1996’s Muppet Treasure Island is surely a part of the second movement of Muppet pictures, which started four years before with The Muppet Christmas Carol. The first trio of Muppet movies, heralded under Jim Henson’s tutelage, was expansive, placing a massive cast of Muppet characters in the real world as if they were not puppets. This next set of theatrical releases, guided by Henson’s son Brian, is inward-looking, with a smaller cast of A-list Muppets on obvious sets, utilizing literary properties for their inspiration. So obviously, Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “Treasure Island” forms the basis for Muppet Treasure Island, just as Charles Dickens was the springboard for…the other one.
The Muppet Christmas Carol showed the potential drawbacks to this new Muppet approach – fewer Muppets in limited roles, the need to marry the anarchic Muppet tone with the often at-odds tone of another artist’s work. This was perhaps the best example of what the Muppets could do as Raiders of the Public Domain. The lone highlighted human, Michael Caine, gives perhaps the best ever non-Mark Hamill performance entirely alongside hand puppets, so good that I never even realized then how odd it must’ve been for that seasoned thespian. Despite largely the same crew behind the scenes – director Brian Henson, writer Jerry Juhl, the usual assortment of unnamed Muppeteers – Muppet Treasure Island is a fairly sorry variation on the same idea. It goes to show how the little changes can make a big difference.
Once again, this film was produced by the Jim Henson Company and distributed by Disney. However, the Disney hand is far more obviously felt at this point – the Muppet movies were always musical comedies with essentially “animated” characters, but they were always more Looney Tune in style and humor. By 1996, Disney was riding high on an unprecedented series of traditionally animated hits (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King…eh, Pocahontas not so much…), all built around a dependable but increasingly-boring musical theater formula. And Muppet Treasure Island does its damnedest to match that formula as best as the Muppets can – Hell, it even has a Yearning Song!
Considering the psychotic megalomania of Disney around the mid-90s, the Muppets were only one of their attempts to branch out into other realms of children’s entertainment. Consider it: They had cell animation under their belts. There were efforts to corner the stop motion field (The Nightmare Before Christmas), and the upcoming CGI market (Toy Story). The Muppets were their inroad into puppetry. The best of these Disney-distributed projects (anything by Pixar) successfully broke free of the immovable Disney formula; the Muppets here did not. For once, their output wasn’t a rich brew of kid-friendly adult humor; it was just kid-friendly.
Considering the stupid new unwritten rules the Muppets were operating under (zero deaths, lessened anachronistic anarchy, music numbers modeled after Ashman and Menken), we have a strange amalgam of Muppet and Disney, a neither-nor proposition. It feels like the sort of thing that, budget aside, would nowadays find its way to TV or DTV (actually, recent Muppet history bears this out). Anyway, considering these new rules, it’s even a strange idea to use “Treasure Island” as your base, since you kinda have to ignore a lot of the no-longer kid-friendly piratical elements to squeeze it into this lame 90s concept of family entertainment. Why’d they (and Disney in 2002 with Treasure Planet) think this was the book for them?
Don’t get me wrong, “Treasure Island” is a great book, something all non-illiterate boys (that is, not most of the youngest generation I now know) should read at some point growing up. It’s the perfect adventure story, and single-handedly turned pirates into a subgenre. And the plot is eminently recognizable (map to buried treasure – that’s mostly it), so there’s room for Muppets to play. But, come on, hand puppets can do “heartwarming” well enough (see The Muppet Christmas Carol), but swashbuckling action sequences are somewhat less in their comfort zone. And the thing just doesn’t have the sort of melodramatic emotions that benefit a musical.
