Muppets take Windows 95: The queer failure of Muppets Inside: CD‐ROM
2023; Wiley; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jacc.13482
ISSN1542-734X
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoIn 2020, communities across the globe had to reimagine what interpersonal connection, communication, and intimacy could look like. With widespread lockdowns, self-isolation, and social distancing, there was a push to adopt previously unfamiliar technologies to usher in alternative ways of being together. Perhaps the most notable addition to our digital repertoire in the United States was the addition of Zoom into many people's everyday lives. From work meetings performed at the kitchen table to impromptu happy hours among friends, this video calling app became the latest standard of how people interact when unable to meet in person. In 2020, the Muppets Studio created a new television show, Muppets Now (Barretta, Thatcher, and Alender, 2020), that sheds humorous light on the mishaps and collaborative possibilities of Zoom. This six-episode series, which premiered on the streaming service Disney+, demonstrates the failure of a computer's operating system. It is set on a computer screen covered in unclosable pop-ups with unexpected video calls regularly disrupting the flow of the show. This is not the first time the Muppets have staged a technological infiltration of the audience's computer or television; Muppets Now harkens back to the innovative computerized aesthetics of the 1996 PC game Muppets Inside: CD-ROM (Starwave, 1996). Muppets Inside's format was a timely commentary on the rise of technology, especially during the height of CD-ROM gaming, just a few years before the internet became popularized. The game was made exclusively for Windows 95, which was the state-of-the-art operating system at the time. Muppets Inside writer Craig Shemin noted in an interview that most of the team working on Muppets Inside had never even used this updated Windows software when they began creating the game (Shemin 2014). Poking fun at the glitches that come with new technology, Muppets Inside's premise revolves around the failure of the game itself. As soon as the game boots up, it short-circuits. The player bands together with the Muppets to fix the game, figuring out how to come together in community when things do not go to plan. In this essay, I draw lines between the shared approach of technological failure and communal collaboration within Muppets Inside and Muppets Now. In particular, I analyze Muppets Inside to demonstrate how the radical community, queerness, and failure of this 1996 game might help us reimagine interpersonal connection in the present. By blurring the line between the digital world of the Muppets and the viewer or player, one can be transported into a world where normative expectations do not apply, and the endless potentiality of hope can be dreamt up through play, absurdity, and chaos. Muppets Inside is predicated on the failure of technology and how we might forge new ways forward. While the gameplay takes place within the minigames, these minigames are not connected to the premise of the game: repairing the player's buggy computer. The minigames, however, are standalone games based around individual Muppet characters and referencing popular videogames of the era. Through the exploration of these characters' defining qualities, the player becomes acquainted with the quirks of these characters—allowing the player to feel a closeness with the characters as the game's journey to fix the glitches unfolds. Borrowing from the computerized aesthetics of Muppets Inside, Muppets Now takes a deep dive into the tumult of technology. The Disney+ series based its format off the introduction and necessity of Zoom into our daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic; they took short video segments and set them in a dizzying computer landscape with video calls, notifications, and email messages that referenced newly popularized technology. Originally slotted as a series of disparate 10-min shorts, Muppets Now pivoted to a half-hour format to better accommodate social distancing protocols at the beginning of the pandemic. This approach allowed performers to record their individual segments remotely, so they could follow the health and safety regulations of the time (Puppet Nerd 2020). Muppets Now acknowledges this unique filming situation in the end credits of each episode: “To those who graciously stayed quiet, lending us their homes, offices, bedrooms, toys, possessions, and support.” During this time of worldwide crisis, communities needed to explore new ways of being together, to find humor amidst the grief, and in their own way, the Muppets helped demonstrate alternative ways of connection. Muppets Now and Muppets Inside grapple with the chaos of the digital landscape through a culmination of clips that comprise the final product, referencing the variety show format of The Muppet