"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Follow That Bird

August 2, 1985

THE MUPPET MOVIE (1979) is a one-of-a-kind American family film masterpiece, followed by several enjoyable sequels. FOLLOW THAT BIRD (a.k.a. SESAME STREET PRESENTS FOLLOW THAT BIRD) is sort of the younger kids’ version of that, and it never quite caught on the same, but it’s worthy of sitting on the same shelf. It depicts Sesame Street (the street) on film, in cinematic terms, and takes some of its Muppet inhabitants out into the real world for adventures both goofy and heartfelt, with guest appearances by a few Canadian comedy stars.

It all happens because of a well-meaning but clueless all-bird organization called The Society of Feathered Friends, whose mission is “to place stray birds with nice bird families.” Somehow they receive a dossier about Big Bird living on a vacant lot with no bird friends, and decide to “help.” As they discuss how sad he looks in a photo an owl comments, “That’s funny, he looks happy to me,” causing outrage, because, according to Miss Finch (voice of Sally Kellerman, M*A*S*H), “We all know he can’t be happy. He needs to be with his own kind. A bird family.”

It never occurs to Miss Finch that Big Bird might want to live on Sesame Street, and she seems to know what she’s doing, so he naively goes along with her, fantasizing in animation about how fun it would be to have a family that looks like him. Maria (Sonia Manzano, FIREPOWER), Gordon (Roscoe Orman, WILLIE DYNAMITE) and the others think he should stay, but respect his wishes, and say their goodbyes before he’s flown on a plane to his foster family, the Dodos of Ocean View, Illinois.

The Dodos are nice, but stupid, and not the greatest of Muppets – they made them full body costumes so they could walk around with Big Bird, but their mask heads can’t be puppeted with nearly as much expression or personality. I didn’t recognize Laraine Newman as the voice of Mommy Dodo, but I did recognize Eddie Deezen as her son Donnie Dodo.

Writing to his friends back at Sesame Street, Big Bird tries to sound enthusiastic about the Dodos’ suburban “birdhouse with a big lawn” and the “lots of great things” that they own, but ends his letter, “So that’s my new home. I should be happy here. What’s wrong with me?”

Heartbreaking! The music here reminded me of UNFORGIVEN, and I later realized that’s because the score is by Lenny Niehaus (along with Van Dyke Parks, arranger/conductor/onscreen piano player from POPEYE).

They do a really good job of making the Suburban Lifestyle Dream seem like a nightmare for somebody from the city. And being a Dodo just does not match life on Sesame Street. Big Bird seems mystified by the Dodo family’s obsession with aerobics videos, that they pat him on the back instead of kiss him good night, and by how literal-minded they are; when he wants to “make believe – you know, pretend, use your imagination?” they have absolutely no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. The dealbreaker is when he tells them about his best friend Mr. Snuffleupagus and they laugh. “But your best friend should a bird!” says Daddy (Brian Hohlfeld, writer of HE SAID SHE SAID and various Winnie the Pooh movies).

“Why?”

“Because you’re a bird!” says Mommy. “Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

“That’s right, Mommy. And you should be with you own kind. Birds!”

So Big Bird says “Fuck these racist assholes” (not out loud, but implied) and runs away. When the Sesame Street gang finds out (from the news, not the Dodos) they split up and take different vehicles to try to find him. Gordon, Olivia (Alaina Reed, 227) and Linda (Linda Bove, CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD) take a yellow VW bug with Cookie Monster, but he keeps eating parts of it as they drive.

Oscar’s vehicle, the Sloppy Jalopy, is an impressive heap of junk. But The Count clearly has the coolest car. You don’t have to be part goth to respect this one.


We also get to see his apartment. Check out his TV!


And Bert and Ernie take a biplane. This leads to a NORTH BY NORTHWEST homage when they spot Big Bird. He doesn’t realize it’s them and makes a run for it. Also they sing a song while flying the plane upside down. Everything written about the movie seems to mention Jim Henson and Frank Oz puppeteering from a plane that was really hung upside down, 18 feet above the ground. That’s cool, but I’m more impressed by the shots of a weird looking Bert and Ernie clearly in an actual, flying plane, including while doing a barrel roll! I don’t know if the real pilot is wearing a mask or ducking beneath a puppet or what, but it’s amazing.

