Are you a Muppet fan? Okay, yeah, who isn’t these days? However, depending on your lust for Miss Piggy, and the rest of the gang, you may have missed their 2002 network (NBC) holiday offering, It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, which, conveniently, the Blue Starlite Drive-In is screening tonight at 7:00pm, hosted by your truly.
This isn’t your typical Muppet fare. It riffs off of Frank Capra‘s It’s a Wonderful Life, with David Arquette as the angel to Kermit’s George Bailey, and – we kid you not – Whoopi Goldberg as god. The Muppet Theater is – once again – in dire financial straits, and after Fozzie Bear has an Uncle Billy mishap with the necessary anti-forclosure cash-flow, Kermit ends up as angst-ridden as any of Capra’s hard-bitten but essentially decent human beings.
Ever wanted to see Scooter cage dancing in a skeevie rave club (in a thong no less) or die-hard conservative Sam the Eagle getting all ecstatic with club kid glowsticks? How about cameos from Carson Daly, Kelly Ripa, Zach Braff, and William H. Macy? Intriguing, yes, but possibly not enough for your fuzzy, joy-jaded Muppety brainpan?
Consider this: director Kirk R. Thatcher is best known, amongst the geek cognoscenti, as the grating but enthusiastic punk rocker that Spock renders unconscious on the bus in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. What’s not to love, or at least feel kinda creeped out about?
It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas plays with It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas 7pm tonight, Dec. 22, at the Blue Starlite Urban Drive-In, 1001 E. Sixth
This article appears in December 16 • 2011.