I have been a fan of almost everything Henson and Oz (and others, of course) have done throughout my lifetime but that doesn't mean that I just get excited about all of them. In the course of watching The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and every single Muppet film that has ever been made I've fallen in love with so many of their whimsical creations. Well, almost all of them. Here are a few of the characters over the years that I didn't like and thought got more airtime than I would have preferred.
Big Bird
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Just like everything else on this list it might surprise some people that I included any of these treasured characters on here at all but Big Bird never did it for me and the reasons are multiple. For one thing, almost all of the puppets in the Muppets' repertoire are smaller than humans and Big Bird isn't just much larger than all of them, he is bigger than all of the humans on the show. While I can admire how difficult it must have been to get the mouth to work and to also be moving around inside the suit, it just seemed out of place to me.
I suspect that BB was used so prominently in Sesame Street because of the fact that they didn't need to construct a backdrop in order to conceal the puppeteers and he (is Big Bird a boy or a girl?) could meander from one scene to another with far less difficulty than the others.
I also found Big Bird to be rather humorless and I still feel that way today. While his cohorts on the show were often silly BB seemed to be the butt of the jokes rather than the instigator. He was just boring IMO.
Scooter
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My disdain for Scooter is a little different than Big Bird and as far as I know Scooter didn't actually appear on Sesame Street at all but was a backstage manager at the Muppet Show and rarely appeared on the "stage."
A little known fact because it happened so long ago but Scooter's original persona was one of being overbearing and would get his way as far as the running was concerned because his family owned the theater. His overruling of the overall consensus of the other characters involved in the performance would almost always go wrong and there was normally some sort of story built in about how being a bully just because you are rich is not a good idea. This idea was scrapped by the 80's.
Scooter rarely did anything funny but was rather the stoic and serious backstage manager who was obsessed with timelines and what not and would try, mostly in vain, to get things organized. Perhaps I didn't like him because he seemed like too much of a parent-like authority figure who was always shutting down the fun.
Later on Muppet Babies he would take on the role of being a hyper intelligent baby that would be a problem solver whenever the babies encountered one. I also didn't like him character in that.
Abby Cadabby
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Abby wasn't introduced until I was already "way too old" to be watching Sesame Street (you are never too old to watch The Muppets) and I didn't have much exposure to her but her voice and enthusiasm just really didn't appeal to me at all. She is as spunky and well-spoken counterpart to the wildly popular Elmo character and it seemed as though that was exactly the intention.
After being annoyed by a couple of numbers that she was involved in I looked into it and found out that the character was introduced in an attempt to have a major female character and also to introduce children to the acceptance of other cultures even though her "culture" is simply that she is a fairy who is living outside of fairly land on an exchange program of some sort. Hopefully the exchange involved sending Scooter away for a while.
She also has a catch-phrase that she uses all the time. In every bit that she is in you can be guaranteed that at some point she is going to say "That's so magical!" and while that may appeal to someone who is 5 years old, it is annoying to me. Maybe I am just being a grumpy old man
The merchandising paid off for PBS or whoever makes the toys though because during xmas season her dolls are featured right next to Elmo's and I presume they sell a lot of them.
So what do you think? Are there any Muppets out there that just rubbed you the wrong way? Perhaps later I will focus more on what my favorites are so I can stop being so negative. After all, children's programming is supposed to be entirely positive, right?