Show. Though these pieces of media were created in dramatically different times, they both allow the audience to engage in a collective reimagining of the world and what community can look like. In addition to the refashioning of The Muppet Show's variety show form, in Muppets Inside, pre-existing content from The Muppet Show found a new purpose, as clips from the show were sprinkled throughout the game. This inclusion of The Muppet Show into this CD-ROM breathed new life into The Muppet Show video archive, one that could not have been anticipated during the original taping of the show. The reformulation of these aesthetics can be described as “queer use.” In What's the Use?: On the Uses of Use, Sara Ahmed theorizes that queer use is when something is useful in a way that does not directly correlate with its intended purpose; it is potentiality put into motion. Ahmed (2019, 218), drawing from queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam, writes: “Queer use [is] finding a use for what has been designated not much use, finding that a potential has not been exhausted.” Because something has been deemed not useful or useless, it must forge unique, non-normative ways of being in the world. Even though the clips from The Muppet Show were not intended to be gamified though an interactive CD-ROM, the archive was able to gain a new purpose through Muppets Inside. Similar to the queer use of the archived TV clips, Muppets Inside's premise of technological failure was able to find new life in Muppets Now. Soon after Muppets Inside was released, Starwave transitioned from creating entertainment CD-ROMs to focusing on internet production. As a result, production of Muppets Inside was cut short by 1998, the year Starwave was acquired by the Walt Disney Company. Because of the game's limited production run and the eventual obsoletion of CD-ROMs all together, Muppets Inside was no longer useful in the traditional sense. Few people could get their hands on the game, and with the rising success of internet gaming, few opted to play a CD-ROM game. Despite these limitations, Muppets Inside found alternative modes of persisting in the form of Muppets Now. This 2020 series is a queer use of the aesthetics of failed technology shown in Muppets Inside. Not only does Muppets Now resurface the theme of computerized mishaps in to form of pop-ups, video calls, and error messages, it also adopts the silly yet radical means of dealing with newfound technology from Muppets Inside. Referencing back to Muppets Inside was not an obvious choice for the Disney's Muppets Now, as the Muppets' relationship with Disney has been nonlinear and tumultuous. After the poor reviews of the Jim Henson Hour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Henson wanted to breathe new life into the company. He entertained the offer by Walt Disney Company's CEO at the time, Michael Eisner, to sell the Jim Henson Company to Disney. However, during this drawn-out exchange, Eisner persisted that the terms of the sale expand to also include Sesame Street. The interminable duration of negotiations with Disney exhausted Henson and, along with other factors, took a toll on his health. Before the deal was able to be completed, Henson passed away from pneumonia. While the mourning period following his death invigorated the creativity in the members of the Jim Henson Company, it paused any business negotiations over ownership of the company. It was not until 2004 that the Walt Disney Company acquired the Muppets, renaming the production company “The Muppets Studio.” This transfer over to Disney was certainly not a straightforward path, nor did it fully satisfy Disney's brand or the Muppet performers, writers, and directors. The Muppets did not fit comfortably into the Disney brand; their wacky antics defy traditional, orderly narratives that always teach a lesson. At the time of Disney's acquisition of the Muppets, the Jim Henson Company had eighteen feature-length projects and three series in the works—only two of which Disney has produced (Weber & Dewey Ballantine LLP 2004). Furthermore, Disney's production of Muppet content overall has been scant in comparison to the rate at which the Jim Henson Company was producing prior to Disney's acquisition of the Muppets. Some Muppets employees have expressed frustration at the sanitization of the Muppets to fit a more kid-friendly mold, as The Muppet Show employed more mature humor. Frank Oz, Jim Henson's right-hand man and one of the original Muppet performers, demarcates a significant difference between “the Jim Henson Muppets” and “the Disney Muppets,” expressing that Disney's version of the Muppets has lost “the soul” of the franchise (Oz, 2021). This Disneyfication of the Muppets can be seen in subtle dynamics, such as Miss Piggy and Kermit exhibiting a more heteronormative couple relationship, and larger plot points, such as the 2011 film The Muppets centering on perhaps the most humanlike, normative Muppet to