Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can exaggerate with puppets. You're not trying to look like real people. The way the Muppets are designed is really appealing. Puppets are best if they're exaggerated creatures.
The Tonight Show' afforded us the opportunity to work with The Muppets and other 'Sesame Street' characters, and we always had the desire to do something that spoke to young people.
One of the mistakes I made was thinking chickens and penguins could sing, just like all the other animals in the 'Muppets.' But it turns out those animals are not allowed to sing words.
Funny enough, there have been puppets in everything I've written because I have a huge love of puppets. There's a big puppet musical at the end of 'Sarah Marshall.' I wrote 'The Muppets.'
I always say I owe my sense of humor to 'The Muppets' because I didn't necessarily know what was going on when I watched 'The Muppet Show,' and obviously, 'Sesame Street' was made just for me.
No one employed [ chaos] better than Jim Henson, by the way, on The Muppets. He had all these chicken Muppets that just brought in the most glorious chaos to whatever scene they were a part of.
I was raised by a dad who has a fantastic sense of humor who raised me on 'The Muppet Show,' Steve Martin movies, and Woody Allen's standup, and he really encouraged me to ham it up from an early age.
I never would have thought that in a million years that this would have happened, being in WWE and being in a Muppet film. But for some stroke of luck I guess they both did and I'm loving both of them.
The first I bought were records. I don't know which was first, but I feel like it was the same day. It was 'The Muppet Show' soundtrack and Queen's first album, because it was the only one my brother didn't have.
'The Muppet Show' was huge. I watched it all the time as a kid, and I really loved the way they used music on that. I also remember hearing the radio in the car as a kid, like Stevie Wonder and Simon and Garfunkel.
My wife is an Olympic gold medalist, WNBA All-Star, 'Jeopardy!' champion, and Rhodes Scholarship finalist who was sung to by President Clinton, sung about by Ludacris, and serenaded on 'Sesame Street' by a chorus of Muppets.
I'm like the luckiest girl in the world. I've gotten to be a princess, I've gotten to work with the Muppets. A lot of my childhood dreams about who I wanted to be when I was a grown-up, I at least get to play them in movies.
One thing that I think never goes out of style is just purity. Niceness and purity. And the Muppets have never lost that. Kermit especially is just wide-eyed wonder, unblinking. And he can't blink. Which I think probably helps.
I'm a huge Muppets fan. Gigantic. I think they're genius. I think they're some of the best work out there and completely underrated, just because of how genius they are. I love that kind of humor. It's so innocent but brilliant.
I can't believe I managed to go through a liberal-arts and theater education and take all these women's-studies classes and never have addressed that the 'Muppets' were all boys, except for one pig who was obsessed with herself!
I remember watching 'The Muppet Show' in the '70s. I was six or seven, and my dad watched it with me, and my grandparents watched it with me, and we're all laughing throughout, but I think we were probably laughing at different things.
'Muppets' was very much an exercise in anti-CG and the anti-effects world. It was very much in camera. We wanted to create a world where tangible puppets walked around and talked to each other. You could touch them. You could meet them.
I don't know exactly when I started watching television, but I know that Muppets and Smurfs hold privileged places in my memory. Without television, I surely could have mastered several classical languages or learned to play the violin, right?
The power of the 'Muppets,' and the popularity of these characters, is so iconic in people's lives that I had to distance myself from publicly. Not privately... Privately, hell, I'm with them for life, and I love these people. They're my second family.
After 'Sesame Street,' it's a hyper-familiar world to me and I have this childlike ability to ignore the fact that I'm talking to scraps of cloth. Every country I go to, I see posters promoting the film in different languages. 'Los Muppets' - I love that!
In South Africa, where HIV-positive children are often shunned, we have an HIV-positive Muppet to teach children to be friendly with children with HIV. But they use local actors. And it's not always a street. Sometimes it's 'Sesame Plaza,' or 'Sesame Tree.'
Amongst the financial Twitterati, the term 'muppets' has come to describe any client used and abused by some financial predator. I've adopted the term to describe portfolios that have been assembled for purposes other than serving the clients' best interests.
If you think hard enough about it, Rowlf the dog playing the piano on 'The Muppet Show' - what kind of insanity was happening underneath the cameras to make that happen? His mouth is moving, and he's got two hands playing the piano. That's two people under there!
When I was moving to New York in 1994, I saw an ad in the paper that said, 'Do You Measure Up To Be A Muppet?' I answered the ad and soon after met John Henson, who brought me in to understudy him for a real version of the computer generated Coca-Cola Polar Bear.
I've just grown a little disappointed with 'Muppets in the Old West', 'Muppets Under Water' and all these weird concept movies. I just want to go take it back to the early 80's, when it was about the Muppets trying to put on a show. That's what I'm trying to bring back.
Over its 40 years, Muppets on 'Sesame Street' have addressed AIDS, divorce, a parent's deployment overseas, and a death in the family. But the show is addressing incarceration in a way it didn't used to: by bringing the show directly to the kids and families it wants to reach.
I was a kid in the 1970s and '80s, and I was definitely inspired by Jim Henson's 'Muppets' and 'Sesame Street.' I was very curious about what was going on underneath the puppets I saw on screen. I made my own puppets, did puppet shows for schools, PTAs, churches, and the kids in my neighborhood.
When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets' Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn't yet know the word 'foreshadowing.' Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by.
Jim Henson once allowed me to visit the Muppets on set and spent an entire day showing me how he and the other puppeteers performed Kermit and all the characters! After that, I was lucky enough to work with both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on many fun animation projects and learned so much from them.
I had a theatre company years ago when I was a young man, and we would do street theater. This guy did a workshop one day on fire eating, and I participated, and it was just one of those party tricks that you learn. My last endeavor doing that was with the Muppets, back in 1995 or something like that. And I haven't done it since.
Once again, the puppets on Capitol Hill are about to slam the Muppets on Main Street. The country still hasn't recovered from the Wall Street-induced financial cataclysm of 2008, yet Congress is preparing to enact the Orwellian 'JOBS Act' - a bill that should in fact be called the 'Return Fraud to Wall Street in One Easy Step Act.'
Cynicism is kind of like folding your arms and stepping back and commenting on things, like the old guys in 'The Muppets,' just throwing out comments all the time, whereas there are other people on the ground really trying to affect things and improve their lives and the lives of other people. I think it's noble and I think it's cool.
