MUPPET BABIES Cartoonist Reveals Why We've Never Seen The Series Streaming and Confirms What Nanny Looked Like
The original Muppet Babies series ran for eight seasons, from 1984 to 1991 on CBS’s Saturday morning cartoon lineup, and it was a fan-favorite. I know I watched it live from a very young age and through syndication as well. It was such a cute show, inspired by the flashback dream sequence in the 1984 film Muppets Take Manhattan, also a personal favorite of mine.
The series featured Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, and their friends, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Scooter, Skeeter, Rowlf the Dog, and Gonzo as the main characters in their baby counterparts. Supporting characters include Bunsen Honeydew, Beaker, and Camilla, Gonzo's stuffed baby chick. In the final two seasons, Bean Bunny and Statler and Waldorf began making regular appearances. Several Muppets made guest appearances, including Janice as an older preteen and Kermit's nephew Robin as a tadpole. The whole series included the babies’ caretaker, Nanny, and the show took the babies on exciting adventures through their imaginations.
Everyone who watched this show has a special place in their heart for it, so the burning question is… why can’t we get it streaming? This question was finally answered by Muppet Babies cartoonist Guy Gilchrist in a recent appearance at L.A. Comic Con, where he explained that it comes down to “copyrights and trademarks.” He said in an interview with Dennis Does LA that back in the ‘80s, there was “camaraderie” between the studios, something that doesn’t exist today amid the big corporate takeovers. He went on:
“Besides using the stuff that was in the public domain, like the silent stuff that we used in the dream sequences… Remember, the editing on that was incredibly wonderful. We used a lot of film clips from a lot of different things, including Raiders [of the Lost Ark], Star Wars, and all of that,” Gilchrist said of the collaboration the studios had with each other.
He continued:
“Jim was very good with George Lucas. George came in and worked on Labyrinth with Jim and that was not their first collaboration. Their first collaboration was… they were across the street from each other. Jim was filming The Muppets and George was doing Star Wars across the street. Yoda didn’t work, so Jim, Frank and Kathy Mullen fixed Yoda. Then, Steven Spielberg was also a very dear friend of Jim’s, and Jim fixed E.T. because E.T. didn’t work.”
With Gilchrist establishing how the studios worked with one another, he went on to explain how the clips used in Muppet Babies made it onto the show and how different it is now.
“Back in those days, everyone loved us. They loved Jim — would do anything for us. We didn’t fill out forms, requests, this or that. We basically did whatever we wanted to do with the blessing of all of the studios. These days, things are owned by Disney, Universal… and there’s not the camaraderie at the creative level that we had in the eighties. That’s why, I’m sorry to say, you will not see the original Muppet Babies. And it’s the question I get asked the most. I had a lot to do with the Babies. I know how much you guys love the Babies and would love to have them back. But I don’t really know a way that that will ever happen. It’s copyrights and trademarks and that sort of thing, unfortunately.”
That’s such a bummer. I wish the studios would make an exception for this show. It would make the fans so happy! But one cool bit of info Gilchrist revealed is what Nanny looked like! We only ever saw the character from her knees down, from the eye level of the Muppet Babies, so all we really knew was that she wore stripey socks. He explained:
“Barbara Billingsley, Mrs. Cleaver [from Leave it to Beaver], she was Nanny. Now you know what Nanny looks like.”
As for Nanny’s striped socks, Gilchrist said it was “an ode to The Wizard of Oz.” You can check out the entire interview in the post below:
via: Deadline