From That Kid to Tough Pig – Part 2
More of Dave’s conversation with Tough Pigs editor Danny Horn:
DT: Well, I was going to ask you what motivated you to attach a forum to your webzine, but I think you already answered that one.
DH: Well, there have been some other places for people to gather over the years, but I wasn’t happy with any of them. I was on the Muppet newsgroup for a long time, that’s where I first met a lot of the people that I still hang out with. But newsgroups were kind of the Wild West; they were the lawless frontier. Full of trolls and crazies and cattle rustlers.
DT: Yeah, I’ve generally steered clear of unmoderated newsgroups for a while. And even with moderated groups and message boards, finding the right tone can be a challenge.
DH: Well, you have to be able to moderate well. It’s a skill, and it’s not easy to do it well. But in my opinion, you need some rules to make a group work well. Unless you want to keep fighting the cattle rustlers forever, and that gets old.
DT: In a hurry. It also helps to have that core group of people who feel comfortable with the tone you’re going for, and can keep things moving in that direction.
DH: Yeah. That happens naturally in a group, I think, that it develops in a particular direction.
DT: The Tough Pigs forum seems to reflect the same tone you go for in the webzine itself, so I imagine there’s some symbiosis there.
DH: To some degree. The site pulls in the kind of people who like the site. But it’s also because I run the forum with the same kind of attitude that I run the site.
DT: It works because it works.
DH: I guess. Yeah.
DT: Getting back into the way back machine for a second . . did the fanzine have the same tone and approach as the website, or did that evolve?
DH: It was pretty much the same. That’s how I talk. As you’re probably getting here, too. The site’s written a little better, because I’m older and a better writer. But the approach was definitely the same.
DT: So when you made the transition from print to web, where did Tough Pigs come from?
DH: The name? I wanted a name that I could own, that wouldn’t get me into legal trouble. MuppetZine wasn’t going to get me in trouble, because it was a tiny print run of 200, and nobody was going to care. But a website can be seen by anybody, so I didn’t know if Henson was going to have a problem with it at any point. So I gave it a name and a logo that was non-copyright infringing, just in case. Turns out they didn’t really care anyway. But they might now that Disney’s going to own the Muppets, so I’m glad I did it that way.
DT: Yeah, better safe than sorry. Beyond just the name, did you spend much time thinking about the sections or the layout of the site, or did you just let it go where it went?
DH: I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and then it’s changed about six times since I started. There were a few things that I definitely wanted when I started, that I’m still following through on: I wanted the homepage to be the news page, so people didn’t have to click on anything to get the news. And I wanted the structure to be as basic as possible so it wasn’t too hard to find things. Although that didn’t really work out too well, now that I think of it. I’m not a very good web designer, as it turns out.I spend more time working on content than I do taking care of my structure, so there’s like six big things that I want to fix that I haven’t gotten around to yet.
DT: You could easily spend forever on that stuff.
DH: And never write anything again.
DT: One thing I remember reading and appreciating on TP was your exhortation to just go out and do it, rather than try to put the Complete Encyclopedia of Whatever up right from the start.
DH: Yeah. People get so bogged down in trying to make their website perfect before they launch it that they never launch it. I’m comfortable with just posting a big mess of stuff, unfinished or not, and adding as I go.
DT: I think it fits with the site, even if it means I’ll be reading the end of My Week with The Muppet Show around the time my daughter graduates from college.
DH: Sure, if we’re lucky. Part of that is also my attention span. I want to work on whatever part of the site is interesting me at the moment. That way, it’ll always be a pleasure to work on, instead of a chore. As soon as I promise that I’ll do some big thing, it starts to be a chore. I’d rather do part of that now, and then something else for a while, and come back to it when I’m into it again. Like this week, that’s been the radio station.I’ve been doing a lot on that. Next week, it’ll be something else.
DT: I haven’t had a chance to listen to the radio station yet, I must confess.
DH: It’ll be fun when you do. Right now it’s full of Sesame Street monsters.
DT: Nothing wrong with that.
DH: Yeah, it’s fun. Are there more questions?
DT: I was gonna ask one more, just to try and bring things around a bit.
DH: Okay.
DT: What’s your sense of the state of the Muppets right now, as a fan? How much of your attention is focused on appreciating the stuff that originally made you a fan, and how much goes to what’s being done currently?
DH: Where the Muppets are right now, apparently, is being boxed up and shipped over to Disney. It’s an interesting moment. The Disney sale was announced last month, but the sale won’t be finalized until sometime next month. There’s a sense that this is the beginning of the next big chapter for the Muppets, and we don’t know whether it’s going to be good or bad. There was a 15-year period between Henson creating the Muppet Show characters until Henson died — 1976-1990. Then it’s been another 15-ish years that the Henson family has been trying to run the company without Jim — 1990-2004. Now, Disney owns the Muppets, so it’s, like, phase three. Phase two had a lot of ups and downs, so I think people are ready for whatever comes next.
DT: And the Sesame characters are in their own little world at this point.
DH: Right, Sesame Workshop owns them now. They’re doing great, and nothing will change for them.
DT: I wonder sometimes if maybe the current group of performers should try something like what Henson did with The Muppet Show – create a whole new generation of characters, and see where they can go.
