Disney recently held their bi-annual D23 expo in Anaheim and a lot was announced. While many sequels and remakes were being thrown at us, some of it was intriguing such as Hoppers, or as I like to call it, Beaver Avatar. However, the major conversations from Disney fans came from the theme park announcements, in which many new developments were revealed. That said, the announcements have created a very mixed wave of emotions with many being excited and others being wary about either rides being put in places that don’t make much sense or replacing longtime beloved ones. However, from my perspective, the issue that caught my attention the most was something that was neither confirmed nor denied outright and that is the future of the beloved attraction Muppet-Vision 3D.
At the park panel, it was announced that Disney’s Hollywood Studios would be receiving a brand-new Monsters Inc. land with a suspended roller coaster based on the door warehouse scene from the movie. While the prospect of such an interesting ride concept excites me, one question was raised: where will this land go? Recent reports show that Disney is uncertain as well with some stating that Imagineering has only a few weeks to decide. The issue is that one of the areas earmarked for replacement is the area of the park that has Star Tours and Muppet-Vision. I won’t beat around the bush: replacing these rides with a new area would be a terrible idea long-term for many reasons.
Let’s first go over the logistical reasons. Disney’s Hollywood Studios is a park that has had an issue with capacity like many Disney parks. Many rides have extremely long wait times even if they don’t warrant them. So, removing more rides to replace them isn’t going to fix the issues that Disney wants to address. The park has plenty of space to build new things, but Disney wants to go with the cheaper option. You see, there is a large building in the park that once held Disney’s Florida animation division. It closed years ago and became an animation museum before being turned into a Star Wars meet and greet area. The place is practically a dead mall and is a waste of space for a park that needs more things for guests to do. So, why not level it and develop new land not just for the Monsters land but for other potential developments? However, I feel that Disney is only considering the Muppets for replacement because tearing down a few buildings would be cheaper than tearing down a large one and redeveloping the land it was on. Even so, rides like Muppet-Vision and Star Tours (which I assume would be affected), that take more guests in at a time are needed at a park like this. The park already had issues when they replaced a bunch of stuff for the Toy Story and Star Wars lands with the park having so little to do, so why bring back that problem? The area being considered would also be too small, especially for the type of ride Disney wants to build there. Not to mention that a roller coaster like this probably has lower capacity overall compared to the rides it would potentially replace. So yeah, in terms of the park experience and logistics, it feels like replacing Muppet-Vision wouldn’t be a good long-term solution for the park. Replacing one or even two reliable rides with a single roller coaster isn’t an upgrade in terms of crowd flow and I feel that replacing areas of the park that don’t get any use or aren’t developed is a much better solution.
However, the other major reason for my concern has to do with the state of the Muppets and how Disney uses them. Let’s state the obvious, Disney has treated the Muppets quite poorly. Aside from the brief resurgence from the success of the 2011 movie, the company has acted so apathetic towards any sort of development with them. It seems like the only person who was invested in the brand was Michael Eisner who initiated the company’s acquisition of them near the end of his tenure. Ever since it has felt like the rest of the company has treated this brand as something with little value. It feels like the only reason the characters are still owned by Disney is because they still generate money from merch sales. However, it doesn’t seem to be enough profit to warrant new Muppet projects consistently. There will be an occasional tv special or limited series here or there, but most of the content we get from the Muppets nowadays is just them promoting things or appearing on other programs. As such, the Muppets have become a brand that is still recognized but has little relevance or any cultural foothold now compared to past decades. I know there are plenty of fans of these characters around, like myself, but many of them are in internet circles and the overall lack of attention given to them in the eye of the general public means that fewer kids know what the Muppets are in general.
