Miss Piggy's looking chic, Gonzo's looking shabby, Animal has slipped his chains, Kermit is naked, and good grief, the comedian's a bear! There's a new poster for The Muppets online. Happy Tuesday, everybody!
Is it just us, or, outside the novelty of the bike-riding scene from The Great Muppet Caper, is there not just something off about seeing the Muppets' legs? Like the train coming out of the fireplace in Magritte's Time Transfixed, they just don't belong. Freud wrote about the unheimlich, or "uncanny" in 1919: instances of uncomfortable oddness where things seem familiar and strange at the same time. The examples he used were from the writings of ETA Hoffman and Otto Rank, but he could just as easily have talked about Muppets with legs.
Or perhaps we're over-thinking this.
The Muppets, if you've been out of the loop so far, is Jason Segel's love letter to Jim Henson's great creation, in which he, Amy Adams and their Muppet pals fight to save the Muppet Theatre from the clutches of Chris Cooper's dastardly oil tycoon.
James Bobin is directing the script by Segel and Nicholas Stoller, and a quite preposterous list of the Hollywood great and good have queued up for roles and cameos, including Alan Arkin, Jack Black, Billy Crystal, Zach Galifianakis, Kathy Griffin, Ricky Gervais and Emily Blunt. And Jean-Claude Van-Damme. Contrary to what it says on the poster, The Muppets arrives in the UK on February 17, 2012. So they're not quite as close as you thought after all.