Sesame Street recently got released on DVD with warning stickers about it possibly not being suitable for young children. I can’t help but think this troublesome production needs the same treatment – or at least a warning that the title could not be more ironic.

Okay, I know the Muppets probably have more appeal now for adults than children, but I’ve gotta say, aren’t the first 15 minutes of this movie a little too much hard work? Especially at Christmas? It’s downright surreal how this one starts, lol.

The whole thing just makes me feel a little sad for the Muppets. It starts with them having “lost everything” as Kermit moans, before flashing back through the eyes of God to show how it happened. In an attempt to pay back a debt, we see Kermit calling his old celebrity friends to come and help. We see a handful of B-Lister cameos in split screen, but the big names … Madonna, Schwartzennegger, Connery, even some smaller ones you’d really expect would be happy to be seen alongside Kermit and co., are offscreen and they all say no and it’s all too believable. Early on a snowman is accused of being a Burl Ives wannabe, and they couldn’t even get Steve Irwin so we get the worst scene in the movie featuring a bad impersonator (“Safari Animal Tracker” in the credits).

Sure, the support cast featuring Joan Cusack (being really quite disturbingly evil), David Arquette, and Whoopi Goldberg ain’t bad compared to, say, their Wizard of Oz … but it can’t hope to compare to the good old days and I really don’t know how younger kids, the only people who might enjoy this, would take the weirdly sincere drama of it all. There’s a scene where Kermit happens upon a statue of himself dancing with 2 children, with a plaque dedication, “To the lovers, the dreamers, and you” and it’s a heartbreakingly harsh comment on how the mighty have fallen (this is, afterall, a TV movie). Later, the movie “does” It’s a Wonderful Life, and in the world where Kermit was never born, network television has been overrun by reality television. Yah-huh, hard to believe, right? Which kind of implies that even in the world where Kermit very much did live and still lives as evidenced by this very movie, his work and the work of all the Muppets has been about as useful to culture as if they hadn’t bothered at all.

It earns a few points from me for plain being so surreal, leaving me sitting at the end agape on the sofa wondering what the hell kind of depressing existentialist puppet show I just watched, pitying any parent who let their children watch it this Boxing Day, lol – and of course the Muppets themselves are all there and that in itself makes it watchable. The movie references are very well done, especially the Moulin Scrooge sequence. Really, there is a lot to like here … it just really doesn’t add up to much in the end, and I personally found it far too transparently bitter for Christmas.