It’s sort of like how Warner Bros. treats the Looney Tunes. Both are culturally beloved and are important to their medium and are still recognizable to many. However, they are also not built for the kind of multi-media franchising that studios want out of their brand nowadays and they either get left to only be marketing figureheads or are put in projects that don’t fit their strengths such as Space Jam and the ill-fated ABC Muppets sitcom. Even when a successful effort is made, it is either not given the support it needs like the 2020s Looney Tunes Cartoons reboot, or thrown out such as Coyote Vs Acme being thrown into a tax paper shredder. As such, these beloved icons are left on the shelf mostly to be used for nostalgia but are rarely allowed to become relevant for recent generations. People will still recognize them, but they won’t be really that important anymore and fade into a more semi-obscure space.
As such, tearing down something with less recognition by modern audiences to replace it with a more relevant brand feels a bit cold. Sure, the Muppets aren’t as well known by today’s audiences compared to Monsters Inc., but that’s mostly the fault of Disney and instead of fixing the issue by giving more exposure to these characters, they seem more content to just put something more recently marketable there. I’m sure that there are still plenty of kids would could get exposure to the Muppets through this attraction and giving a bit more attention here and there to the brand in general would allow a larger audience to form. However, I feel like Disney is less focused on creating a sense of growth for all of the brands they own, and more on milking the existing ones that are super popular until the cow is bone dry. We are getting a 3rd and a 4th Frozen, so it’s not surprising that Disney wouldn’t give the Muppets any sort of priority when, even if they put the effort in to regain an audience, it wouldn’t be as immediately huge market-wise compared to other recent projects.
Alongside the issue of brand image and care from the company, there is one other reason that this ride should stay and that is because it was one of the last projects that Jim Henson was personally involved in. In the late 80s, Henson planned to sell his company to Disney so he could relinquish corporate responsibilities and focus more on creative elements. The ride was part of a deal to build Muppet attractions in preparation for the planned acquisition. However, he died in 1990 and the merger as well as most of the theme park plans were scrapped with only Muppet-Vision being finished. Frank Oz, one of Jim’s longtime collaborators, felt that the stress around the merger and Disney being extremely difficult about it contributed to Jim’s passing. As such, replacing it feels kind of wrong in some way. I know Disney intended for his parks to be ever-changing and that they shouldn’t be preserved to reflect his or anyone else’s vision in perpetuity, but the circumstances around this one feel different given what it represents. Honestly, I feel that Disney should add Muppet experiences around the area if they want an increase in guest flow. Build a dark ride or an interactive restaurant and allow more opportunities for new generations to be exposed to these characters. However, I know that it won’t happen because like I said before, they aren’t trendy compared to their animated movies or Star Wars and Marvel. Sure, Disney used to be willing to build unique experiences based on any type of film regardless of their popularity or even completely original rides, but that is a long-gone mentality given the recent developments at the parks. With all of this said, I want to say that Muppet-Vision needs to stay. It’s not just because it’s a beloved attraction or that demolishing it for new developments seems like a cheap fix for a park that needs more long-term substantial development, but that it being on the potential chopping block symbolizes a lack of care for these characters held by the Disney company in recent years and that the ride itself represents a long-gone era both for theme parks and for the Muppets. Disney parks used to take more interesting risks or at the very least felt more cohesive in their designs. Now it seems like any sort of new development is done to promote another brand the company wants to expose regardless of whether it fits in an area. That’s not to say that this wasn’t done before by Disney, but compare building Animal Kingdom with a focus on real animals to Disney replacing the Rivers of America in Magic Kingdom with a Cars attraction tangentially connected to mountain racing and the difference is palpable in terms of how the creative choices fits in the park. The Muppets mean a lot to people in many different ways and I feel that removing one of its few remaining large-scale experiences would be a disservice to the fans, the characters, and the people who made them in the first place. The fact that this decision is being considered represents how studios view things like the Muppets only in a cold and business-like way. But thinking this way won’t always lead to the best results. You can’t just assume that because something is recognizable, putting out anything with its name slapped on it will immediately make all the money. People need to connect and find value in something and have it grow an audience over time rather than immediately. Disney might not see the Muppets as important, but they are important to me and millions of others around the world, and all we want is a bit more care and respect
