Muppets vs. Disney

There's a deleted scene from Pulp Fiction where Mia tells Vincent about there being two kinds of people (as there often are) Beatles people and Elvis people. To paraphrase: you can love both, but only one can truly have your heart. At the toy store during my final days, I came up with my own theory: There are Muppet people and Disney people, and I am most assuredly a Muppets person.

By the way, Disney actually owns the Muppets now, so they get paid from either person.

Disney, inarguably, have created many, many classic movies that I, for one, grew up with. But nearly everything Disney touches has the sticky layer of cloying earnestness that occasionally makes a non-diabetic reach for the insulin. I mean, if I say some thing's "Disney-fied", you know exactly what I mean.

I LOVED the Muppet Show when I was a kid and I love it now; like Looney Tunes, it has that magical cross-generational appeal that eludes most children's programming. A collection of songs from the show and the various movies got regular rotation in the toy store CD player. A used to have a lot of adults that didn't seem to notice that I worked at a toy store on purpose would ask, "How can you listen to that music ALL DAY?" Little did they know that countless times during my toy store tenure "Mahna, Mahna" was the only thing that was keeping me from going "Mahna, Ma-nuts"!

Out of all the things at the toy store that didn't quite pass politically correct muster (Charlie Brown, the original Annie movie,other stuff here)nobody ever said a word about the Muppets. No one seems to notice that at it's heart, the Muppets have an interspecies couple (I'm not even gonna mention the hypnotic effect Gonzo has on chickens)that's the most abusive this side of Andy Capp: Miss Piggy and Kermit the frog . Piggy is constantly threatening Kermit with physical violence if she doesn't get her way, though Kermit is far from the only one to be on the business end of one of Piggy's "HAI-YA!"

A co-worker of mine said that when she was a kid, she wanted to be Miss Piggy. As she got older, she changed to wanting to be Tina Turner, only to change back after she saw What's Love Got To Do With It.
"So," I asked,"You'd rather dispense the beatings instead of take them?"
"Yeah!"