Disney+ is about to play the music for Muppet fans: All five seasons of The Muppet Show are finally heading to Disney’s streaming service on Feb. 19.
The arrival of The Muppet Show, an off-the-wall variety show filled with celebrity guests that aired from 1976 to 1981, has been a long time coming.
The Muppets’ official Twitter account first teased the arrival late last week, leaving fans to guess what the announcement could possibly be.
Although Disney acquired the rights to the Muppets in 2004 and several collaborations with the Muppets became available to stream when Disney+ first launched in November 2019, its Muppet curation has always felt incomplete. Sure, you might’ve been able to stream films like The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Muppet Christmas Carol, the short-lived ABC mockumentary series, and the two films Disney made since the acquisition of the Muppets (among others).
The biggest lapse in Disney+’s Muppet collection has always been The Muppet Show, which boasted over 100 episodes. For more than a year, the question of would The Muppet Show ever stream on Disney+ lingered, and while no clear answers were ever given, some believed that music clearances were the main issue.
And The Muppet Show’s Disney+ debut also marks another first: It’s the first time that the show’s fourth and fifth seasons—which were never given a home release—will be available for viewers.
“It’s going to be great to welcome back longtime fans, and to give a new generation of fans a chance to see how we got our start, how Miss Piggy became a star and so much more,” said Kermit the Frog in a statement. “Today, I’m proud to say: ‘It’s time to play the music, light the lights and meet the Muppets on Disney Plus tonight!’ And as for Statler and Waldorf, the two old guys in the balcony, I can only add: ‘Sorry, guys, but….here we go again.”
Since the launch of Disney+, the streaming platform has already invested in the Muppets with Muppets Now, a series that shows the Muppets putting together their own webseries; at one point, a new Muppet series was even in development but was passed over by Disney+. But between the anticipation of the announcement, the outright fervor over The Muppets Show coming to Disney+, and how viral prompts of Muppet-themed movies go viral on Twitter, the Muppets could easily be a well that Disney taps into again soon.
H/T TVLine