At one point everybody stops at a place called the Don’t Drop Inn that serves spaghetti with maple syrup and meat loaf with marshmallow sauce. Oscar is thrilled that they’re going to not enjoy some “real Grouch dining.” Representation matters. Sandra Bernhard is the waitress and Paul Bartel is the cook.

In the tradition of THE MUPPET MOVIE’s villain Doc Hopper, this one has small time carnival scammers The Sleaze Brothers (SCTV’s Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty). Rather than cook Big Bird up with some waffles they kidnap him to make him a carnival attraction. But they don’t want anybody to recognize him so they paint him blue. He sings a sad song about it. To an audience made up largely of twins for some reason?

It culminates in a car chase with Big Bird locked in a cage on the back of the Sleaze Brothers’ truck, and I swear to Christ it turns into some FAST & FURIOUS shit. Just a little bit, but still… did you expect any FAST & FURIOUS shit in a Big Bird movie? Personally I did not.

Big Bird has a good line: “Gordon, I’m not supposed to do this. Why, you should never jump from a moving truck! Why, I shouldn’t even be standing up!”

I can’t believe they really had somebody jump from one moving vehicle to another in a Big Bird suit! The specific double is not credited. It would be amazing if Spiro Razatos was the stunt coordinator but no, it’s Ted Hanlan (Friday the 13th: The Series, La Femme Nikita, CRASH).

This is a musical, and the songs (by Jeff Pennig & Jeff Harrington & Steve Pippin, Jeff Moss, and Randy Sharp & Karen Brooks) are pleasant and catchy, if not on the level of Paul Williams. Waylon Jennings, playing a turkey truck driver who gives Big Bird a ride, sings an inspirational country tune called “Ain’t No Road Too Long” (with some parts sung by Gordon, Olivia, Cookie Monster, Grover, The Count and Big Bird). The sweetest one is “Easy Goin’ Day,” by Big Bird and two little kids he meets on a farm. In the ballad/lullabye “One Little Star” he sings about missing his friends, while Olivia and Mr. Snuffleupagus join in from other locations, unaware that they’re all looking up at the same star in the sky while thinking of each other.

Does that sound familiar to you? It’s the exact same concept as a more famous scene and song in AN AMERICAN TAIL, which came out a year later. Turns out both movies were written by Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss, who were writers from the show. AMERICAN TAIL’s version of the concept, “Somewhere Out There,” became a #2 single in its end credits pop version by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram. It was also nominated for the best song Oscar and Golden Globe, but lost both to “Take My Breath Away” from TOP GUN. If they had won and didn’t immediately hand the trophy over to Big Bird they would’ve gone to Hell, guaranteed. It’s in the Bible. Page 54. Look it up.

Wikipedia claims that John Landis almost directed, but chose to do INTO THE NIGHT instead. (There’s no citation and I couldn’t find a source for that, but Jim Henson does make a cameo in INTO THE NIGHT, in addition to Landis regular Frank Oz.) Instead the director is Ken Kwapis, who was a recent USC School of Cinema-Television graduate who had only done two after-school specials, Revenge of the Nerd and Summer Switch.

One reason FOLLOW THAT BIRD is fun is that you can sense how excited they are to expand into a movie. I appreciate the ways they play with the format. For example, it cold opens in a parody of PATTON – a tiny Oscar the Grouch in the bottom corner of an American-flag-filled screen, as if standing at the front of your theater – as a narrator says, “Ladies and gentlemen, would you please rise for the Grouch Anthem?”

“No no no,” grunts Oscar. “For the Grouch Anthem you stay seated.” (Arguably all movies should start with the Grouch Anthem.) An animated Big Bird inflates the studio logo and says, “Sesame Street is brought to you today by the letters ‘W’ and ‘B.’” An early scene finds a way for outsider Miss Finch to ask, in all seriousness, “Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?” During the end credits, The Count counts how many people are credited.

And of course they jump at the opportunity to make a more cinematic version of the neighborhood. A bigger and more realistic version of the original Sesame Street set was built in Toronto. That partly explains how they got art director Carol Spier, who had already done David Cronenberg’s FAST COMPANY, THE BROOD, SCANNERS and VIDEODROME (later production designer of THE FLY, DEAD RINGERS, NAKED LUNCH, CRASH, eXistenZ, BLADE II, SILENT HILL and many more). And Kwapis chose director of photography Curtis Clark because of his work on Peter Greenaway’s THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT. “It just felt very important to take those characters and present them, literally, in a new light,” Kwapis told IndieWire a few years ago.

