Bringing home the bacon
Miss Piggy and The Muppets set for visit Down Under
It was unprecedented, unfathomable, some would say unnatural. It was an inter-species love affair in a world that still struggles with that sort of thing.
Pig and frog. Pink and green. Amphibian and ungulate. Diva and geek.
Their relationship always seemed doomed to me.
Even so, they were romantically intertwined, on and off, for decades, hooking up in the mid-70s and finally calling the whole thing off in 2015.
A few years later, with a level of maturity that’s perhaps surprising, these two unlikely ex-lovers still manage to work together in showbiz.
We’ll be seeing them in Aotearoa next month, on stage at the Jim Henson Retrospectacle in Wellington: two of the greatest glittering stars in the entire Muppet menagerie. Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog.
‘‘Yeah, what a couple, right?’’ says Bonnie Erickson from her New York home. As one of the chief Muppet designers, she knows both romantic partners very well.
‘‘It was never an easy relationship. Kermit was endlessly distracted with work, and he was never quite sure how to handle Miss Piggy. She was never mean or nasty, but always, well, full of herself, shall we say.’’
Actually, she was full of the hand of master puppeteer, Frank Oz. But please, continue.
‘‘Miss Piggy became a global icon for so many reasons. She’s feisty and glamorous and curvy, with no time for the idea that you need to be tall and slim – or even human – to be beautiful. Nothing was ever going to shake her confidence that she was the most important and appealing female you would ever meet.’’
Indeed. I grew up watching Miss Piggy of The Muppet Show during the 1970s, and I loved her almost as much as she loved Kermit.
Never before in the history of the world had a collection of thread and felt and foam oozed such personality. Partly based on jazz singer Miss Peggy Lee, Miss Piggy was one glam ham.
Despite growing up on a hog farm in Iowa, she affected sophistication by sprinkling her speech with French, specifically ‘‘Oui! Oui! Oui!’’ and ‘‘Moi?’’
Raised in the rural wilderness by an uncaring mother, she was a former beauty pageant pig, her supergroomed look a reaction against her squalid farmyard past, her volatile personality equal parts vulnerability and rage.
Musically, she was not flash, admittedly. But what commitment! Miss Piggy belted out her ballads in a wobbly soprano, her satin evening gown all a-quiver with emotion.
And if any female guests on the show got too close to ‘‘my Kermie’’, she gave them a harrowing Death Stare before following through with a mighty karate chop.
Hiiiii-YAH!
‘‘Actually, Miss Piggy looked very different in her early days,’’ reveals Erickson, who joined Muppet creator Jim Henson’s team in 1970 after a background in art and theatre. ‘‘By the mid-70s, Jim was trying to convince various TV networks that a weekly show was a good idea, so we did a series of stand-alone specials. One was called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence, and it had this segment called Return to Beneath the Planet of The Pigs. Jim came to me and said – I need three pigs.’’
Erickson reckons she landed this key role because of her own rural background.
‘‘I’m from Minnesota, so Jim figured I’d have intimate personal knowledge of pigs! I started right away carving them out of foam. One eventually became Doctor Strangepork. Another became a generic background pig. And the female eventually became Miss Piggy.’’
In her first incarnation in 1975, Miss Piggy had little button eyes, a bentover ear, and – quelle horreur! – little hoggy hooves.
‘‘Then we needed a more sexy pig for a bit we were doing, so I quickly went to the eye drawer and got out these huge blue eyes with eyelashes, and threw some lavender silk around her to make the dress.’’
There wasn’t enough time to carve new hands to replace the hooves, so Erickson inserted a wire frame into a pair of long silk gloves.
‘‘And when we took off her original outfit, you could see the seam where her head joined her neck, so I gave her a set of pearls to cover that up. Really, all the things you associate with how Miss Piggy looks were just choices made on the spur of the moment.’’
At first, the corker porker was merely a ‘‘minor chorus-line pig’’, says Erickson. But you can’t keep talent like this in the back row.
Miss Piggy rapidly found her rightful place under the spotlight, singing solo songs and starring in dramatic ensemble classics such as Veterinarian’s Hospital and Pigs In Space.
‘‘Different performers played her over the years, but once Frank Oz put her on his hand and did a karate chop – that’s when everyone suddenly knew just who Miss Piggy was!’’
What will this unlikely global superstar, this peerless Princess of Pork, think of New Zealand? We will soon find out.
It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights.
Miss Piggy is heading here with Kermit, Fozzie and a host of other Muppet mates for the Jim Henson Retrospectacle, joining Oscar-winning songwriter Bret McKenzie and The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for a musical tribute to Muppets creator, Jim Henson.
Is it true that Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street will be taking a bromantic bubble bath together as they sing that immortal classic, Rubber Duckie, on stage?
Will teensy blue stuntman The Great Gonzo get shot out of a cannon with a mighty ‘‘Boom!’’? Can we expect appalling jokes from Fozzie between songs? Will parents and kids alike shed a few tears during ballads The Rainbow
Connection and It’s Not Easy Being
Green? We’ll have to wait and see. The stage shows conclude a 21-day showcase of Muppet-related events, including a film series, puppetbuilding masterclasses and Q&A sessions, some of them featuring Bonnie Erickson. The show’s been several years in the planning. Erickson heaps praise upon local organiser, Nicola Marshall, director of the Square Eyes Film Foundation, which is bringing the show to New Zealand in partnership with the New York-based Jim Henson Legacy.
