No ‘Happytime’ for film’s R-rated trailer

THE creators of Sesame Street are suing over a new movie trailer that they claim suggests certain puppets live depraved, brutal lives when off-stage – snorting hard drugs through liquorice straws, selling sexual favours to humans and succumbing to gun violence.

Set for release in August, The Happytime Murders does not feature Big Bird, the Cookie Monster or any other resident of 123 Sesame Street, where puppets have been learning with children since 1969. But the movie is directed by the son of the late Muppets creator Jim Henson, and is set in a fictional Los Angeles, where former stars of a children’s puppet show are being shot dead for unknown reasons.

“What really goes down when kids aren’t around,” promises the movie’s official trailer, which prompted Sesame Workshop to sue STX Entertainment in federal court last week, claiming the production company has “diluted and defiled” the beloved characters’ reputations.

The film is R-rated and includes scenes in which:

A puppet in a spiked collar, vaguely resembling an emaciated Fozzie Bear, offers to perform oral sex for 50 cents on the movie’s star Melissa McCarthy.

A squid and a llama puppets are decapitated by shotgun blasts.

Two puppets have sex “that culminates in a scene where a puppet is depicted copiously ejaculating for an extended period”, as the lawsuit describes the trailer, accurately, though the ejaculate appears to be silly string.

Such scenes have been paired with the trailer’s tagline, “No Sesame. All Street”, and examples of director Brian Henson’s previous non-sexual work, such as The Muppets Christmas Carol. – The Washington Post