I love seeing this world that’s familiar from video, but on film, with more natural lighting, crane shots, and wider frames populated with way more extras (both puppets and people). There’s often somebody doing something in the background. Check out this shot that the title goes over:

Your eye first goes to Barkley, then Big Bird as he roller skates into the frame, but there’s all kinds of other activity going on, including monsters in the window above and Bert tending to his pigeons on the roof in the upper left.

They add all kinds of visual depth by having familiar characters in the background, sometimes outside or inside windows.


The tone of the movie is very in keeping with the Muppets tradition. It’s not educational like Sesame Street, unless you count a little part where Big Bird watches with fascination as some kids use a water pump. But of course it has a moral that underlines one of the central themes of the show. I’m hesitant to consider Big Bird as being coded as a specific race, so I don’t know if his situation should be taken as a direct analogy about interracial adoption. But for sure it’s a message in favor of multi-culturalism. The Feathered Friends assume Big Bird would have to be, as Miss Finch says at the end, “happier with his own kind.”

But Maria politely debunks that. “Well, we’re all happy here on Sesame Street, and we’ve got all kinds. We’ve got people, and we’ve got cows, we’ve got Bert and Ernie. And there’s dogs, and birds. We’ve got monsters. And kids. And- and there’s Honkers. Why, we’ve even got Grouches!”

“So you have. And you’re all… happy?

I like monsters and shit, and they can be a good symbol for having “all kinds” in your life, but this is also a deliberately diverse cast race-wise. All of the human cast from the show are present except David, whose portrayer was banned from entering Canada due to a violent bipolar incident. Of that cast there are two white people – Bob (Bob McGrath), who doesn’t go on the trip, and Linda, who represents for the deaf community. Those two and Maria and Gordon and Olivia and Luis and Oscar and the rest make up Big Bird’s family. They don’ t have to be related to him or similar to him for that. They just have to care about him.

Actually, maybe there’s more than a little bit of FAST & FURIOUS shit here. Maybe this is a FAST & FURIOUS movie.

FAST & FURIOUS SESAME STREET PRESENTS FOLLOW THAT BIRD got decent reviews – Walter Goodman in The New York Times praised its “tone of kindly kidding” – but at the box office it couldn’t compete with BACK TO THE FUTURE, THE BLACK CAULDRON, the re-release of E.T., COCOON and all that shit, and was considered a box office flop. They didn’t make another Sesame Street movie until THE ADVENTURES OF ELMO IN GROUCHLAND 14 years later, and that made even less money. I guess not enough people want to come to a movie theater to watch Sesame Street. In this case they were missing out.

NOTES:

Summer of 1985 connections:

One week after NATIONAL LAMPOON’S EUROPEAN VACATION, which had followed FLETCH by a few months, Chevy Chase had a cameo in this as a TV newscaster. Paul Bartel, who had a cameo in EUROPEAN VACATION, cameos as the Grouch cook. John Candy of BREWSTER’S MILLIONS cameos as a state trooper.

Co-composer Lenny Niehaus also did PALE RIDER.

Sam Sleaze steals a bite out of a kid’s apple, just as Gurgi did to Taran in THE BLACK CAULDRON. Except they don’t become friends.

The poster was by Drew Struzan, who already did RETURN TO OZ, THE GOONIES and BACK TO THE FUTURE this summer.

Pop culture:

There’s a Wile E. Coyote doll at the carnival (WB in-joke/product placement). There’s an Archies lunch box. The Sleaze Brothers talk about teaching Big Bird to breakdance and having him wear a white glove.

Tie-ins:

Appropriately, most of the merchandising I could find evidence of was either reading or arts & crafts related. There was a storybook adaptation and five related storybooks: Big Bird’s Day on the Farm, Big Bird Visits the Dodos, Big Bird Joins the Carnival, Count All the Way to Sesame Street, and Welcome Home, Big Bird (a sequel, hopefully not inspired by WELCOME HOME BROTHER CHARLES). There were also coloring and activity type books, and a set of cut-outs (pictured) based on the Toadstool parade scene, plus Bert and Ernie’s bi-plane, the Sloppy Jalopy and the Countmobile. There were also Viewmaster reels from the movie.

