Disney+ were right to caution and not censor The Muppet Show episodes

Pat Stacey

Leaving the shows as they were made, while identifying them as products of their time, credits viewers with some intelligence

Spike Milligan causes mayhem for the Newsman during one of the less contentious moments from his appearance on The Muppet Show, originally shown in 1979

February 23 2021 08:33 AM

Disney+ began streaming The Muppet Show on Friday, the first time the late Jim Henson’s beloved comedy-variety show, which ran for five seasons, has been available in its entirety in any format.

It’s also the first time select episodes of The Muppet Show have come with a content disclaimer. Disney+ has prefaced 18 of the shows with the following advisory warning: “This programme includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.

“Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

The shows carrying the disclaimer include those hosted by Steve Martin, Johnny Cash, Peter Sellers, Debbie Harry, Spike Milligan, Kenny Rogers and Joan Baez.

The Muppet Show was broadcast from 1976 to 1981, a time when even the most racially and culturally aware television series were still prone to making errors of judgement. Disney hasn’t detailed which segments of the 18 shows it thinks warrant the disclaimer; it’s not a difficult task, though, to identify some of the most glaringly obvious ones.

The episode with Johnny Cash, for instance, features the singer performing in front of a prominently displayed Confederate flag, which is now widely and rightly reviled as a symbol of white supremacy.

In Peter Sellers’s episode, he dresses up as a stereotypical gypsy — headscarf, earrings, big satin belt — and sings a song in a comedy accent. Mind you, it’s a model of sensitivity compared to the star’s “blackface” turn in slapstick comedy The Party.

Sellers’s friend and Goon Show collaborator Spike Milligan appears in what is possibly the episode of The Muppet Show most in need of the disclaimer. During The Muppets’ performance of Disney theme park song ‘It’s a Small World’, Milligan pops up as a “Chinese” man, complete with pigtails and plastic buck teeth.

Bizarrely, he also appears to give a Nazi salute while wearing an outsize kilt and tam o’ shanter cap.

Incidentally, the Milligan episode is one of two (the other features John Denver) that are available on Disney+ in America, but not in Europe.

Apparently, this is to do with a rights issues and not, as one right-wing British newspaper dishonestly claimed, because Disney has pandered to the “woke” brigade and “purged” Milligan from The Muppet Show’s history. Nobody was purging anyone.

Of the 120 episodes of The Muppet Show that were produced, only two have been omitted from Disney+ completely. Unsurprisingly, one of them features Chris Langham, who was jailed for six months in 2007 for downloading and possessing Level 5 child sex abuse images and videos.

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The other one, featuring Brooke Shields singing a song from The Wizard of Oz, can’t be shown because the film’s owners jealously guard the rights to the material.

The House of Mouse isn’t the easiest of entertainment conglomerates to warm to, not least because of the way it treats its ordinary, minimum-wage workers. In April of last year, Disney furloughed 100,000 employees because of the pandemic, while leaving its executives’ salaries and fat bonuses untouched.

And then there’s its seemingly insatiable hunger to swallow up, well, everything. Its ownership or part-ownership of ABC, ESPN, Hulu, 21st Century-Fox, Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm is just the tip of an inconceivably huge iceberg.

But it deserves credit in this particular instance. The easiest thing in the world would have been to just omit troubling episodes of The Muppet Show, thus depriving a new audience of seeing a multitude of terrific talents who are no longer with us.

Leaving the shows as they were made, while identifying them as products of their time, credits viewers with some intelligence.

That’s more than you can say for the bludgeoning, obnoxiously self-righteous warriors of cancel culture.

Disney+ were right to caution and not censor The Muppet Show episodes

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