The opening sequence shows what perhaps could be done by hybridizing Muppets and pirates – Muppirates! A I mass of evil, evil pirates trounces about the titular Treasure Island (not yet so named), burying their ill-got treasure and singing “Shiver My Timbers,” which has just about the most piratical lyrics I’ve ever heard: “Shiver my timbers, shiver my soul/Yo ho ho!” Considering all of the seven or so songs in the film are derived from sea chantey tunage, there’s only so much you can do with this angle, and this one does it best. There are, of course, metric felt-tons of Muppets on hand to sing as well, crabs, gators, monkeys, fleas, totems, skulls, whatever, none of them familiar. There are hardly any A-list Muppets here, odd since they’re not real actors with contracts, and thus just as easy to throw in as the anonymous goat monsters we get. So anyway, this scene boils down to a fun sea chantey, and singing Muppet skulls. Good times.
Here we are at that inn like in Stevenson’s novel, not clearly named here (and I forget what they called it in the book – oh whatever). Drunken pirate scalawag Billy Bones (Billy Connolly, a comedian here not trying to be funny) regales us all with his exposition about the buried treasure at Treasure Island – you know, that’s not so complicated a concept to need so much exposition. Also, Jennifer Saunders is there, as per this film’s scant, scant cameos. Young Jim Hawkins (Kevin Bishop, in his first role, now star of “The Kevin Bishop Show”) is rightly thrilled by this tale of pirates and gold and corpses. Where’s the Muppets?! Ah, here’s some now – Gonzo the Great and Rizzo the Rat (as “themselves”), now officially a comic duo after their unexpected success together in The Muppet Christmas Carol. And here’s the problem with such an adaptation of “Treasure Island”: They have no literary equivalent; they’re just extra characters with no plot function.
They also do not serve the same function as last time, to act as the meta-framing device – a means to up a Muppet movie’s IQ by many dozen points. Sure, the fourth wall gets broken occasionally, but only in the ornamental sense of The Great Muppet Caper and not in the intricate, essential way of The Muppet Movie. ‘Cause, you know, they could be formally inventive, but that’d confuse the kiddies, and Disney don’t want that!
A little wilting comic business later, emphasis on the lame slapstick over the usual sophisticated bad punning, and it’s time for Jim’s Disneyfied Yearning Song™, “Something Better.” This so precisely follows the Disney standard that – Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
Whoa, pirates!...Well, Muppet pirates, hideous “frog” creatures (I guess, since they’re French) that look like so much disgusting felt under the couches at a kindergarten. The new character designs here look diseased. This is the inciting incident, sending Jim (and Gonzo [and Rizzo]) off on a whirlwind adventure of musical numbers and stilted action. Jim gets the map to Treasure Island from Billy (Connolly), who promptly – dies. Rizzo thinks this shouldn’t be here, though it’s clearly in the book, because, you know, people can’t die in kid’s films. I disagree. I think kids are less innocent than the moral guardians would prefer, and if you don’t give ‘em some death in the right way, they’re just gonna go ahead and watch some Eli Roth movies, and that’s much worse. But I digress.
Uh…Jim seeks a ship, so to go get that there treasure what for himself. The next ten minutes sees the introduction of most A-list Muppets to appear, so let’s go over them. There’s Fozzie Bear as Squire Trelawney, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew as Dr. Livesey, Beaker as whomever, Sam the Eagle as Mr. Samuel Arrow, and Kermit the Frog as Captain Abraham Smollett. Also, Sweetums appears for the first time in about 15 years, which probably meant very little at the time. Also also, Statler and Waldorf are the Hispaniola ship’s bow sprites, just because – look, we gotta squeesze certain Muppets in someplace, setting be damned! And not only are these some random and arbitrary character designations (except for Sam the Eagle, which is why this is the only time he’s had a major role), but it begs further questions. Like this: With the Muppets averaging a movie every four years, and with no regularized TV show since the early 80s, just who would appreciate or even recognize the Statler and Waldorf jokes? It’s like putting Disco Stu in Ancient Greece and calling him Discus Stu, only without the regular series context to make that joke “work.” With this continued Treehouse of Horror approach, I can see why the Muppets are not the most tenacious of film franchises.