Legacy:

Director Ken Kwapis directed a few more movies, including the semi-culty VIBES (1988), the monkey movie DUNSTON CHECKS IN (1996), and, uh, THE BEAUTICIAN AND THE BEAST (1997). But he really made his mark in TV, with an impressive track record of cool and/or influential shows including Amazing Stories, Eerie, Indiana, The Larry Sanders Show, Bakersfield P.D., Freaks and Geeks, Malcolm in the Middle, The Bernie Mac Show, Parks and Recreation and The Office.

Writers Judith Freudberg & Tony Geiss later wrote AN AMERICAN TAIL and THE LAND BEFORE TIME, in addition to continuing to write for Sesame Street and various spin-offs for many years.

First time editor Evan Landis followed this gig with CARE BEARS MOVIE II: A NEW GENERATION. He went on to do b-action movies like VIRUS (1996) starring Brian Bosworth, SANCTUARY (1998) starring Mark Dacascos, and ABSOLON (2003) starring Christopher Lambert.

Alyson Court, who played the little farm girl Ruthie, became a prolific voice actor. Her work includes the Ewoks cartoon, Care Bears, Garbage Pail Kids, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures, Free Willy, and much more. She was Jubilee on the ‘90s X-Men cartoon, Lydia on Beetlejuice, and Claire Redfield in the Resident Evil video games. And she was in ROLLING VENGEANCE!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2020 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Family, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

18 Responses to “Follow That Bird”

  1. Yeah, this is a seriously enjoyable old school Henson joint, that is both lesser, but also as good as some of his best. But holy shit, is the German dub INFURIATING! It was obviously done by someone who never watched Sesame Street! Several of the characters have in Germany different names. For example Grover is Grobi or Big Bird is Bibo (Don’t ask me why), but the dub uses all the American names! Also none of their voices! Why? Seriously! Why? That show was as big here as it was in the US! Everybody knew it! And they gave the German translation to one or more people, who didn’t give a shit. Can you imagine how annoying this was for little CJ? Shit, even late-30s CJ, who revisited this one not too long ago, was pissed off by this!

  2. I remember that animated fantasy of the bird family going fishing together. It made me want to go fishing so my dad took me fishing. Don’t remember if we caught anything but of course the time with Dad was the point.

    I also remember Big Bird thinking that is a fight took two hours, Walking should only take 3. As a kid I don’t think I understood why he was wrong.

    Damn this takes me back. Glad it holds up. Wonder if the Elmo movie is any good.

  3. I can’t vouch for the whole of ELMO IN GROUCHLAND, since I only saw bits and pieces of it on TV, but it gave me one of the biggest Sesame Street related laughs in my life (joke spoiler following, quoted from memory):

    Ernie & Bert are playing some kind of “greek chorus” in the movie and comment on the things that happen on screen. At some point it looks really bad for Elmo and Bert is worried that this will be the end of the movie. Ernie is more optimistic: “They won’t let the movie end like this. Have you ever seen a movie that ended sad?”

    Bert (completely deadpan): “Titanic.”

  4. I have fond memories of playing the soundtrack over and over when I was a kid – it might have been a bootleg because all the songs sounded like they’d been ripped straight from the final mix, dialog and sound effects included. That still of Oscar in front of the flag brought the Grouch Anthem roaring back, a song I hadn’t thought of for decades.

    I’m fairly sure my parents took me to see this when it came out, or maybe showed it to me when it came on TV. It might very well have been my first movie, as I was only two when it was released.

    It certainly has a pro-melting pot moral, something that feels sadly dated and out of touch today. There’s a shock of recognition in reading the description of The Society of Feathered Friends and finding that I see their type all around today, from the bizarre modern progressive segregationism espoused by Twitter jerks and online activists who go on about “cultural appropriation,” to the (Left-wing!) racial essentialists who call the Black parents of mixed-race kids race traitors. Miss Finch would fit right in with that sanctimonious bunch.

  5. I agree that THE MUPPET MOVIE is a unique masterpiece. In terms of a personal favourite though, I’d probably give the edge to THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN for that one-of-a-kind Henson production sincere sweetness and charm, amnesiac MAD MEN Kermit, the showstopper finale and of course the birth of the Muppet Babies.

