Disney's Muppet Babies are now actual Muppets!
No, they have grown up to be their adult selves yet, but they are now actual puppets as opposed to 3D animated characters.
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| Executive Producer Tom Warburton with the Muppet Babies puppets |
Entertainment Weekly sat down with Muppet Babies Executive Producer Tom Warburton to talk about the shorts and how they came about.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Where did this idea come from?
TOM WARBURTON: Well, there’s always a little gap in between seasons and I thought, “How can we do something fun with the Muppets, with the Muppet Babies in between seasons while kids are waiting for the new episodes?” And I thought, “What if we…” Of course, I’ve always wanted have real Muppets with these characters, so I came up with this idea of them interacting with real kids and I talked to Matt Danner, my co-producer and supervising director, and he’s also the voice of Kermit. I said, “What if we did this?” And he has an adult Kermit puppet sitting on his shelf. So we got the five-year-old niece of one of the production assistant and we went to the park and just shot on my iPhone a little skit of going like, “Hey, I saw you go down the slide. I really looks fun, but I’m scared. Can you show me how?” And the girl goes down the slide and then Kermit goes down the slide. It’s down and dirty. We shot it in half an hour, and then I went to Disney and showed it to them and they were like, “This is great. We have to do this.” Then we had to go through the process of budgeting and scheduling and, on top of all the production we’re already making. And we did it. It was a 3-day shoot and every day my heart was just exploding with how cool it was to see the Muppeteers work with our characters. This has been a dream come true.
The puppet versions are all performed by the Muppet performers and voiced by the cast of the show.
You can watch the first short below:
They were real during Miss Piggy's "imaginary flashback scene" in "The Muppets Take Manhattan." This inspired the hand-drawn cartoon the CGI show was based upon. The Muppet Babies were real Muppets in the 80s.
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