only work in specific angles or settings and now often in the cartoon ERA filmmakers with little visual effect experience will just shoot a scene on a blue screen while the producers throw it to a team of overworked underpaid VFX artists and say just figure out what's happening here so as an example let's look at a scene from the 1985 movie dream child with puppets by Jim Henson's Creature Shop these puppets are incredible like look at those weird ass designs look at the detail in the faces these things are awesome then you should say what you you mean but as you watch it don't you kind of wish that the lips and mouths moved a little bit better and were more in sync with the dialogue like you can't help but stare at the lips maybe think about what it would be like to kiss them but more to the point you can't help but just watch as they don't perfectly move around the words and CGI could do that no problem deliver a full range of motion and perfectly think with the dialogue but then also you would lose that tactility you would have the sense that you're looking at a thing that isn't really there and the actor would no longer have this real thing to act against and react to of course it should be noted that performance capture and motion capture technology have to an extent solved this problem because they do have a live actor there on set but also you have weird cases like The Call of the Wild movie where the dog is in entirely animated but he is done with performance capture with a human there but also the whole time you're watching the movie wondering why the dog is fake I don't know it's a weird choice I think the best modern balance between the two approaches is in Spike Jones's 2009 adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are for the titular Wild Things The Henson Creature Shop designed and built these huge animatronic suits for actors to wear on set on location and then CGI was used to animate the faces and since they had the physical faces built into the suits as reference for the animators the animation work seamlessly matched with what was shot live so you get the tactility of puppets and the expressiveness of animation and it's basically perfect it couldn't possibly be done better and of course that movie was not a commercial success and so basically nothing was learned from it in Innovations but wait the story isn't over yet in the last 15 years there's been a sort of resurrection of Muppet Cinema The Muppets franchise was rebooted in 2011 for two new movies Star Wars brought back a focus on practical puppetry bringing back puppet Yoda and most significantly introducing Lil baby Yoda grou and in 2019 Netflix produced The Dark Crystal age of resistance a 10 episode prequel show once again starring a cast entirely of puppets and all of this is great get out of here like I said all of this is great it's just it's wonderful to see puppets on screen again it's been so long and I got to say it's a bummer that Muppets Most Wanted had such bad marketing that it flopped and put the franchise on ice again because that movie is actually good but to be cynical for that's it I'll show you py easy now Patrick give me that watch the [Applause] fur sorry about that as I was saying to be cynical for a moment all of these new works of Muppet Cinema only exist because of nostalgia they're all reboots of old intellectual properties when Star Wars returned in 2015 its operating philosophy was to erase the memory of the prequels and go back to how the original movies looked and felt so the return to practical puppets was a deliberate nostalgic throwback if this was any other series would those characters still be practical puppets I kind of doubt it The Dark Crystal show exists because at that time Netflix was desperate to get its hands on any intellectual property it could no matter how small the fan base and they were throwing money at basically anything and then like the show swiftly canceling it so it remains to be seen if puppets will be used for anything outside of franchise reboots or of course uh adult comedies where the joke is look at this [ __ ] up stuff the puppets are doing okay so after all of this what is Muppet Cinema really Beyond a dumb confusing term that I made up well I think it's this special combination of theater and cinematic special effects it prioritizes caricature and disregards realism while putting something tangible and believable on screen as sergeant puts it puppet driven Cinema can be seen as as a momentary aberration before the rise of CGI a technology that has now come to dominate special effects practice within the Hollywood film industry and people like me and especially Jake over here keep going back to it because these movies possess unique qualities that even the best animation can't replicate so no matter what spectacular visual effects we see in the years to come no matter what rad [ __ ] Jake sell does next I still can't imagine anything topping the time that a frog and a pig Road Bicycles through a park anyway that's our show what wait hey I've been waiting here all day you're not going to let me do my part oh don't worry we have a part for you in the bonus companion video companion wa you're pushing me off no we're bumping you up to another platform a better platform Griffin an ad free platform called nebula okay I'm listening see right now Griffin and I are going to hang out and have a whole conversation about Muppet Cinema not an essay just a a chat about everything we love about these movies and characters and you can watch that right now over on nebula as you may have heard nebula is the creator-owned adree streaming platform that I helped develop which is honestly the best place to watch this show for every episode we have an exclusive bonus companion video only on nebula and it's also the place where you can watch the Patrick H Willams Star Wars holiday special our insane musical season finale that was released in December or night of the coconut our featurelength movie the real goal of nebula is to help creators like me produce the big ambitious projects that we could never really afford to make ourselves like the the short film that I'm working on right now that nebula is funding and helping me develop and that will be available exclusively there once it's done see we're getting into the film business now so nebula is the exclusive place where you can watch the new movies from Abigail Thorne or Jesse gender we've got a ton of great stuff coming up that I am really excited about so just going to say now is the time to join if you haven't already and if you use my link to sign up you'll get a discounted rate that comes out to only $2.50 per month and that also helps support my channel and fund future projects all right well that just about does it here for us big thanks to our special guest Griffin Newman hey thank you for having me Patrick this has been one of the more uncomfortable experiences of my life and I I dress up as water on a regular basis so that's saying something another one in the books I think we made some magical content today all right so all all that's left to say is good night everyone wait I did it I finished watching every single Muppets movie so now we can finally start filming Emma we just finished the video is over but I watched Muppets in Space for this SC you know what let's take it from the top folks one more time from the beginning places people this time I'm at he's doing the tire eating routine someone get me that blue Ghost guy here we go [Music] again hello and welcome back to a brand new season of the show we've been gone for 2 months we are finally back it's a bold New Era I got a desk now we have guests on the show uh huge thank you sincerely to Griffin for coming on the show Absolutely crushing it blank check best movie podcast out there Masters of the Universe Revolution on Netflix he's great in Scott Pilgrim takes off also on Netflix go watch listen to all of those um yeah this season we we might sometimes have more guests I think I think that'll be fun not every episode because that would be really hard to coordinate but sometimes uh I think it'll be cool so look if you are a famous person who watches the show um please let me know so that we can book you on it and use your notoriety to boost our numbers great um one thing I must address since this everyone knew this video was coming for a year uh people kept saying there better be a muppet Patrick in the Muppet episode and so we made it a patreon goal where if we reach a certain number of patrons then I'll commission a muppet Patrick and we didn't reach it that's why there's no Muppet Patrick uh I guess people didn't want it enough but that said if and when we do reach that goal I will still commission them up at Patrick and put it in some other future episode we'll we'll we'll you know put it to good use uh and look we have other good goals on the patreon like I will make a video about lacrosse with my dad I'll make a video explaining everything on this giant shelf behind me uh I'll make a video about the Avatar movies filmed in the Avatar Land of Disney World it look look we we got a bunch of good stuff on there stop plugging it now so look I have to go back to work finishing editing the veto Awards because they will be out in less than a week two videos in one week what is even going on I don't know I'm I'm very tired thank you for watching good night [Music] everyone

Channel: Patrick (H) Willems

Views: 281,702

Keywords: patrick willems, patrickhwillems, patrick h willems

Id: AZcawgSGsMk

Length: 54min 51sec (3291 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024