How the Muppets Made Me Media Literate (& Why I am Psyched for their Return to TV this Fall)

The Muppet Show is back this fall in primetime on network TV and poised to call our attention to all the media production techniques our current popular sitcoms use to make us laugh and reinforce our notions of personal and cultural identity:

The original Muppet Show was appointment TV every week for my family in the late 70s, but it wasn't until this particular moment (below) in The Muppet Movie that I realized how those fuzzy puppets had been teaching me all along about the construction of media and representation of culture and identity. Use this post to prompt the following questions:

• How did you become media literate? 
• What popular media supported your media literacy development?
• How does parody call attention to media techniques and representations? 

In anticipation of the return of The Muppets to primetime network TV this fall, I reflect on this pivotal personal moment of critical distance, and discuss why parody in puppetry can be effective for media literacy development, as the new version of the show plans to lampoon confessional-style sitcoms like The Office and Modern Family while using the format of TV production sitcoms like 30 Rock that call attention to the making of a late night comedy show.

But first, let's set the scene. A darkened movie theater in Baltimore, 1979, I was six years old, and completely enthralled in the journey of Kermit the Frog (and his "weirdo" friends) to Hollywood with their goal of "making millions of people happy" and the love story between Kermit & Ms. Piggy that had unfolded over the past 45 minutes, which was falling apart before my eyes on the screen. And then...

Aha! This is all a movie, and a movie made by the characters on screen, no less! My young mind was blown! At that moment, I had a flood of awareness about all the ways that the movies and shows I watched were made to tell stories to audiences. I noticed the people around me in the theater watching, just like the muppets on screen watched the movie they had made in the story on screen. For the first time, I wanted to make a movie myself--at that moment, one where Piggy and Kermit would just be friends and go play with the other muppets (because the romance was making me a little uncomfortable!).

Parody Pulls Back the Curtain

This moment was the key for me that unlocked the constructed-ness of many other shows and movies, starting with the original Muppet Show, which was a parody of the most popular TV format of the 1970s, the variety show, but it offered backstage scenes of the producer (Kermit) and cast with audience commentary (remember the two old guys, Statler and Waldorf, wisecracking in the balcony, and the call and response moment in the opening theme song with the audience singing, "Why don't you get things started"). I began to see how the muppets were always making fun of how entertainment was made, always showing the seams in the otherwise seamless media representations in which TV and movies immersed me. Whether by singing slightly off key or subverting my expectations (like Gonzo's failed trumpet blast to start every show), the muppets always called my attention to my own expectations about how stories should unfold and I started to realize that those parodied TV shows and movies created those expectations, and that you could play with them and do things differently. I started to see how everything that the muppets did was making fun of popular culture, which I often encountered for the first time through their comedy. I think this had the effect of making me see everything as made by someone for some purpose, and that the purpose could be subverted or changed--and that subversion is fun!

[After the jump, more on pop culture parody as provocateur of critical autonomy, how the muppets made me question notions of race and gender, and ideas for making puppet parodies for ML]

Muppets Meta-Mock Instagram

How would you categorize these Muppets Instagram images?
 clockwise from top left: Swedish Chef selfie; invading Beeker's privacy; found sight gag of Gonzo; pranking Zoot with the old banana in the horn

Among my fondest early media literacy experiences was sitting in a theater watching the first Muppet Movie when the film appeared to break apart and get replaced by a scene of the muppets in a theater watching the film they had made break and complaining about the projection error. To promote the latest movie to the millennial generation, the Muppets have an Instagram site pulling the same tricks--making you laugh while seeing the construction of the stuff you enjoy. The site is a genre study of Instagram images--selfies, sight gags, photo bombs, ad remixes, celebrity shots, privacy invasions, etc. It's worth talking about for kids to explore and discover the unwritten, unspoken rules and categories that emerge, like a grammar in their social media just as in any other communications. Ask: What are the categories of images? Do you see commonly these types of pictures on Instagram sites of friends, celebrities, others? What do you notice about the production values of the images?

Playful marketing? Or, do the Muppets have "Evil Plans" to co-opt your authenticity in social media?

About half of the shots look like ads of different genres/styles with professional production; the kind of stuff a fan might forward to friends with excitement about a new release. The other half look like amateur shots, suggesting the idea that the muppets themselves took them. The attention to detail given to the amateur, "real" look of many of the images--poor framing, blurred exposures, low resolution--is quite remarkable. It's a nice clear example of mass media taking up the spontaneous aesthetics of grassroots media with calculated precision in order to sell back to the masses a familiar style. That makes this site a funny way learn about how big entertainment and marketing companies use emerging structures of communication as well as a way to examine how genres, codes and conventions structure our personal uses of social media.
[inspired by Steph Harmon at Junkee; activity ideas after the jump]

Blog Recommends Opinion Essay Satire for Learning about Opinion Essays

Why do we share opinions on the Internet? Why use an opinion essay form? What does the style in terms of opening or closing down dialogue? Are we speaking to the choir, or reinforcing like minds among readers? Engaging opposing views or convincing the uninitiated? Or just venting? What elements of an opinion essay are effective for whom?

Continuing the meta-humor theme from Brooker's, "How to Report the News," from our previous post, today here's a bit from the opening of Edward Sharp-Paul's satire, "An Opinion Piece on a Controversial Topic":

No doubt you will have noticed that Issue has been in the news lately, due to the scandalous behaviour of Public Figure, and the controversial comments of Publicity-Hungry Commentator. The editor of this site and I were discussing the Issue just the other day, and we agreed that making a glib reference to that discussion at the start of this piece would add a sense of authority to my authorial voice, as well as suggesting that the site upon which this piece is being published shares my opinionated stance on this Issue. 

I was inspired to write this piece by Currently Fashionable Polemicist, who summarised the Issue better than I could when they said “oversimplification that makes me feel smart”. I have a strong opinion on this Issue, and my sharing it with you at this time is in no way attributable to opportunism on my part, due to the Issue’s sudden prominence in the news cycle.

Sharp's essay makes a perfect introduction to news-related opinion or argumentative essays for English or other writing classes (advanced high school/ introductory college).

Blog Recommends Satire of TV News Segment for Learning about TV News Segments

Why is it funny to reveal the conventions of storytelling and reporting in local TV news in a local news style? Is TV news format absurd? Ridiculous? Inane? Or, does the humor come from seeing something so familiar stripped down to the bare bones of its rules and internal logic without the narrative and connection to reality? This clip from Charlie Brooker's brilliant 2010 BBC4 Newswipe series, a show designed to reveal the inner workings of television news, presents us with a fun way to learn the typical techniques used in local TV news segment.



The obvious application here is to support learning conventions and techniques in TV news. Simply taking notes from the video would make a nice introduction to local news format. That could be a springboard to analyzing the techniques of other news broadcasts to compare to Brooker's satire.