date, Walter. However, in 2020, Disney took a chance at resurfacing some of the aberrant aesthetics from the out-of-print game Muppets Inside to create Muppets Now. In this essay, I explore how the short-lived, short-circuited game Muppets Inside offers a radical politics of queer sociality. Muppets Inside's approach to chaos and community serves as a guiding force in the present, as society learns to navigate alternative ways of being together in tumultuous times. Turning to Halberstam's (2011) definition of “queer failure” and “Pixarvolt,” I dig into failure as a queer mode of existence. Through this lens, I explore how one can identify with the human and the monstrous within the Muppets and how, by utilizing Muppetian tactics of dealing with the absurd, one is better equipped to recognize and confront absurdity within their own lives. Specifically, I investigate how the failure of the player's computer system in this game allows for the Muppets and the player to rally together in order to rebuild a system that has been broken and why aesthetics of chaos and failure are necessary in imagining queer, community-driven futures. Following the lead of queer of color theorist Muñoz, I turn to and anticipate queer futures in Muppets Inside. In Muñoz's (2009, 27) book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, he argues that the “present is not enough…for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations.” Therefore, we must consider “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” outside of what might be considered normal, rational, or useful by majoritarian voices (Muñoz 2009, 1). Muppets Inside allows the player to engage in imaginative play and world-building among technological chaos. The Muppets' universe reveals the absurdity within normative social structures and prompts the player to imagine what it could look like to build a more generous, kind, and overwhelmingly silly future together. Despite Jim Henson's reputation as a soft-spoken, notably relaxed colleague and leader, his work often jumps at the chance to ruffle a few feathers (with the exception of Camilla the Chicken, Gonzo's devoted girlfriend, of course). His longtime collaborator and ex-wife Jane Nebel Henson described this tension: “[Jim] was not a rebel, but he always saw the rules and the systems and everything else being handed out as being a little questionable and a little absurd” (Kinberg 1994). Henson regularly used television and movies to call into question societal norms. Notably, the Muppets, his most famous creation, take everyday situations and extract the absurdity within them. The Muppets use their malleable felt bodies and quick-witted jokes to poke fun at and call into question cultural, social, and political systems. By opening up this space to revel in the subversive and ambiguous, the Muppets create a sort of queer utopia—a pleasurable space both within and totally defiant of mainstream culture. Despite the tumultuous beginning of the 1990s for the Jim Henson Company, the cast and crew banded together during this decade to create some of the most memorable Muppet projects to date. In 1990, after Jim Henson's untimely death, his son Brian Henson took over the company. Just 2 years after Jim Henson passed, the Jim Henson Company premiered one of its most beloved films to date, The Muppet Christmas Carol. Despite its moderate initial box office success, the film remains a fan favorite, even receiving the praise from the Charles Dickens Museum as being their favorite adaptation of this literary classic (Toughpigs.com 2021). In an interview, Muppet performer Dave Goelz expressed that the Jim Henson Company's willingness to create The Muppet Christmas Carol so soon after Henson's passing meant they were all inspired to create something that so powerfully balanced silliness and sentimentality (Toughpigs.com 2021). Soon after The Muppet Christmas Carol's premier in 1992, the Jim Henson Company began work on their fifth feature-length film, Muppet Treasure Island. The release of this Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation was accompanied with a PC game produced by Activision. The same year Muppet Treasure Island and its companion game came out, Muppets Inside made its debut. Not only did these projects premiere the same year, but they were being worked on simultaneously. Scenes from Muppets Inside were filmed at Shepperton Studios, near the shooting of Muppet Treasure Island. “We set up a sound stage right next to the movie, and when the performers were finished, they would come by our sound stage and [after they finished filming for the game] keep recording stuff for the movie,” Muppets Inside game designer and producer John Cutter recalled. This boom in activity for the Muppets in the 1990s, perhaps, was a rallying around the Jim Henson Company after the tragic, sudden loss of Jim Henson at the beginning of the decade. The company persevered with the creative fervor that Henson's memory