From That Kid to Tough Pig – Part 1
Soon after my daughter was born, she started watching the 6:30 AM showing of Sesame Street on our local PBS station. The combination of colorful, frenetic characters and music was, unsurprisingly, a big hit. It was soon clear we would need more Muppet material, and as we’ve discussed before here, Pattie and I are nothing if not big on the research. So I started checking out Muppet websites, and eventually found my way to Tough Pigs. The essays and reviews on the site combined insightful analysis with the irreverent humor you’d want to see in a site devoted to the Muppets. And I soon discovered that the site’s webmaster, Danny Horn, lives right in my back yard. Danny is the Education Director at the Mazzoni Center, Philadelphia’s gay/lesbian/bi/trans health center, working with the staff at Philadelphia public schools on GLBT health and safety issues. (He and his boyfriend Ed live in the suburbs with three cats and a house full of Muppet toys.) I thought it would be neighborly to chat with Danny about the Muppets, his site, and fandom, so we got together for an IM chat.
So, ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a big welcome for Danny Horn! YEEAAHHHHH! (Waves arms wildly while leaving the stage . . .)
DT: We might as well start at the beginning. How’d you become a Muppet fan in the first place?
DH: How did I become a Muppet fan. I don’t think people become Muppet fans. I think it just happens before you’re even conscious of it. I was born in 1971, which was two years into Sesame Street. So I was watching Sesame since before I can remember; it was just always there. Then I was five when The Muppet Show started in 1976. I remember seeing commercials for the show over the summer, and I watched the first episode that aired on the New York station. It was Rita Moreno, and it ended with the sketch that had Rita trying to sing “Fever” while Animal interrupted with crazy drum riffs, and at the end, Rita comes up behind Animal and crashes his head with cymbals. It was so obviously the best thing ever. So that was pretty much it.
DT: I was born a little later, in 1975, so I missed a lot of The Muppet Show on first run. So Sesame was definitely my strongest introduction to the characters.
DH: Yeah, that’s the show that they’ll stick an infant in front of and just leave him there. Everyone pretty much starts out in life as a Sesame fan. The smart people stay that way.
DT: Well, I’m not sure how smart I am. I never lost my fondness for the characters, but I didn’t really pay much attention to Sesame or to the Muppets for at least a good ten years, until my daughter was born. The last two years or so have been a lot about rediscovery for me.
DH: Yeah, there are some folks on the TP forum like that. It’s the circle of life.
DT: Thank heavens for the Internet, because it made playing catch-up a lot easier.
DH: Yeah, I thank heavens for the internet about three times a day. At least. That’s a slow day.
DT: It definitely makes it easier to stay energized about things that have more of a niche fandom, because it reinforces the notion that, hey, I’m not the only one who still likes this stuff!
DH: Interacting with other fans definitely increases your own interest. I’ve heard that from people since I was doing my fanzine — that they were only vaguely interested in the Muppets when they picked up the zine, but now they’re getting more rabid. It’s a virus, really.
DT: How long ago was the fanzine?
DH: It was called MuppetZine. I published twenty issues, from 1992-1997. It was right at the tail end of when there actually were fanzines anymore. I was very timely. The internet and websites were just becoming popular. So I decided to go the more expensive and difficult route. That “smart kids” thing only goes so far.
DT: Well, ’92 was probably a bit early for the whole web thing. I know I was still poking around text-based BBSes on a 2400 baud modem at that point.
DH: Yeah, there were still zines in ’92.
DT: So you were just doing your apprenticeship.
DH: I actually stopped just in time. That’s one of the reasons why I stopped, actually, because it was obvious by 1997 that websites could do what I was trying to do, but better and faster. And a lot cheaper. But that’s how I earned my Muppet-fan stripes, publishing the zine.
DT: So, in ’92, you were 21. What was the motivation to devote that kind of energy to Muppets and Muppet fandom?
DH: I’d just graduated from college, and I needed more friends. That’s always been the whole thing, meeting other Muppet fans to be friends with… The actual impetus for it was that I worked in New York the summer after I graduated from college, and there’s a great photo store in Greenwich Village that sells 8×10’s from movies and TV shows. They had a lot of great Muppet photos, and I pretty much spent my entire summer-job salary buying them. And then I had nobody to show them off to, so I started a fanzine.
DT: While you were in college, were there a number of Muppet fans?
DH: No, college was when I became a Muppet fan again. We’re doing this all backwards, actually. Maybe I should start over. Can I come in again?
DT: Ah, well, time has no meaning, space is all relative.
DH: Well, it does have meaning, we’re just going backwards.
DT: Fine, ruin my existential moment, why don’t you?
DH: Oh, sorry. Was that a philosophy thing? Remind me never to ask a philosophy student to read a map while I drive.
DT: The stories I could tell you . . .
DH: Space may be relative, but I still want to make it to my destination before I have to pee. Anyway. College? Was that the question?
DT: Right. Set the way back machine.
DH: Okay. Let me see. You got me at five, with Rita Moreno. Totally loving Muppets all through childhood. I was That Fan Kid in elementary and middle school, the one who has some odd interest that everyone sort of rolls their eyes at. Whatever it is that I’m supposed to do, the Muppets get worked in somehow. That Kid. So by high school, I decided that I wanted to try out being a more normal well-rounded human being, which obviously is a huge mistake. It made me terribly unhappy. High school was the time when I started figuring out that I was gay… so that was the major concern at that time, people not finding out that I was gay. So anything that seemed kind of odd or non-masculine about me got pushed away, and playing with dolls was definitely one of those things. All my Muppet stuff got thrown out, or stored in the attic. And I was miserable and closeted, both as a gay person and as a Muppet fan, and that’s high school for you. So in college, I started coming out to people. Both kinds of coming out. I started going to the meetings of the college gay group, and buying Cookie Monster toys again, literally in the same week. By the end of college, I was totally out, both as gay and a Muppet fan. Then I graduated, and the big crisis of graduation is going out into the big world, which doesn’t provide you with little groups that you can join. You have to find people to connect with some other way. So that’s why I started the zine. Phew. You still with me?
