What a tapdancing Muppet can teach us about ourselves

Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson making The Muppet Show.
© The Walt Disney Company.

I have a deep fascination with puppets, especially with the work of Muppets creator Jim Henson. There's just something so pure in the simplicity of puppetry, something so crude yet so effective in their construction. Henson himself talked about this in numerous interviews where he explained that all puppets are abstractions of familiar forms. Just look at Kermit the Frog. He's effectively just a sock puppet with two halves of a ping pong ball glued onto his "head," and yet children and adults alike—it's even been demonstrated to work on animals—perceive him as an autonomous, living being. Just in this one introductory paragraph I've already referred to Kermit as "him," not "it," and I think this line of thinking applies to most people as well. 

There's something very fascinating about how our complex minds can break things down into its most basic forms. Take the simple smiley face as an example, or even better, the simple text form we've become so familiar with in the digital age; 

:)

It's just two dots and a curved line, and yet we see two eyes and a mouth. That's all it takes. We read that simple combination of two text symbols as a happy little face. And this is essentially what makes the Muppets work as well. With some fleece and two ping pong balls Jim Henson created one of the most enduring icons of family entertainment. He created a persona, a celebrity, and a performer that can never grow old or die.

And this brings me to a short 1 minute and 30 second skit produced for The Muppet Show in 1979, the famous "Happy Feet" number where Kermit does a tapdancing routine—quite a feet as most Muppets don't even have legs. And therein lies the magic, with some green fleece wrapped in a little tuxedo and a camera angle that only showed the top half of the character—the only half that actually existed—Henson made the world believe the frog could tap-dance.

The reason why this skit works so well boils down to the power of our own imagination and our suspension of disbelief. Despite the obvious ridiculousness of the situation, we just go along with it...we play along with it.

We all KNOW he isn't actually dancing, but we BELIEVE that he is. And that's the clinger. That's what makes this such a clever scene. And that's what I think a lot of modern entertainment has been sorely lacking for a while now. You don't always need to see everything, you just need to believe in it. 

One could argue that there's an almost spiritual quality to the art of cinema as a whole, it demands a certain degree of trust, or faith if you will, in its audience. Give too little and the viewer looses that faith, but give too much, and it looses much of its mystique. 

The human factor does tend to be lost amidst gimmicks and effects; a problem we've been aware of for a long while now, but I am also beginning to think that the less we let the viewers participate with their own creative minds, the more people will drift away from modern media, or be totally psychologically consumed by the hyperreality of it.

Watching Kermit dance is in many ways the perfect encapsulation of how our minds worked when we were children; when we knew our stuffed animals weren't actually alive, and yet, we believed that they were. If pressed on the matter I'm sure virtually all of us would have conceded that they were in fact just some faux fur stuffed with cotton, but that didn't stop us from talking to them and playing with them as if they had complex personalities and genuine agency. In a sense we still do this as adults when we're watching a movie or a TV show. We know that the characters on the screen are just actors in costumes pretending emotions and reading lines with the help of a script, and yet we laugh and cry at their fortunes and misfortunes as if they were real people. We know it's all fiction on an intellectual level, but on the emotional level we believe it's all real. 

Fozzie Bear & Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show.
© The Walt Disney Company.

Blur this line between fiction and reality too much and I think we may begin to develop neurotic tendencies. 

One has to wonder what would have happened if children's stuffed animals actually started talking back to them, something which advanced robotics and AI could soon make a reality. I have no doubt some marketing teams would try to make some bold claim that this would enrichen childrens' playtime in a way not previously possible and present it all as some great leap in creativity, despite the obvious paradoxes in such a statement. I think such a "toy" would not only defeat the entire purpose of a child's imagination, but that it could cause an entirely new form of neurosis. It would effectively constitute the gaslighting of an entire generation of children (or at least those rich enough to have one).  

This is why I think it is important for children to be given books instead of smartphones. This is why I think Lego made more sense when they sold boxes filled with neutral building bricks and not just predesigned playsets based movies that comes with detailed and restrictive instruction manuals.  However complex or advanced our entertainment may get in the future there will never be a greater creative force than that of our own imaginations. But give a child, or an adult for that matter, too many distractions, or limit the audience's participation, then that ability might never be properly developed or nurtured. The brain, just like the muscles in our bodies, need constant training to stay fit. Media can of course stimulate and strengthen our minds if done properly, but if done wrong, if done in such a way that it does all the "thinking" for us, it can make our creativity wither away into an emaciated parody of its full potential.

We need to re-learn to trust our imaginations.