Muppet*Vision 3D Receives a Suitably Silly Send-Off

It’s time to cut the music. It’s time to dim the lights. On Saturday, June 7, Muppet*Vision 3D ends its 34-year standing engagement at Walt Disney World. The significance of this theme-park attraction featuring a 3-D movie along with live special effects and animatronics can’t be overstated: It’s Jim Henson’s last major work that he directed and performed in, a testament to an era of classic Imagineering craftsmanship, entertainment with a rare-to-come-by-’round-those-parts sense of humor, and the only place on earth you could go and actually sit in a theater with Statler and Waldorf heckling from the box seats. But under the leadership of Bob Iger and Parks czar Josh D’Amaro, the entire Muppets area of Disney’s Hollywood Studios must make way for progress in the form of a land themed to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc.

Muppet*Vision 3D’s impending closure has stirred all kinds of emotions in fans, and no one has channeled them quite like Andrew Barth Feldman. The Jimmy Award winner, No Hard Feelings star, Saturday Night scene-stealer, and former Evan Hansen is also a noted Muppet Adult (a corporate subsidiary of Disney Adults) and all-around Disney theme-park head (his Disney Cruise boys’ trip with Joshua Bassett is a must-watch for fans of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series). On Saturday, May 31 — one week ’til D-day — he released “Thank You, Muppet*Vision 3D,” a silly and sentimental music-video send-off to the attraction featuring tons of Easter eggs for fans, a derpy Kermit, and the most haunting lyrics this side of Charlie Puth’s hook on “See You Again.” He talked us through this insanely committed act of fandom, why Jason Segel’s Muppets reboot might be one of the best movies ever, and how to deal with the inherently goofy but still-real grief of losing a piece of pop culture you love.

What came first: your Muppet fandom or your first time at Muppet*Vision?
I went to Walt Disney World for the first time when I was 2 months old, so I think my first introduction to the Muppets was Muppet*Vision 3D. But as much as my family is a Disney household, we really are also a Muppet household. We will still regularly put on episodes of Muppets Tonight. I was born in 2002, and the next youngest to me, my brother Matt, is nine years older than me. So that ’90s, early-2000s era was the media that I grew up consuming, even though it had already passed me by. During COVID, we watched every episode of Muppets Now. My favorite movie, period, is The Muppets 2011. I think that movie is perfect. I will watch it anytime. So the Muppets are a massive influence for me in everything that I do.

Right now, it feels like Disney, or maybe culture at large, doesn’t know what to do with the Muppets. Why do you think that is?
Muppets have always been countercultural, and Disney is the culture. It’s really hard to find something within that that can abide by the rules of the larger parent company but still be countercultural.

The Muppet Show was parodying a format that doesn’t exist anymore. How do you translate that? They tried to do it with Muppets Now in a more bite-size, TikTok style. The ABC show did a similar thing, doing an Office-style docuseries. But the Muppets were made for a format that doesn’t exist, so to try to translate them is really hard. Which again gets back to The Muppets 2011, which doesn’t try to translate them to a new format but references the old format that made them so beloved. It’s about coming back to that format, and how it doesn’t exist anymore.

I don’t know what the solution is, necessarily. I think it’s to continue making things inspired by the Muppets, because the beating heart of it is creativity, zaniness, and chaos, and there are so many people in so many art forms, puppetry and otherwise, who grew up with that in their DNA, myself included. I don’t know what to do with Kermit and his friends, but I’m glad that they’re not dead and never will die.

To someone who’s seen your video but hasn’t seen Muppet*Vision 3D, what is it about this attraction that makes it so special to you?
Personally, my brother and I can recite the entirety of the pre-show and the show itself, and we often speak to each other through quotes from it. It’s a huge bonding point for us, which is so much of why it’s so personal to me, and he’s so much of the reason why I love it. As for the larger context of Muppet*Vision 3D, it was the last film Jim Henson ever worked on. And in terms of the Muppets parodying and interacting with a format, it is case-in-point of that. They’re making fun of the 3D movie in a theme-park format.

I want to be very clear about this, though: This video, and my feelings about it, are not saying that it should not close. These are all difficult decisions that have to be made far above my pay grade. And things change; things die. That’s especially hard for fans of this thing, where we imagine taking our kids to these attractions. We want the experience we pass down to be the same, but it’s going to be different. Muppet*Vision 3D will always live in our hearts.