    I’m not sure anything has quite hit the bullseye since Jim Henson passed away, but MUPPETS MOST WANTED had five or so of the biggest fresh laughs I had in the 2010s, and I think it’s a shame it flopped. The always slightly Ellisian Disney handling of the Muppets has gotten much more Ellisian since then unfortunately.

  6. This Summer of 85 series is a delight so far, and that goes double for this review. I was under the impression that “Follow That Bird” is the one where Big Bird gets stuck in a museum and has his soul stolen by a mummy, so I learned something today.

  7. I saw this movie first, so that when I saw Patton I wondered why they were making fun of Follow That Bird

  8. There’s just something magical about puppets in real locations. Not even an old sourpuss like me is immune.

  9. Suburban Lifestyle Dream! Well, well done, Vern.

    Ben

  10. This movie sounds amazing. I may have vaguely heard it was decent, but this review puts it a lot higher on my list.

    In so many 1980s movies, suburbia was the good place where the decent, hard-working, respectable people lived, and the city was a lawless hellhole where good people never lived but sometimes accidentally trespassed and then had to heroically escape. So a 1980s kid’s movie showing multicultural urban life as a loving home – and suburban life as a false solution to it – would have been extremely progressive for the time.

    Gepard, I’ve never heard anyone on the left describe interracial parents as race traitors – that sounds rare and I hope it is – but I definitely agree that nowadays, “well-meaning but clueless social worker” seems to code as a satire of the left rather than the right, especially the idea that it’s only good and correct to fraternize with those who are ethnically / culturally / ideologically similar to yourself. But also because by contrast, it’s hard to imagine the modern right having much concern for other people’s welfare at all (as Vern indicated with the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” reference).

    The stuff with Oscar and the Count sounds especially awesome. This sounds like a movie someone would want to make today as a retro-1980s franchise homage, except it’s the real thing.

  11. I had no idea about the real-life tribulations of poor Northern Calloway until this review.

    “On the morning of September 19, 1980, Calloway was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee. He had been invited to the home of Mary Stagaman, marketing director of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, after performing there on the 13th. Calloway refused to leave and beat Stagaman with a clothes iron, causing serious head and rib injuries. He then fled into the suburbs of Nashville, where he smashed a plate glass window and storm door at one house and did extensive damage to the interior of another, destroying the family’s collection of fine crystal, smashing a television set, and breaking light bulbs with his bare hands.

    “He also stole a backpack from a first grader, smashed a windshield with a rock, and stole a bag of herbicide from elderly resident Douglas Wright. Calloway spilled it on his body and was rolling on the ground and running around, at which point Wright attempted to hold Calloway at gunpoint and fired a warning shot at him, causing Calloway to dive to the ground and scream that he was shot. He then jumped up and washed his hands and face in the Wrights’ birdbath before fleeing the scene, where witnesses reported him wearing only a Superman T-shirt. He was arrested after hiding out in a couple’s garage, screaming, ‘Help! I’m David from Sesame Street and they’re trying to kill me!’

    “These events were not publicized, and Calloway was allowed to continue appearing on the show as he sought help.”

    On a lighter note, a highlight from the early days of my career as an archivist was getting to process the personal papers of Afrika Bambaataa, which required writing up an inventory of his several thousands of records. Included among these was, weirdly, Bob’s solo LP from 1970, BOB MCGRATH FROM SESAME STREET. The bits I’ve found on YouTube sound like pretty decent sunshine pop, and I’ve spent many hours since imagining what Bam would have done with this record on the wheels of steel.

  12. “Actually, maybe there’s more than a little bit of FAST & FURIOUS shit here. Maybe this is a FAST & FURIOUS movie.”

    Man, that gave me a genuine belly laugh.

    I thought I hadn’t seen this movie, but I vividly remember Big Bird disguised in blue. Looks like a good one to revisit.

  13. I remember seeing this in the theater with my Mom. I remember liking it quite a bit, noticing how bigger it felt from the show, kind of an early awareness of Filmatism.

