Present, The Muppets Haunted Mansion hits Disney, and while not exactly as frightful for us as it's for Pepe and Gonzo, it definitely is pleasurable. For the first time in a while, it feels like the stripe of collaboration Disney and the Henson Company have been looking for to make the Muppets really feel at home at the house of mouse.
Haunted Mansion — putatively a collaboration that sees Gonzo and Pepe trough Kermit’s repeated Halloween party to instead spend a night in the Haunted Mansion of Disney Park fame — is the terminating in a long line of Disney’s more recent attempts to bring the Muppets in line with its own Telly plans. The supernova-and- miss resurrection at ABC tried to multitude a Muppets Show vibe into a contemporary comedy show setting, and while region of its bold test to dive into the messy lives of the Muppets beyond their show were immersing, it sometime did n’t connect. The first Muppets program for Disney meanwhile, Muppets Now, traded the character drama the precedent resurrection had for ridicules and celebrity jewelries, and while still notably better took, also required that special object if only because its bite-sized florilegium format did n’t really allow for it.
To be fair, it’s hard to battle with the Muppets’long Box history — The Muppet Show in particular — which is alike a special, famed thing in the first place. The Muppets’ particular alloy of capriccios, humorless character work, and celebrity metatext works best when each of those ABC is given the time to breathe and blend. Yes, them goofing around is great, but The Muppets Show was added than just capers, it was about the interplay between the Muppets as characters that we saw develop as people working on a show, but also as the personalities that be to stand alongside their celebrity guests as, well, The Muppets.
Muppets Haunted Mansion either, at long last it seems, really gets this. Primarily narrative- driven, yea with its jackpot cast of celebrity appearances, walks a malevolently funny tightrope. Will Arnett, TarajiP. Henson, Darren Criss, and Yvette Nicole Brown get the meatiest businesses, but crucially they're there as characters rather than themselves, alongside a truly daunting list of celebrity cabochons to bang. The special is smart enough not to make the metatext of the classic theme demesne ride its focus — for addicts, it's bursting with sight tricks, in- jokes, and Easter Eggs — and nowise forgets that beyond the Muppets’ tickled sense of sense-good humor there’s a ton of heart.
Muppets Haunted Mansion does this by largely clipping down the number of Muppets it needs to center on. Pepe is largely left to wander about the castle in hunt of celebrities and a love life, playing right into the spectral, blemished hands of one of the lift’s big-name characters, Constance Hatchaway. So really, the center stage is on Gonzo, who has avoided attending Kermit’s traditional Halloween bash to try and survive for one night in the Haunted Mansion, the succeeding big trick for the thrillseeking Gonzo the Great who claims to have no fears. Nothing in the Mansion really bothers him, generally because it’s a lot of singing ghosts and the occasional floating candlestick, as Arnett’s Ghost Host guards him through its halls. But when he comes across the dreaded room 999 (which, of course, inverts its sign the twinkling he closes its door behind him), Gonzo is faced with no ghosts or shaitans, no big horrors, not yea an redundancy- manslayer trying to marry him but a glass.
The glass — and an ancient, decrepit rendition of Gonzo reflected back at him — shows him a view at Kermit’s party, where all his musketeers are having a good time while he’s trapped feebly on the other side. Gonzo’s search to constantly prove himself to be Gonzo the Great has pushed him out from his musketeers, yea as Kermit tells him (and reminds Scooter just in time for glass-Gonzo to overhear) that he does n’t need to be “ Gonzo the Great” to be great in the eyes of the people who watch about him the most. The plight of Haunted Mansion isn't that Gonzo and Pepe have to survive the night and make it out before dawn, but that Gonzo just has to learn that his musketeers watch about him? That right there's some Muppet Show spirit, alive and well, no matter how numerous celebrity ghosts Gonzo and Pepe have to run through to learn it.
It’s what makes Haunted Mansion truly sing, alongside the usual capriccios and, thanks toDr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, one like killer cover of Dancing in the Moonlight. It feels like Disney letting the Henson Company do what it does noncasual with the Muppets — bringing the heart alongside the fourth- wall, luminary- jokes, and letting them play in the world of Disney, rather than the other way around. It might not be the spookiest special of the season, but it’s probably going to be one of its noncasual.
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