inspired, and Muppets Inside became a part of this new chapter of the Muppets. To delve deeper into the game's conception, I contacted John Cutter for an interview about the design and production of Muppets Inside. During our conversation, he provided incredible insight regarding the process of creating Muppets Inside and the collaboration between the Jim Henson Company and Starwave, a software company founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, where Cutter was employed. At the time of Muppets Inside's creation, Starwave had already made several successful entertainment-based CD-ROMs for musicians, such as Sting and Peter Gabriel, featuring highlights from their performances and showcasing the artists' oeuvre in various ways. At Starwave, Scott Wallin suggested that the Muppets CD-ROM become a video game instead of primarily displaying clips, so he hired John Cutter to design and produce the Muppets project. According to Cutter, some of the executives at Starwave were a bit hesitant to produce a full-on game. Cutter was urged by Wallin to market the game as “interactive entertainment” instead of a video game, but Cutter's excitement about the playable aspect of Muppets Inside shone through during the meeting with Starwave executives, slipping the word “game” in a few times (Cutter 2020). In the end, Muppets Inside was primarily composed of seven minigames. In addition to the playable aspect of Muppets Inside, clips from The Muppet Show punctuate some of the games and pop up as the player makes their way across the “bitmap.” Sometimes these clips appear as flying insects or programming bugs that smash on the databus's windshield and are wiped off after the scene is finished. These deftly written details speak to the cohesion of the game's playability and thematic humor. As the game began to take shape, the Jim Henson Company hired Eddie Dombrower to co-produce the game and Craig Shemin to write the “120-some-odd-page script,” among a fierce group of other creatives who worked on the project (Shemin 2014). Through Cutter and Shemin's brainstorming, they decided the Muppets should get trapped in the player's computer (Cutter 2020). Regarding the game's inception, Cutter envisioned that the game should be marketed to adults as well as children. He proposed, since children already love the Muppets, it would be beneficial to shift focus to simultaneously securing the adult market. Cutter remarked, “What if we did a game that was marketed and pushed more towards my generation who have nostalgic memories of the Muppets' TV show…with computer gags and computer humor?” It is evident that Cutter's vision, through essential collaboration with Shemin, made it through to production; even the title of the game itself, Muppets Inside, parodies “Intel Inside”—a marketing slogan indicating the CPU inside a computer was created by the brand Intel. This balance between wit and foolishness, clever references, and physical comedic gags ensured Muppets Inside's place among existing Muppet content, tonally towing the line between Sesame Street and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Muppets Inside infiltrates the player's broken, hacked computer—going so far as to screenshot the player's desktop and implement it into the game itself—forcing the player to merge their understandings of technology, fictional narratives, and human experience. The Muppets' approach to chaos can be found within the introduction to the game. Because of the throughput from the CD-ROM, the game could not display a full-screen window (Cutter 2020). This technical hang-up became the basis for one of the most exciting innovations in Muppets Inside: the incorporation of the player's desktop screen into the game itself. Though there was some initial worry that players might think their computer actually broke or was infected with a virus, the developers did not receive many, if any, complaints about this (Cutter 2020). It seems that most players stuck with the game through its absurd opening because, when it comes to the Muppets, not only does the player expect this sort of chaos, but they trust the Muppets to help them navigate it. However, the Muppets' guidance through a difficult situation does not necessarily equate to a clean resolution at the end of a Muppets game, film, or episode. In fact, most of the narratives in the Muppets' repertoire remain unresolved in some way. The player joins forces with this ensemble of wacky, wise-cracking puppets to fix the Muppets' game and the player's computer. These misadventures build a type of community between the player and the Muppets, asking the player to question the trivial demarcations between the world of the Muppets and their own. By asking the player to rethink preconceived notions of what “normal” can or should look like, Muppets Inside proposes queer, alternative ways of being in the world—one that welcomes difference and embraces chaos. The premise of Muppets Inside asks the player