The Muppets

The Muppets are a group of puppet characters that were created by world famous puppeteer Jim Henson and have been around for 55 years.

In 2004, the Walt Disney Company, distributor and owner of Pixar, acquired the ownership and materials of The Muppets, placing it under the same ownership as the Pixar company. Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy appear with other Disney characters (including Pixar) on the cover of the 2004 annual report.

On July 21, 2010, the team involved with producing the new film The Greatest Muppet Movie of All Time!!! met with creative heads at Pixar to fine-tune the script.

Pixar Mentions/References

 * The Muppets have frequently been cited on different occasions by Pixar artists as an influence, perhaps most apparent in Monsters, Inc. The film's co-director, Pete Docter, has often stated that The Muppet Show influenced his work in terms of both humor and character.
 * He expounded on it in greater detail in 2009: "The Muppet Show was a big influence on me and just because of the sense of quirkiness, the fun and especially the sense of very specific characters that they created. It really transcended puppets. I think, these guys became, for me, very deep characters. They have a lot of sides to them, and they’re really amazingly well-defined characters."


 * Speaking specifically on character development, Docter used the example of Fozzie Bear's facial expressions to explain Kevin from Up, in an NPR interview:
 * Terry Gross: You gave Kevin emotion, the kind of emotion you couldn't read in the real bird that you based him on, so what kind of methods did you find for giving your bird emotion.
 * Pete Docter: Well, the cool thing was, we did the same thing that I described where there is no facial expressions. And, the Muppets do this wonderfully. Where you'll have Fozzie, who has no facial -- other than he can open and close his mouth -- the rest of it's just movement. So, the bird has a great deal of expression and range of attitudes, but it's all through movement.


 * A San Francisco Chronicle reporter noticed Docter's Muppet influence:
 * Peter Hartlaub: Some of the characters in "Up" have a Muppet vibe.
 * Pete Docter: "The Muppet Show" was definitely something I watched when I was growing up. They're such great characters. I think in a lot of ways that was an influence on Pixar in general.
 * Peter Hartlaub: In what way?
 * Pete Docter: They just had this great specificity in their character. I don't even think they thought of them as puppets. They were caricatures of people, but they had real underlying foibles. Fozzie has some sadness to him. He's a failed comic, and that's what makes him funny, of course. ... There's a sense of funny, quirky, goofball stuff, but it always comes down to character, and the whole show is running off these personalities. That's what we're trying to do. However the plot works out, it's always a character study that gets you through the movie.


 * In Finding Nemo, Dory briefly refers to Nemo as Elmo, and in audio commentary on the DVD release, Andrew Stanton explains that Austin Pendleton was cast as one of the fish on the basis of the crew's fond memories of Max from The Muppet Movie.


 * On The Incredibles DVD, a feature devoted to Bud Luckey discusses his work on Sesame Street and shows a clip of "Ladybug Picnic".


 * In a brief shot from the short Presto, the main character runs across the stage with a group of balconies behind him. In one of those balconies, Statler and Waldorf can be seen.


 * The end credits to Up include a dedication "to the real life Carl and Ellie Fredricksen's who inspired us to create our own Adventure Books"; the list includes Mike Oznowicz, father of Frank Oz.


 * The title card for the Kermit segment of Pepe's Profiles ("A Frog's Life") is similar to the title design of A Bug's Life.


 * WALL•E is parodied with a movie poster spoof, "BEAK•E".