This draws an interesting parallel to theater, where you work on a show, you build a whole world, and you know it has an end date. It’s ephemeral. Do you think working in theater made you uniquely prepared for this show closing?
One hundred percent. And also, I have always felt this deep connection between theme parks, specifically the Disney parks, and theater. Disney is theater: Things close, they come back, they go on Disney+.

What made you want to write this song and film a whole music-video tribute to Muppet*Vision?
I would have felt unfulfilled if I didn’t at least take part in something to memorialize the attraction. I’ve been sort of surprised at how earnestly it’s been taken by some people. This is a true grieving process that we have to go through, and I want it to be acknowledged as such, as opposed to something that is fought or resisted.

The lyric “Change only hurts if we’ve loved enough first” is gorgeous, and so surprising in the context of a very silly, funny video.
That, to me, is the funniest kind of joke: putting a lot of intellectual and emotional effort into something that seemingly shouldn’t exist.

Do you think of that as a Muppet-ish artistic instinct?
Absolutely, which is why this felt so congruent with Muppet*Vision 3D itself. There’s no reason for it to exist except to open an emotional pathway that otherwise wouldn’t have been open for something, where you maybe would’ve read an article about it closing and go, I went on that once. I wanted to mark the moment, even though the moment didn’t necessarily need to be marked. That’s the Muppets.

Tell me about the process of filming the scenes in the park. Did people recognize you? Was it hard to film in the attraction?
The funniest part is no, not at all. Nobody cared. I feel like I get recognized most in Disney World by cast members, which is always really nice. Filming in the theater, I just had my brother sit in the row in front of me. It was all very easy to do, very silly. I knew I wanted CGI Kermit at the end. I knew I wanted shots of Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster. I had already written the song, so it was just kind of a fun day with my brother and [Defunctland creator] Kevin Perjurer, who joined us on that afternoon to help out.

How do you know Kevin?
I did a show called Park Map a few years ago at 54 Below, which was my solo show about becoming an adult and accepting the identity of a Disney adult. It was basically a one-man Disney-adult manifesto. I connected with Kevin on Twitter because I have always been a huge fan of what he makes. His work is so artful and so smart, and I asked him if he would be my consultant to make sure that all of the Disney facts that I had in Park Map were accurate. So we connected on that, and we’ve started a number of projects in the years since and become really good friends. He was already hanging out with us on the day we were filming it, so I sort of pitched the video to him and then I was like, “I have this idea for CGI Kermit. I have these storyboards for what I want it to be. Do you think this should exist? And do you think you could do it?” He was like, “It won’t be very good.” And I was like, “That’s what I want.”

I love that weird little CGI Kermit.
Any thought that this was exclusively earnest melts away at CGI Kermit, who is a little upsetting to see, but also maybe sort of heartwarming.

How long did this take, from writing the song to Kevin’s animation?
The idea started germinating when it was announced that Muppet*Vision was closing, so that was around November, and I finished the whole song by January. Most of the heavy lifting happened in the last two-and-a-half weeks, but I had begun to edit and color the video from January when we filmed the stuff in Disney World, and figured out what else we needed storyboarded, the CGI stuff.

Something you touch on in your song is that Disney has announced that its moving the Muppets into Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster. What are your thoughts on that?
Here’s how I think this can work: In talking about Muppets parodying a format, let’s have them parody the format of Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster, which is featuring music and musicians. If you rotate who the musician is at the center of the Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster, you have them film a little thing with the Muppets every couple of months, maybe even a few artists at a time. You’re not sure who you’re going to get. That way, the Muppets are sort of a host in the way that they traditionally were on The Muppet Show, to another outside musical artist.

To me, this feels more connected to what the attraction is really built for than using Electric Mayhem or Muppets music. You get to feature Kermit and the gang interviewing whoever these artists are. The Muppets are best when they’re interacting with people — play with that! And we definitely need figures of the Electric Mayhem playing you into the launch. Aerosmith has been dated for so long, so anchor the ride to the Muppets, who will always be alive, and rotate in Olivia Rodrigo or someone every six months. That’s how I think you should do it.

Has anyone reached out to you about your music video, either from Muppets or Disney?
The official Muppets Instagram account commented on the video. That’s pretty big for me. It’s only been two days since I posted it, but it’s been a lot of cast members reacting, which, again, is exactly who I made this for. I wanted this to be shared in cast-member group chats and played in the utilidor for each other. That’s my dream for this.

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