These puppets go blue Son of Muppets founder Jim Henson takes company in an adult direction By: Randall King Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2018

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This article was published 22/08/2018 (2354 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s not exactly a big tourist destination, but it’s worth seeing the Jim Henson Company in West Hollywood. It has a Disney-esque facade, featuring a statue of Kermit the Frog dressed as Charlie Chaplin (in homage to the fact the La Brea Avenue studio was built in 1917 by Chaplin).

It’s a bit of an irony that the facility occupies a rather sordid piece of real estate, a stone’s throw from porn shops and strip clubs, and a few blocks away from the spot where Hugh Grant was once arrested for hiring a prostitute.

One can’t help but wonder if that neighbourhood mix didn’t inform The Happytime Murders, a film very much targeted at an adult audience and directed by Brian Henson, son of the late great Jim. It’s about a world where humans and puppets interact, except puppets, being a minority, are subject to extraordinary prejudice.

• Watch the trailer for The Happytime Murders (note: trailer is rated R and includes adult language and themes)

In this realm, someone is killing off the cast members of a much beloved old TV show, The Happytime Gang, and it takes the combined efforts of a human cop (Melissa McCarthy) and a puppet private eye named Phil Phillips (played by puppeteer Bill Baretta) to try to solve the case.

Henson is circumspect about the question of whether the Henson Company environment affected the film.

“I can’t say I looked out a window and said, ‘I’ll make a movie about that,’” he says during a phone interview from Toronto while doing a press tour. But he acknowledges that the city’s oft-sordid underbelly played its part.

“Hollywood’s a pretty dark place at times,” he says. “We’ve said our movie is set in a dark version of Hollywood, where there’s a minority population of puppets and there’s terrible prejudice.

“Think of it like New York was in the ‘70s,” he says. “It was bankrupt and it was filthy and people never threw garbage in garbage cans, they just threw it. So Hollywood has a dark underbelly, although that also happens everywhere.”

Henson, 54, says the film’s R-rated humour, including puppet sex and puppet violence, was an effort to “shake things up a bit.

“I was looking for something new and different to do with puppets,” he says. “I knew I wanted to do something a little bit edgier and adult.”

If the film ups the raunch factor, that was a deliberate move to keep kids out of the theatre. This is not a Muppet movie, he asserts.

“I realized in feature films, I’d have to go much more adult, so I was really solidly getting an R rating so people wouldn’t accidentally be bringing kids,” he says. “I didn’t want to accidentally invite an audience that I don’t want to invite.

In Manitoba, The Happytime Murders has a 14A rating.

“So that’s why we went to this pretty raunchy place,” he says. “At the same time, when you watch the movie, it’s a story, it’s a character driven story and it has its roots in 1940s film noir.

“It’s a buddy-cop comedy movie, but it definitely has its moments that are really strictly for adults.”

This kind of film is not unprecedented. Indeed, it bears a certain resemblance to a 1989 film made by Peter Jackson (well before Lord of the Rings) titled Meet the Feebles, about the depraved private lives of an all-puppet cast of characters.

“I can’t say movies like Meet the Feebles influenced me, “ he says. “I have an entire life of puppetry, and that’s influenced me more.”

In fact, the film has been gestating for 12 years and was partly inspired by a live puppet show Henson produced called Puppet Up.

“I had this live show — a largely improvised live puppet show — where I was looking for a new tone of comedy,” he says. “That became a very rich experimental ground where we could figure out what the audience wanted and they were really enjoying letting it get very naughty and very adult.

“Mostly, it was really fun to do.”

When he started doing the adult-oriented puppet show, he admits an initial concern for critics who might consider it a taint on the Henson legacy.

“When we started going on tour, I thought: ‘Hoo boy, there’s going to be people saying that Jim Henson’s going to be rolling in his grave, and this is a terrible thing to do with puppets.’

“And nobody responded that way. Everybody loved it.”

“Now, that was a nice closed controlled environment because it was live theatre, but I believe that people will respond in a similar way here,” he says of Happytime. “I’m sure there will be some people saying, ‘This is awful, this is terrible,’ and they either didn’t see it or they were predisposed to think this is something we shouldn’t be doing.”

To further avoid getting the film confused with the Muppet brand, Henson says, “We’re releasing it under the Henson Alternative label, which is very specifically our label but the content is not suggested for children.

“The characters are called the Henson Miscreant Puppets and they’re specifically a character set that we use for the Henson Alternative material,” he says.

It is not, he emphasizes, out of character with the brand created by his dad.

“We are known for being irreverent, for questioning authority,” Henson says. “Even Kermit has a naughty sense of humour.

“I tend to bristle when people say we’re a ‘wholesome’ company,” Henson says. “I don’t know what wholesome means.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca  Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
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In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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