out of curiosity, I searched around for more of these so called "10 Worst Muppets" lists, and the results made me very sad.
So far, out of the three lists i could find, Janice and Robin has made the list all three times.
Janice:
"Named for Janis Joplin and designed to bare the frame of Mick Jagger, Janice the Muppet is the valley girl guitar player in the band
Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem. She is freaky looking, not funny, and not the stereotypical guitar player that the band could have hired in her place. Imagine, instead, a Keith Richards-inspired Muppet instead of this blonde talentless airhead."
"Janice started out okay—a hyper-stylized Janis Joplin/Mick Jagger mash-up with a stereotypical valley-girl voice. Over the years she’s mutated into being particularly freakish; each design revision makes Janice look worse, and she’s contributed little more than her “fer sure, really!u201D catchphrase, which wasn’t really even funny in the late '80s when people would actually say that. What’s worse, the repeated changes to Janice’s look are obviously designed to transform her from a '70s rocker into an annoying pastel-colored '90s valley girl stereotype. "
"I'm sure we all know somebody that has an annoying voice, whether it's the tone or pitch of their voice or an accent like Fran Drescher's laugh or the accent of anybody in the movie Fargo. Janice is the Muppet Show character that represents those people. That voice just makes me want to punch myself in the ear because ringing would be better than hearing her voice."
Robin:
"Once one of the top social parody shows on television,
The Muppet Show actually was awful when Kermit’s nephew came on screen. Robin would have been fine for
Sesame Street and the Elmo-loving crowd, but there was no reason to shove this little ‘lovable’ amphibian down our throats on
The Muppet Show."
"Nobody’s going to argue that over the years the Muppets haven’t gradually lost a lot of the satirical and sarcastic edge they had in the '70s and '80s, and nobody is a better bellwether for that than Robin, Kermit the Frog’s nap-inducing, obnoxiously sincere nephew whose primary purpose is to kill time or sing some kind of bizarrely sugary song that seems out of place. The fact that Robin has never once appeared in a funny sketch and has always felt out of place among the rest of the show’s cast due to a total lack of sarcastic humor and yet has appeared more and more in films and television specials as the years have gone by definitely illustrate how obnoxious sincerity can completely destroy any notion of “edginess”. Remember, the Muppets were once considered cutting-edge enough to appear on
Saturday Night Live. Not so much anymore. Robin has to be at least partially to blame for that."
"Sadly, even The Muppet Show jumped the shark. Nope, one annoying little frog just wasn't enough. The Muppet Show had to bring in another frog to be Kermit's nephew. Couldn't they have at least made a relative of one of the good characters?"
Seriously? SERIOUSLY?