In March 2008, Variety magazine reported that Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller had approached Disney with intentions to develop a script for a new Muppets movie project¹. The combination of Segel and Soller, backing from Jim Henson Studios and a $45 million budget assured the project a heavy market impact. Upon its release in 2012, The Muppets enjoyed critical acclaim and commercial success in equal measures. The film grossed a respectable $159 million at the box-office, reaffirming The Muppets as a bankable mainstream draw.

Witnessing a movie franchise wither from blockbuster supremacy into the straight-to-television ghetto is a humiliating affair. The declining quality of the Friday the 13th films, for example, transcends the boundaries of rational understanding to such a degree that the series now seems to somehow exhibit many of the central tenets of the abstract concept of existential absurdity and the bleak inevitability of formless oblivion. When the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) screened The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz in 2005, Jim Henson Pictures had been looking a bit Samuel Beckett for a quite a few years.

Expanding on G. K. Chesterton’s defence of trashy Detective Stories, George Orwell defined a “Good Bad Book” as:

“…the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished…the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration².”

Granting a similarly open-minded pardon to The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz unearths a wealth of redeeming – although not immediately apparent – virtues. The premise is simple: it’s the Wizard of Oz with Muppets! Kermit is the Scarecrow, Fozzie Bear the Lion and Gonzo the Tinman. Taking instruction from the 1939 cinematic version of the L. Frank Baum children’s novel, the story follows Dorothy – played by singer/songwriter Ashanti – on her adventures along the lutescently glossed walkways of Oz.

The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz is nobody’s finest hour; the sets are shoddy, the performances stilted and the soundtrack abysmal. Nonetheless, the moment that green frog and his comrades appear on screen, all judgements are suspended and indiscretions forgiven. Especially when one considers that there is no understandable reason as to why The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz exists in the first place. Yet, here the creature breathes. The whole enterprise revels in its own pointlessness, radiating the comfortingly unassuming and self aware whimsy that has come to define the Henson brand.

Appearances from Jeffrey ‘Arrested Development’ Tambor, David Alan Grier and a genuinely unnerving cameo from Quentin Tarantino add further cult credibility to this harmless attempt at filmmaking. If nothing else, The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz is the perfect Saturday afternoon waster for anyone recovering from a night of heavy drinking or needing an hour of quiet from the kids.

In a tweet: The Muppets Wizard of Oz is a good bad movie interpretation of a quite good book.