DH: Well, they’ve done that in a bunch of different ways. Bear in the Big Blue House is the best example of a new Muppet franchise, a totally new group of characters. It’s been successful, and I love the characters. Bear’s at an interesting point right now — that show ran for four years on the Disney Channel, but the series ended. Now they’re working on a new series for direct-to-video that takes the characters out of the house, and into the real world. So we’ll see where that goes, if they have the power to exist for longer than just a four-year run.
It’s tough to start a new group of characters from scratch, though. It’s risky. There’s been a long history of concepts that they tried that never quite made it . . . Little Muppet Monsters, Mother Goose Stories, Bratz of the Lost Nebula, Animal Jam, Big Bag . . . People who aren’t Muppet fans won’t even recognize most of those names.
DT: Yeah. It just seems a shame to me at times that the current group of creators are always somehow expected to capture the same lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry and concepts that the original performers had. But to do something new would be to try and catch the lightning again, and how easy can that be?
DH: Right. I think it’s a little easier to take the characters that people already know, and try to evolve from there. The tough thing is finding the balance. When they made Muppets Tonight in 1996, I think people got turned off because Kermit wasn’t the host. The first couple episodes got good ratings, and then people just went away and never came back, because it wasn’t the characters that they knew. But if you take the basic family and add characters, then people can warm up to them, like Pepe. A show that was all about Pepe wouldn’t go over big, but including Pepe in with the familar characters makes him a fan favorite.
DT: It’s a tough nut to crack, now that so much of the potential audience is made up of people our age who want that reconnection with their childhood.
DH: On the up side, the performers that they have now are just amazing. Eric Jacobson is the new performer for a bunch of Frank Oz’s characters — Piggy, Fozzie, Grover, Bert — and he’s just fantastic. Jacobson’s Fozzie is a lot more like “the real Fozzie” than Frank Oz’s Fozzie was in the last ten years.
DT: I’m still getting the hang of Jacobson’s Bert, but I really like his Grover.
DH: I think he’s still getting the hang of Bert himself. His Grover is lovely.There’s a lot of really talented puppeteers who are working with the Muppets. The people who are starring on Broadway in Avenue Q are all Sesame Street performers. So the talent is there, as soon as they get all the business stuff under control. You asked about whether that makes a difference for Muppet fans, and I think it does. New productions and new merchandise gives us stuff to talk about. If the Muppets suddenly vanished tomorrow, we’d still have all the old stuff to enjoy, but it wouldn’t feel the same. I’m sure we’d go on. But it wouldn’t be as much fun.
DT: It seems like fandoms get themselves more and more wrapped up in the business and behind the scenes side of things these days as it is, for better and for worse.
DH: I think it’s for worse, myself. That’s the one thing I don’t like about the internet. I used to think that there was no such thing as too much information, but I think fans get too much access to behind the scenes stuff. It makes fans more likely to second-guess, to feel entitled to absolutely everything. The Henson folks on the whole have kept fans at some distance, which I now realize is a pretty good thing for both sides.
DT: The entitlement thing drives me nuts, especially when diehard fans don’t seem to realize that they’re such a small subset of the audience these things need to find.
DH: I think the entitlement comes from knowing so much, especially when something isn’t going well. It’s frustrating to know that there’s a problem, and not to have any power to fix it. So fans just get frustrated, and in groups, that can make them act a little nuts.
DT: But I think it’s also given the levelheaded fans a little more knowledge on how to support the things they care about. Like the Save Farscape folks exhorting people to buy DVDs and whatnot.
DH: I’m just not sure that has any power either.I mean, “buy the stuff” is the most basic rule of being an audience member. It’s a hard thing for fans, that the stuff that we love the most is run by people who aren’t us. It’s not your kid; you can’t protect it. You can just enjoy it, or not, and play with it, but you don’t own it. If you want to own something, you need to make your own show.
DT: And then you lose the ability to appreciate it as a fan. It’s always a tradeoff.
DH: Right. And I think the access to information gets some people mixed up. It’s kind of like the way guys act on a date, like if I listen to this person talk for long enough, then we get to have sex at the end of the date. Fans have heard so much about the ins and outs of the production that they feel like they should be able to run it themselves after a while. That analogy didn’t make sense. But anyway.
DT: It was a good try.
DH: Yeah, they don’t all work.
DT: I said I only had one more question. I didn’t mean to follow it up with so many declarative sentences.
DH: That’s okay. Is there anything else? Or did I just kill it with that analogy?
DT: You didn’t kill it – I could probably keep this going until you rue the day you ever heard of me. But I’ll hand the floor over to you for any closing comments.
DH: About the Muppets, or fandom, or Tough Pigs, or what?
DT: What, you can’t wrap all of that up into one pithy statement?
DH: I guess my pithy statement is that people need to come out as fans.
DT: That’s very good, I like that.
DH: Coming out is the greatest experience, no matter what you come out as — it helps you connect to other people who feel the same way that you do, and it makes you feel more authentic and connected to the world. Finding “your people” helps you live more comfortably in the rest of the world. The Muppets taught me that, with their own crazy families. They think different, and they live different. There’s a lesson in there. I think that’s pithy.
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.