More specifically, Kermit’s usage in these films grows increasingly gutless in each entry. He is slowly getting Mickeyfied, becoming a noble and personality-free company mascot who is no longer allowed to have conflict. To only see this movie, you’d never understand how Kermit could reach the cultural plateau he now enjoys; it took my rediscovering the old Muppet movies to realize this myself.
Now, isn’t there a certain character from “Treasure Island,” a certain greatest fictional pirate of all time, without which Muppet Treasure Island could barely call itself a shallow pastiche of a century-old book? Yeah, we’re gonna need a Long John Silver, that rapscallion who did the one leg and parrot thing before it was cool. As per the new Muppet rules, this’ll be the big guest star of the entry, like Michael Caine last time. It’ll be Tim Curry – you know, Dr. Frank N. Furter, the Lord of Darkness, Pennywise the Dancing Clown. That’s one bizarre-ass resume! And compared to Caine’s soulful and film-carrying performance from last time, Curry just hams things up worse than the yet-to-appear Miss Piggy. It’s one thing to deliver an unfiltered mass of “Arr!”-ing pirate clichés, and it’s another thing to do it well (like those other Disney pirate movies from the ‘00s – you know the ones).
Speaking of those unnamed movies, guess who did the soundtrack for this thing? Hans Zimmer. Wow, it’s almost like a real pirate movie!
The Hispaniola is off on an interminable sea voyage. There’s the usual conflict concerning Silver’s character, who might be a good guy (a father figure to Jim), or a bad guy (scheming potential mutiny). You ought to know this, though, since this story ought to be amongst our culture’s best known – it might even be through pure pop cultural osmosis. The Jim and Silver stuff, the real meat of Stevenson’s tale, plays totally independently of the Muppet-based nuttiness. It’s pure melodrama, and played totally straight even though it’s aimed for the rafters. It’s pretty bad.
The Muppet stuff, which is totally independent of Stevenson, largely concerns Rizzo having organized an anachronistic cruise for his drunken rat buddies, a “Caribbean Pi‘rat’e Tour.” If that pun made you cringe, well, it’s about the best joke in this thing. Oh Jerry Juhl, you were once so good at telling bad jokes! And there are songs, naturally, the best way to fill out the streamlined narrative and sketchy humor to feature length. “Sailing for Adventure” is, well, it’s exactly what you’d expect from that title. At some point in here, Dr. Teeth’s Increasingly Anachronistic Mayhem makes a token appearance, to little or no effect. Animal, the greatest and most glorious of all Muppets, gets only one line: “POLITICS!” Actually, that’s the funniest joke in the movie!
The movie drags along, and it seems we’re rather in the doldrums. This is appropriate, since the characters themselves are too, just lying around uselessly on the deck awaiting incident. And where do you turn as a filmmaker when put up against such a stultified wall? Why, straight to Crazy Town, that’s where! All the Muppets go mop mad as a vague Raimi cam settles on them, bursting into the “Cabin Fever” dance number, ship somehow transformed into a Copacabana discotheque. This is the sort of imagination-deprived, desperate non sequitur plea for attention one sees in DTV kid vid flicks, and “VeggieTales.” (They’re vegetables!...That’s the joke!) Now, name a musical genre. Go ahead, name any. It appears in this sequence. Statler and Waldorf make occasional appearances to badmouth the movie they’re in, as is their wont. Sadly, in this particular case, they’re right on the ball (for once).
Back on the actual plot front with Silver: His central trio of hench-Muppets is brigged, then de-brigged, then whatever. Now, there’s a central incident in the book, where Silver straight up murders Mr. Arrow, which is rather essential to the story. But, Billy Connolly aside, we cannot have deaths in this exceptionally infantile version of a young adult story, so…Silver rids the ship of Arrow (Sam the Eagle, remember) by tricking him to row out in a lifeboat. Actually, I can’t wholly badmouth something Bruce Lee did in Enter the Dragon. Still, this is a pretty awkward way to avoid a death that would otherwise surely be in here. Why’d they adapt this novel?! Couldn’t we have had the thirty-thousandth unnecessary adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” instead?