    I also remember this is one of the first times I kind of noticed something being “sappy”. Probably a song Big Bird sang is the culprit. Within a couple years I was knee deep in horror movies and 80s action movies lol, so this was kind of the end of an era for me. But I still checked out Sesame Street every time I was home sick from school….it was a time honored tradition!

    I would love to read your review of ELMO IN GROUCHLAND, VERN. I remember when that was new it was a pretty hated movie, at least by people I knew. Most people my age had an instinctive hatred of all things Elmo, so maybe it was more that than anything else. I remember thinking the trailer looked pretty funny, but skipped it.

    For some reason it popped up in my mind here and there that I should see it. Perhaps coming across it in various Walmart $5 bins over the years.

    What eventually pushed me over the edge, was I was in line someplace, a Target or a WalMart, and a group of 20-somethings were behind me. ELMO IN GROUCHLAND was on the endcap, part of some sort of sale. One of them said, with a huge smile, “ELMO IN GROUCHLAND…that movie is sooooo weird!!!”

    That was it. A slight nod that that movie may be their RETURN TO OZ or something.

    So I got it within a few days. It wasn’t as bad as i’d been led to believe. A bit cheesier than most MUPPET brand movies, but not too bad. It’s weird…not as weird as those kids let on….but weird enough. Wrongfully dismissed and worth checking out for all Muppet lovers for sure.

  14. One thing I’ve observed during these past couple decades of extremely corporate filmmaking is that the younger generation’s conception of what constitutes a weird movie has really degenerated. Shit these kids think is the ne plus ultra of weird would be considered mildly quirky at best in the 70s and 80s. I call this The Sharknado Quotient: Before a thing’s weirdness can be properly quantified, the ambient milquetoastness of the surrounding culture must first be assessed. This is why it’s so hard to make an exceptionally weird Japanese movie.

  15. This review also made me curious enough to look up Northern Calloway, and, man, what a bummer.

    I remember the Elmo backlash from back in the day. And it’s weird what we hold onto when it comes to children’s entertainment. Elmo’s pretty innocuous, but for a while there he was the death knell of the beloved institution that was Sesame Street. Also, would we ever have the same situation today where a toy was so popular that it was sold out every, like Tickle Me Elmo or Jingle All the Way’s Turbo-Man doll? I feel like internet shopping has solved the problem of engineered scarcity at least when it comes to children’s toys.

    I saw Follow That Bird as a kid, and I also remember getting a bit of a jolt from how cinematic it was compared to the single-set show. It was just fun to see all these characters out in the world. I don’t remember the Count’s car, but that picture is just so badass.

  16. There are two parts of this film’s plot that actually get me a bit emotional just from reading the description in this review. The first is Big Bird’s innocent disbelief at being told by his well-meaning “family” that his best friend should be someone of his own kind. The other is when one of Sesame Street’s human adults patiently explains the value of diversity to the antagonist(?) who seems to accept this reasoning as valid.

    It’s poignant to imagine this kind-hearted kid’s movie that’s based on such simple, straightforward, decent assumptions about how we can get along with each other and those who don’t already see eye-to-eye can reason with each other without resorting to scolding, shaming or demonizing.

    Maybe it was an obvious and even corny lesson in 1985, and yet a mere 35 years later we’re living in a world seemingly dominated by people – either in the halls of power or in grassroots social media – who somehow made it to adulthood without ever internalizing those basic golden-rule values.

    For that reason at least, it sounds like this movie may have improved with age. It also sounds like its sweet vulnerable naivete is wrapped in just enough light-hearted irreverence and irony to be a Trojan horse that can penetrate a modern viewer’s heart more easily. And I’m generally a sucker for movies that seem like disposable entertainment on the surface but turn out to have a surprisingly profound message.

    Maybe I’m building it up in my mind but I really want to see this one.

  17. Oh wow, I have loved this one for so long, and cool to see you give it some love! I put it up there with MUPPET MOVIE and GREAT MUPPET CAPER as a classic of the specific form that only the Muppets ever did? There are some terrific jokes, and “Easy Goin’ Day” is a tearjerker for me

  18. TIGGER’s memory of seeing it reminded me of seeing the DUCK TALES movie with my mom when I was about 6 or 7. I immediately remembered how big it was compared to the show, a feeling that came back to me when I saw THE SIMPSONS MOVIE much later. I can’t think of any live-action equivalents where the movie version took on similar but heightened proportions.

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