to engage with the absurdity that follows a technological breakdown and examine what shared identification the player may find within the colorful puppets that accompany them. Specifically, the Muppets challenge socially constructed, rigid perceptions of how someone might operate in the world by celebrating weird, subversive, queer methods of navigating existence. At their core, the Muppets are queer, insurgent subjects. Throughout this essay, following in the tradition of queer and queer of color theorists, I define queer as a mode of existence and political critique that resists reductive, prescriptive constructions of identity and insists upon the malleability and intersectionality of identity. Predetermined categories of identity “have often worked to establish and police the line between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal.’” (Somerville 2014, 203). Queerness refuses essentializing identity markers, which have historically been employed as a means of violence, power, and control. As Gloria Anzaldúa (2007) writes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, queerness cannot be confined to singular categories. Specifically, she writes about the Texas/Mexico borderlands where physical and social borders are unfixed. As a countermeasure to oppressive demarcations of identity, she argues for a queer “third space” that transcends and would be excluded from already existing identity categories. Anzaldúa urges the embracing of ambiguity—explaining how, often, the harsh lines drawn in identity are tied to white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia. Along similar lines of malleability and intersectionality, Eve Sedgwick (1993, 8) describes queerness's resistance of categorization as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.” These definitions of queerness hold different connotations, yet I provide them all to reveal queerness's slipperiness and refusal to conform to prescriptive, normative categories. From the Muppets' brightly colored felt, feather, and furred bodies to their kooky, unconventional demeanor, they defy what is normal. Even among the Muppets, there is no streamlined way of aesthetic appearance or social performance. These creatures thrive on difference and building community that embraces aberration from what might be deemed acceptable from a normative gaze. Through Muppets Inside's untraditional gameplay, queer failure, and collectivity, it exemplifies the subversiveness of the Muppets and creates strategies for how to approach chaos in our own lives. Considering the eccentricity of the Muppets' narratives and the performance-forward nature of The Muppet Show, I find it useful to look at this franchise's work through the lens of absurd theater to frame the chaotic gameplay of Muppets Inside and how it pertains to a Muppetian approach of reckoning with the absurd. Specifically, how might seeing outlandish plotlines play out allow the viewer to see themselves within the Muppets' universe or modern society reflected in the Muppets? In The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin (1961, 6) argues that the impact of absurd theater does not lie within the philosophizing of the absurd condition of quotidian life; moreover, the staging of the absurd—laying it simply yet inexplicably in front of an audience—permits the audience to recognize the absurdity within their own lives. The Muppets do not falsely decree that chaos can be quelled by order but that they coexist in tension with one another, as evidenced by the varied cast of characters within the franchise. To have a successful show in the Muppet universe, they need the bespectacled stage manager Scooter to make sure everyone hits their cues just as much as they need the daredevil from outer space Gonzo walking a tightrope while reciting Hamlet. The chaos of the Muppets helps its player to recognize the absurdity of everyday life, opening up a space for critique and reflection. The more composed characters, however, help ground the viewers in the idea that they share the Muppets' reality. Esslin (1961, xix) writes that the theater of the absurd “strives to express its sense of the senseless of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought.” By embracing a world where humans exist alongside zany felt puppets, the player of Muppets Inside opens themselves up to other lenses to analyze their own lived experience—perhaps, coming to the revelation that a singing green frog or a karate-chopping pig wearing a feather boa are far more believable and desirable than some of the oppressive societal conditions under which we live. Not only do the Muppet characters display a certain absurdity with their antics, but the structure of the game itself defies a traditional layout. The introduction to Muppets Inside disrupts linear gameplay by breaking the fourth wall, closing the distance between the player and the Muppets, and asking the player to debug the game and repair their own