Doop-de-doo! We finally make it to Treasure Island. This movie is wildly over-plotted (for a Muppet movie), but it all boils down to this: The entire crew turns out to be pirates, intent upon enacting mutiny in order to get their hands on the same treasure they were going to get their hands on anyway. Half of these (Muppet) pirates go with Silver and a captive Jim to the island, while the other stay on the ship to tie up the various A-list Muppets the movie no longer has any use for (Fozzie, Bunsen, Beaker). Kermit, Gonzo and Rizzo, meanwhile, have independently headed inland to rescue Jim from Silver.
The ship goings on barely matter now, but we still have two central plot threads here. The thread that actually conforms to the novel, Silver’s quest for the treasure, follows fairly true to Stevenson’s outline. Only Stevenson never wrote a song titled “Professional Pirate,” which is the sort of thing like “The Pirates That Don’t Do Anything” that struggles to make pirates kid-friendly. ‘Cause, of course, kids love pirates, but adults don’t want ‘em to like pirates qua pirates. Oh, life’s silly little paradoxes.
Meanwhile, Kermit’s trio has quite a non sequitur experience (another one) that has absolutely nothing to do with the novel that is ostensibly being adapted here. It has more to do with an unseemly desire to readapt King Kong with pigs in place of more overtly racist stereotypes. So, in this version, Treasure Island is inhabited by a tribe of cannibalistic pigs, who have frog-, rat- and whatever-napped Kermit, Rizzo and Gonzo in order to eat their delicious felt bodies. That crazy ceremonial dance from King Kong, the one where they were about to sacrifice Fay Wray, is recreated as “Boom Shakalaka,” which is pretty much just the same thing – with Muppets. And along comes a massive cage containing whatever the pig cannibals’ holy beastie is. With great, dramatic emphasis, the cage is opened to reveal:
Miss Piggy! Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!
Piggy here plays Benjamina Gunn. Er…okay then. There’s a character in “Treasure Island” named Benjamin Gunn, marooned from the original treasure-burying trek. That’s all well and good, but in a film full of arbitrary Muppet casting, this is easily the most arbitrary. You wanna make a movie where you can (eventually) include the beloved Miss Piggy, you adapt a story with a female character. Still, Treasure Planet making Benjamin a robot called B.E.N. is maybe an even stupider indignity visited upon this poor, unsuspecting fictional character.
As in the original story, Silver is unable to find the treasure as per the treasure map, since Benjamin (er, Benjamina) has snatched it away – that is, if I remember correctly a book I last read in the late 80s. To hell with you, Wikipedia! Whatever the case, this leads Silver to a faceoff against Piggy, one where he ultimately learns of the treasure’s true location. The cannibal pigs have to get involved here, because they’re in this movie, but they can’t have any impact, because they’re awkward additions. I’ll bet someone who hadn’t read Stevenson could ID the bizarre mutant limbs on this thing.
But meanwhile, Jim has escaped Silver’s clutches (and crutches), and freed Gonzo and Rizzo (new characters) from the pigs’ clutches (new characters). They aim to get back to the ship out in the cove, which is made over-simple for them since Sam the Eagle suddenly appears in his lifeboat (original character, but long deceased originally). It ought to be that Jim alone swims out to the ship, and has a harrowing encounter against the nastiest of Silver’s underlings aboard the mast. This is perhaps the highpoint of the novel, and I haven’t seen a single film adaptation that matches it. They don’t even try here, since the Muppets are rather allergic to adventuring, so all those pirates on board are simply scared off – they think Sam is a ghost of himself.
