Best Muppet Film

[That Announcer]

I do love the Monkees and James Frawley, although I still think that Brian is a better director. Frawley's directorial style was better suited to on-the-fly setups for something like The Monkees rather than ten-minute-setup shots like TMM. I think another reason that Brian was such a good director was that he, combined with Jerry Juhl, made sure that the characters didn't fall into self-parody. It is unfortunate that they were made into other characters to serve the purpose, but it seemed to work. Immediately, you will notice, after Brian stopped directing and Juhl took a break (soon after this he retired), the worst non-DTV Muppet movie ever made came out, MFS. I will always stand up for Brian, and demand that he directs another Muppet theatrical movie- I'm sick of telefilms.

 

[DerekJ]

I do love the Monkees and James Frawley, although I still think that Brian is a better director. Frawley's directorial style was better suited to on-the-fly setups for something like The Monkees rather than ten-minute-setup shots like TMM.

Frawley was picked for TMM on the basis that he was used to improv actors (like the Monkees, for ex.), and good at channeling the ad-lib energy into looser scripts, which certainly applied to Jim & Frank & Co.

...The added bonus, of course, was that nobody else could do incredibly bad Muppet-style jokes quite as well as his earlier job.

I think another reason that Brian was such a good director was that he, combined with Jerry Juhl, made sure that the characters didn't fall into self-parody. It is unfortunate that they were made into other characters to serve the purpose, but it seemed to work. Immediately, you will notice, after Brian stopped directing and Juhl took a break (soon after this he retired), the worst non-DTV Muppet movie ever made came out, MFS. I will always stand up for Brian, and demand that he directs another Muppet theatrical movie- I'm sick of telefilms.

Again, like the Muppet Oz, MFS came solely out of the fact that Columbia/Tri-Star and the German company had bought the Muppets, and, giddy over their new purchase, immediately commanded the golden goose to start laying eggs again--
(Well, it laid an egg, all right...)

Juhl's credited as a writer on MFS, but I suspect more along the lines of an early-draft script that had too many cooks in the production:
The story's so bizarrely empty, you almost suspect that he'd originally written a more Hensonish Pigs-in-Space-style "Muppets IN Space", there was some script/rights problem with title ownership, and the studio scrambled new writers to come up with some excusable plot concept that would legally fit "Muppets FROM Space"...
(I'm only theorizing here, and not sure if that's what actually happened, but if any history buffs can back me up on this one, I'd be grateful.)

...As the overbearingly retro-snotty VMC proved, without Juhl's old-school spirit, the whole empire came crashing down--
The new kids today weren't there, and just don't understand.

 

[That Announcer]

I somewhere (I think in the MC news archives) read that Kirk Thatcher wrote a script entitled Muppets In Space, and that Juhl wrote Muppets From Space. Kirk's script was biffed and Jerry's was given the go-ahead; then, that little devil Joey Mazzarino altered it heavily enough to kill it.