Jennifer Saunders makes a welcome cameo as the Admiral Benbow's landlady, making the very most out of a slightly underwritten role. Kevin Bishop's singing is a little suspect at times, but he plays up the earnestness of Jim Hawkins very well, making him strongly principled but never unlikeable. In addition to the puppeteers and voice artists, the human actors are very well-cast. Changing the character into a love interest for Smollett may offend some purists, but it does provide for an awful lot of good comedy. Even Miss Piggy's characterisation makes sense, hypothesising just how mad Ben Gunn would have become after all those years alone. Livesey, providing a cool head while Beaker gets to play up the madness of a given situation. Fozzie is a good choice for (the halfwit son of) Squire Trelawny while he is perhaps more inept and eccentric than his literary counterpart, the idea of a small person living in his finger is a nice twist on his inability to keep a secret. Kermit is perfect for Captain Smollett, since the role panders to both his ineptitude and his place as the commander-in-chief of the Muppets.īy instilling us with this kind of confidence so early, the film gradually puts its own stamp on the story through its character choices. But more than that, all the familiar Muppet characters and elements that come along feel like they complement the story, rather than being shoehorned in for the sake of getting them on screen. The Muppets' style is widely known and easy to recognise, so we have no trouble imagining the kind of tone Henson is aiming for. Muppet Treasure Island overcomes this by setting out its stall very early on. But the film suffered from a conflict between the conventions of the story and those of the people making it, so that at times it couldn't decide how faithful or straight it wanted to play things. Treasure Planet functions perfectly wells as a transliteration of the story, getting the various plot points on screen in the right order with a couple of interesting twists in terms of presentation. When I reviewed Treasure Planet not so long ago, I talked about Disney's attempts to retain the basic elements of the story while putting it in an exciting new context. Ironically the more outwardly male and aggressive of the stories is the one which provides the most in terms of family entertainment, something for which Henson deserves a large amount of praise. This may just be a reaction to the source material: there is less overt sentimentality in Robert Louis Stevenson's story, and the morality of Stevenson's work isn't presented through any kind of potentially awkward prism of social commentary. And both involve substantial amounts of characters breaking the fourth wall to talk about how silly everything is.īut despite being so technically similar, Muppet Treasure Island does manage to edge out over its festive counterpart. Both are adaptations of classic works of English literature which play the material as straight as possible, considering who is performing it. As well as being directed by the same man (Jim's eldest son Brian), they both feature greater interaction with human protagonists than the likes of The Muppets Take Manhattan or The Great Muppet Caper. After the slow-burning success of The Muppet Christmas Carol¸ Muppet Treasure Island laid such fears to rest, and still provides a great deal of family fun after 17 years.Īmong the post-Jim efforts, Christmas Carol and Treasure Island have a large number of similarities. While the Henson family were determined to keep producing work to honour his memory, many wondered whether it would be possible to replicate the magic that he created. After Jim Henson's tragic death in 1990, there was great concern about the future of the Jim Henson Company and the Muppets in particular.
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