Meet the Feebles

Heidi Hippo's rampage in Meet the Feebles

Director Peter Jackson with a couple of Meet the Feebles puppets.

Meet the Feebles is an adult, initially unrated 1989 all-puppet film directed by Peter Jackson. The film, whose title is loosely taken from a line in The Muppet Show theme song, focuses on the backstage activities of a motley animal theater troupe preparing a variety show, much like The Muppet Show. Unlike the Muppet Show, the performers' eccentricities extend to pornography, sexual perversions, drug use, and gang warfare, and acts include a knife thrower with Vietnam flashbacks and a musical salute to sodomy.

The plot follows the troupe as they prepare their first television pilot in the hopes of landing a lucrative syndicated series (a reference to The Muppet Show's success following Lew Grade's backing). The troupe's star, the obese but sensual Heidi Hippo, is a manic-depressive parody of Miss Piggy, and like Piggy, is in love with the producer. Producer Bletch, unlike Kermit, is a lewd walrus who is operating a drug ring and having an affair with a Siamese cat. Various subplots culminate in the jilted Heidi going on a bloody machine gun rampage and slaughtering the majority of the cast. While Jim Henson was not averse to extreme Muppet violence (see Wilkins and Wontkins), Jackson takes it further in a tour de force of puppet bloodletting.

One scene depicts the rabbit character Harry praying to a religious icon which bears a striking resemblance to Kermit the Frog.

References

• When Peter Jackson arrives in The Muppets Mayhem episode "Eight Days a Week," Floyd Pepper says he hasn't seen him since that night in Wellington "when we met the Feebles." The comment elicits collective shuddering sounds by the rest of the band and Jackson acknowledging it was a bad night: "Two of the Feebles are in witness protection, and the rest are in prison." The line was an ad-lib by Jackson.