Jim Henson’s Cheap Cash-In Babies

It wasn’t new in the ‘80s. Still, in 1984, the Muppets launched a trend. In The Muppets Take Manhattan, Piggy has a flashback sequence where she imagines herself, Kermit, and various of the others as babies. Barely two months later, a TV show debuted that my sisters and I would watch faithfully for years, with Kermit, Piggy, and various of the others (plus a new Muppet named Skeeter, Scooter’s sister, so there would be a second girl even though Janice was right there) as babies. And for five or ten years, everyone was made into babies, or at least children, whether it made the slightest bit of canonical sense or not.

Well, again, not new. Superboy dates back to the ‘50s, after all. There may be older versions. There’s just something people find appealing about not just a backstory but a whole childhood universe. For all we know there were ancient Greeks telling one another stories about young Hercules, which was doubtless extremely different from the version we actually got very briefly in the late ‘90s starring Ryan Gosling. (The things I learn doing research.) Maybe it’s even older than that—the newest thing coming to ancient Sumeria, Li’l Gilgamesh and His Pals.

But friends, the ‘80s were such a special time that I have trained my children to say “cocaine is a hell of a drug” in answer to pretty well all questions about the pop culture of my childhood. Creativity was different then, and one of the ways it manifested was in not being there and instead by running things into the ground. So we started with Muppet Babies and kept going. If Muppet Babies can run for eight seasons and win multiple Emmys, why not Flintstone Kids?

If you’re thinking, “Because that sounds terrible,” well spotted. A Pup Named Scooby-Doo at least had the interesting difference of not taking its own tropes seriously, The New Archies was just Archie and his friends in junior high instead of high school. Sweet Valley Twins was Sweet Valley High in junior high. How old are the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi? Doesn’t matter! They’re kids now—in animation form! To tie in with our long-ago discussion of “why is this a cartoon?” is Little Rosey, an animated version of Roseanne but with kids.

Basically the idea seemed to be that any character could be a child, especially if they were an animated child. James Bond? Sure, throw in his nephew and he’s James Bond, Junior. (Don’t. Just don’t get into the rules about “junior.” You’ll be happier.) Robin Hood. Tom and Jerry, in a “what age are they usually?” version. Yo Yogi, because what Yogi Bear needed was a hip, fresh version where they’re teenagers at a mall, right? We were swarming in these for, well, about as long as Muppet Babies was on the air. You could even have Cabbage Patch Preemie dolls.

It’s never truly gone away. Yes, you would get the odd future Oscar nominee somehow stuck playing the teenage version of an actor he does not in so many words resemble. Gotham is not a dissimilar concept to The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles or Young Sherlock Holmes. No, its universe doesn’t entirely make sense extended into the one you know. Shut up. Don’t worry about it. You really want to see Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys as kids, right? Of course you do!

It’s strange that the pop culture landscape in those days was so varied and yet so cookie-cutter. Yes, I grew up in a time when you could get Muppet Babies followed by Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling. Yes, that was a real show. But the very next season you’d have to make a choice between Muppet Babies on CBS and Flinstones Kids on ABC. And that’s the season Pee Wee’s Playhouse debuted. So much whiplash. So many child characters for no good reason. At least they never seemed to have considered Rambo Babies.