DT: Definitely.
DH: So, no — in college, I didn’t really know Muppet fans, but I knew gay people, so that’s kind of the same thing.
DT: I love the metaphor of buying the toys and going to the gay group meetings at the same time.
DH: Yeah, it didn’t strike me at the time. It seems obvious now.
DT: I didn’t have the issues with my sexuality, but I had a similar experience in grade and high school as far as being That Kid goes.
DH: You were That Muppet Kid? Or another species of That Kid?
DT: My second grade teacher sent notes home because I was signing my test papers “Peter Parker” and “Luke Skywalker.”
DH: Ohhhh, you were THAT Kid.
DT: I was another species. I don’t think we had That Muppet Kid. I was only THAT Kid for a year, I toned it down a little bit eventually. But I was always a bit of an outsider, and any attempt to blend in usually failed miserably.
DH: Yeah, I was never that successful at the toning down. Now I’ve got Muppets, like, on the door of my office. It’s still a thing.
DT: High school I careened back and forth between playing up the eccentricity and trying to be ‘normal.’
DH: It’s always a mistake, trying to be normal, isn’t it? It doesn’t fool anyone, and it makes you unhappy.
DT: Then I went away to college, figured I had a chance to really recreate myself anew, and I realized I could function in social groups and still be That Fan Guy.
DH: And then after a while you discover that there are social groups that are *about* being That Fan Guy. And then you’re home free from then on.
DT: Yeah. I think both are fun. You can really immerse yourself with fellow fans, poring over the nitty gritty details. And every now and then I can be ambassador to the non-fan people when they need some bit of information.
DH: Right. I think having your own fan space is important, just for your self-esteem. A place where you don’t have to apologize for the stuff that you love.
DT: And once you have that, there’s much less of a need to apologize to anyone else. By the time I was a junior, I was like, “Yeah, there’s a picture of Yoda above my desk. Got a problem with that?”
DH: Exactly. You need a little home space, and then you can function better everywhere.
DT: Of course, one of the interesting things then becomes watching the different fan groups interact with and form opinions of each other.
DH: Yeah, and seeing where they overlap.
DT: That Frank Oz fellow was handy for me when I started dipping my toe into the Muppet waters.
DH: What, that he was Yoda?
DT: Yeah, there’s a ready-made appreciation for puppeteering and Oz’s performance skill that comes from being immersed in Star Wars fandom.
DH: Excellent. Plus, you already like Fozzie Bear’s voice. Or Grover’s, rather. He’s more Grover.
DT: Yeah. I was reading Monster at the End of This Book to my daughter, and my wife and my sister-in-law both said, “You sound like Yoda.” My wife, bless her, immediately realized the humor in that.
DH: Oh, that is so cute. What if the Monster at the end of the book really was Yoda? That would be a surprise. All these years, it turns out to be Yoda.
DT: And you thought the grammar police went after Elmo for the personal pronouns thing.
DH: Yeah, that’s something that a lot of Frank’s characters do. Yoda, Cookie Monster… You’re right, that’s a nice bridge between the Star Wars people and the Muppet people.
DT: Not everyone necessarily crosses it, though. I remember one week, I was reading a message board for the Star Wars comics, and it had evolved into another continuity discussion. Someone posted “You don’t see Muppet fans trying to figure out how The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan fit together, do you?” And meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself, “I just saw someone on Tough Pigs trying to do just that . . .”
DH: Ha, yeah. Although it’s true that Muppet fans tend not to get too hung up in continuity. The sane ones, anyway. The Muppets pretty much resist any attempt to pin them down, which is one of the things I like about them. They don’t worry about whether what they’re doing now fits in with what they did ten years ago. If it’s funny, they do it.
DT: I think that’s in part because the appeal of the Muppets is the characters, more than any particular plot line.
DH: Right. Also, they don’t care. It’s partly that they’re a comedy thing, so they don’t have to take themselves too seriously. As they do in serious important dramas like Star Trek and Doctor Who.
DT: I ain’t touching that one.
DH: Right. Me neither. What’s next?
DT: I wonder sometimes, if the comedy and the perceived kid’s-show nature let the Muppet writers do some experimenting. I mean, The Muppet Movie is apparently a movie about the Muppets watching the movie they made about how they met and made a movie about how they met.
DH: Right. Exactly. It’s funny because it’s true; it’s true because it’s funny.
DT: I could sit here and try and work that out with tables and graphs, or I can repeat to myself, it’s just a movie, I should really just relax.
DH: Yeah.
DT: But there’s also a middle point, where you can appreciate the creativity and the fact that the writers and performers are saying “Hey, who says there have to be rules?”
DH: Well, there are rules. The rule is that people have to enjoy it, which is the basic rule of storytelling. If people don’t enjoy it, they go do something else, and the storyteller dies of starvation. That’s the natural selection of storytelling.
DT: Or applies for a government grant.
DH: Or writes Ben Stiller movies. It’s very complex. Was this an interview at some point? I want a new question. We’ve been doing this for a while, and I think I still just graduated from college.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.