Silver, ever the more obvious villain here than usual, ties up Kermit and Piggy by ropes over a seaside cliff. There’s little room in “Treasure Island” for the usual faux-insipid lovey-dovey lampoonery we’re used to getting when the pig and frog are on screen together, but they try their best anyway. See, apropos of nothing in any other adaptation, Kermit has a romantic past with “Benjamina” (that’s a fan-fickish notion that would be truly wrong in a normal version). Thus they dangle helplessly together, singing the bland romantic duet “Love Led Us Here” while Silver’s pirates go for a treasure hunt in a treasure hut. They’re going for “ironic juxtaposition,” only…ah hell, these things hardly ever work! It’s probably just done here because it’d be too boring to watch a pig and frog sing and dangle motionlessly for three whole minutes otherwise.
Commanding the Hispaniola, “Captain” Jim Hawkins steers directly under pig and frog just in time for them to plummet and be caught by the anthropomorphized bow sprites (which surely wouldn’t be as fatal as hitting the ocean about 10 feet further down). Then the ship runs aground on the beach, just as Silver and his comically inept pirate crew emerge with their treasure. Cue a big swashbuckling sword fight climax – with Muppets! Which makes it kind of awkward and not at all swashbuckling. And somehow, despite the setting and the mass of pointy, pointy swords, the potential for death is avoided at all turns, just like how all the gunplay in the old “G.I. Joe” was similarly nonfatal. Amidst all this insane inanity, Kermit engages Silver to a duel. It’s a really awkward physical matchup, like Stallone versus Lithgow in Cliffhanger, meaning the screen cap below is the only moment where Kermit and Tim Curry convincingly appear on screen together. And then Silver loses, because Kermit is no longer allowed to look bad.
The treasure is now in the hands of the rightful robbers, non-pirates, as the Hispaniola sails off for the sunset. In the original novel, Silver escapes from the brigs to flee with part of the treasure, and is sent on his way by Jim, realizing there is some goodness in this man. Ah hah!, but painting Silver as a morally grey character would be too much for a kiddie flick to do, so we can’t give him an open-ended exit like that! Sure, Jim still lets Silver go, as he always does, only in this one Silver’s lifeboat instantly sinks – he’s the bad guy here.
Now it’s off into the sunset. “Here we go again,” Gonzo says for absolutely no reason. Just as randomly, we plummet into the ocean for the first time in this ocean-themed movie, to see a few aquatic Muppets just as the credits play.
Despite my relative issues with it, Muppet Treasure Island is the second highest-grossing Muppet movie, after the unassailable Muppet Movie. That it could only make $30 million in 1996 dollars indicates just how minor these Muppet movies have always been. That they retain any sort of pop cultural cachet has less to do specifically with their films, and more to do with the overall Muppet impact, through television, theme parks, et cetera. They’re just recognizable (like Mickey, Donald and Goofy), even if most people have never seen them in any real narratives (like Mickey, Donald and Goofy). Their inexplicable continued cinematic presence is evidence of a deeply stagnant production company more than anything innately interesting about them as a narrative property.
The Jim Henson Company could try self-contained puppet-based films, such as Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, but they don’t. Perhaps there’s little call for puppet movies in this day and age; Star Wars suggests it was once a valid movie practice, but the dreaded Prequel Trilogy suggests no longer. Danged audiences today are, sadly, not sophisticated enough to accept the reality of something as blatantly unrealistic as the Muppets. They want themselves some photographically realistic thinguses like those hideous robots from Transformers, even if their animation is the furthest it could be from nuanced. Consider the relative critical love for Fantastic Mr. Fox, versus its box office take.
I surely don’t know what kind of movie could be told entirely with puppets. Maybe it’s not a valid question. But there’s gotta be more to the medium than just Muppets…Of course there’s always Team America – there you go!
Related posts:
• No. 1 The Muppet Movie (1979)
• No. 2 The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
• No. 3 The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
• No. 4 The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
• No. 6 Muppets From Space (1999)
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