‘‘Nic has done so much to get this across the line. We knew Jim’s work was popular in New Zealand, and of course, all the designers and performers and Muppets wanted to come down there for a look around! We’re thrilled it’s finally happening.’’
Erickson is a Big Kahuna in the Muppet world. She spent many years as president of The Jim Henson Legacy, designed and built characters, ran the workshop during the early Muppet
Show years, and helped create various TV specials and children’s toys.
Jim Henson was ‘‘a profound inspiration’’, she says, and the world lost a great creative spirit when he died suddenly of Toxic Shock Syndrome in 1990, aged just 53.
Henson invited her to join his merry band in 1970, initially as a costumemaker on early Kermit special, The
Frog Prince. It was her dream job, in her dream city.
Erickson had been drawn to New York City during the 60s, dizzy with the possibilities of what she might do. Her old mate Bob Dylan relocated around the same time.
‘‘I went to the University of Minnesota when Bob was just starting his career. He was just part of the crew back then, and they were heady years. Bob moved to New York just after me, and was singing at The Gaslight when I lived just upstairs. We met up one night and discussed the fact that we weren’t gonna tell anybody we were from Minnesota, because we were both busy creating this other persona for ourselves. Back then, everyone was trying to decide what we were gonna be when we grew up. Then of course, Bob went on to be the spokesperson for his era, in many ways. And I ended up building Muppets!’’
I would suggest that The Muppets brought as much weirdness and joy and skew-whiff wisdom to the world as the collected works of Bob Dylan. Maybe more.
‘‘Well, we have Jim Henson to thank for that. He wanted to help make the world a more tolerant, peaceful and magical place, and he had great confidence in finding the right people to help him make it a reality. Jim created this world where a lot of writers, designers and performers felt safe to experiment and add on to his original vision.’’
Henson loved the fact that puppetry was so all-encompassing. You could create the music, invent the characters, plot the stories, write the scripts, build the sets, do all the editing and post production. It was a whole world he could invent, populate, develop and display, with the help of his handpicked creative team.
One of the greatest charms of the early Muppets material is how palpably hand-made everything is. In these days of ever more spectacular digital CGI effects, there’s a lot of be said for the more modest delights of a hunk of felt and foam with somebody’s hand up its jacksie.
‘‘That’s true. These things engage the viewer to contribute some of their own imagination to the story, rather than just be some passive observer. And Jim’s shows made you feel good, too. The Muppet Show created a strange sort of goodwill between viewers, while Jim’s work on Sesame
Street changed the way children were seen, talked to and taught. That’s really something, right?’’
Henson was also involved with the TV series Fraggle Rock, and movies The
Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Erickson remembers these early years as hectic, exhausting, ‘‘a pretty mad time’’, with a host of creative people working together to do things that had never been done on television before, and Henson presiding over it all, ‘‘sort of like Kermit, keeping this group of crazies in place’’.
Along the way, Erickson had a hand in the creation of many other characters. She helped develop the Swedish chef, Animal, Fozzie Bear. She designed hep-cat sax-man Zoot from
The Muppet Show’s psychedelic house band, The Electric Mayhem.
Best of all, she designed and built crabby old codgers Statler and Waldorf, The Muppet Show’s resident hecklers, two grizzled curmudgeons who would sit in the balcony during each week’s show, commenting on how crap most of the performers were.
‘‘Ah, yes. Those two guys came to me in a strange way. I would often work really late, then take a cab home, and down by Grand Central station I would pass the Yale Club, where they had these huge oil paintings of important guys up on the wall. I would see them every night and think about the kind of cantankerous old men who sat around in these clubs, drinking brandy and smoking cigars. So I did a drawing for Jim, and in the end, he played one of them himself, and Richard Hunt played the other.’’
Statler and Waldorf may have been perpetually grumpy, but they were always immaculately dressed. They had a New Zealander to thank for that.
‘‘The man who did their tailoring was Christopher Lyall, who’s now back living in Christchurch,’’ says Erickson. ‘‘He was a former ballet dancer, and I loved working with him. I’m hoping to see him when I’m there. He made such beautiful suits for those two cranky old men.’’
Our time is up. I’ve enjoyed the respectful way Erickson has talked about her assorted creations, as if she’s discussing real flesh-and-blood friends.
The Muppets come across as eccentric, playful critters with independent lives and complex personal histories, rather than something she once strapped together at her workbench.
‘‘Yeah, you’re right. I mean, I know these things are puppets, and we’ve made them from cloth and foam, but I always refer to them by name, and I’m very mindful of their different personalities. That’s a real compliment to the performers who inhabited them, to early writer Jerry Juhl, and key people like Jim Henson and Frank Oz. We all helped them come alive, so much so that the word ‘Muppet’ has entered the lexicon to describe a certain sort of human now. Donald Trump would be called a Muppet, right? That derogatory use of the word is a bit tough on the Muppets themselves, but hey, they can take it! For one thing, they’re made from cloth and foam, so their feelings are unlikely to be hurt. Also, I suspect they’d be more amused than offended to discover that real living, breathing humans sometimes got referred to as Muppets. They’d probably find that flattering.’’
❚ The Jim Henson Retrospectacle is on at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington on April 27 & 28. thejimhensonretrospectacle.co.nz