computer. Muppets Inside starts as what appears to be a pop-up window entering the player's desktop screen. Soon after a parody of the bright yellow and red title card of The Muppet Show appears, reading “The Muppet CD-ROM,” the familiar theme sequence from the The Muppet Show plays. However, the theme song has been cleverly re-written with witty computer puns and references, opening with: “It's time to boot the disk up. It's time to turn stuff on. It's time to meet the Muppets on the Muppets CD-ROM!” Two verses into the song, the screen glitches, and the pop-up suddenly disappears. Animal—the fuzzy, red, anarchic Muppet drummer—cries out from somewhere behind the screen, “Uh-oh!” At this point, all the player can see is their own desktop screen with whatever icons, applications, and web browser windows they had open prior to starting the game. From the player's viewpoint, it appears the game has closed out due to software defects. However, the Muppets' voices can still be heard, as they begin to workshop what the technological issue might be. Kermit asks the resident wacky, melon-headed scientist Dr. Bunsen Honeydew to figure out what went wrong with the game. In the meantime, Kermit requests that his cheesy comedian confidant, Fozzie, stalls the player while he tries to resolve the issue. Kermit and Fozzie's felted fingers then pry the desktop open from the center, exposing the machinations of a computer monitor. After trying to crack a joke and getting heckled by his harshest critics, Statler and Waldorf, Fozzie worriedly expresses that they are having technical difficulties and to please stand-by. Following a series of physical gags, power outages, and a Muppet falling from the sky, Dr. Honeydew finally enters the scene and explains: “Your copy of Muppets CD-ROM has been broken into teensy little pieces and— how should I say it—it's corrupted your entire system.” Dr. Honeydew's latest invention then begins to swing into action, causing rips and tears in the desktop and, of course, causing his longtime test subject and lab partner Beaker to faceplant right into the player's screen. This eventually results in the supposed total deterioration of the computer screen, landing the player in the colorful and surprisingly tropical interior of the player's computer. Kermit and Fozzie greet the player, as the 4-min opening scene ends, and the game begins. Most traditional computer games build gradually; the player completes one mission to be able to conquer the next. However, Muppets Inside's gameplay is nonlinear. In this CD-ROM, the minigames do not actually contribute to the overarching plot of the game. The player bands together with Kermit and Fozzie in an effort to help repair the game from the inside by completing the minigames. Whereas Rizzo the Rat was the only Muppet who was not sucked into the computer when the game crashed, so he is tasked with reading Dr. Honeydew's notes to fix the game and get the Muppets out of the player's computer from the outside. In one of the video cut scenes, Rizzo explains, “When our CD-ROM program blew up, it scattered the games and the video clips and multimedia who-hah, all over the inside of the computer, and sorta stuffed up the pipes. So, you're going to have to find our games and play them all the way through. That's the only way to clear the clogged datapaths.” While the player, Kermit, and Fozzie play the minigames, Rizzo is working on external solutions to retrieve the Muppets from the computer. Once the player beats a certain number of minigames, they are taken to a different component in the computer to find other Muppets that have been lost during the breakdown of the game. This traveling is shown through computer animations and video clips outside of the gameplay. The minigames themselves, however, have little to do thematically with this journey throughout the player's computer. By completing all the minigames, the player reclaims the lost data from the game. In addition to gathering the files from Muppets Inside, playing the minigames indirectly builds community between player and the characters. Most of the minigames demonstrate how the Muppets defy normative modes of being by acquainting the player intimately with the characters. This PC game consists of seven minigames which must all be completed to clear the “datapaths” to get the computer in working order again. Almost all these games are a clever take on something the player is already familiar with—whether that be a classic video game, a clip from The Muppet Show, or a reference to the technology they are playing the game on. Muppets Inside encourages the player to reimagine its relationship with technology and media by putting technology and games they might recognize into the Muppet universe. “Trivia but True!” is a game akin to Hollywood Squares in which the player picks a character to answer a trivia question and decide whether to agree with their answer. In “Beaker's Brain,” the player watches cl
Referência(s)