As Muppets Now debuts on Disney+, tracing the history and pop-culture influence of the characters

The structure of Muppets Now goes back to the early days, and taking a cue from the original Muppet Show. If this scene from Muppets Now feels manic and combustible — and even a bit familiar — that is by design: as Leigh Slaughter, vice president of the Muppets Studio, explained recently, she and her colleagues are hopeful that this series will conjure up “that true Muppet anarchy — that complete chaos.” She added: “If they’re going to take on real-world science, we thought, we have to burn things. “They were very collaborative experiences,” Jacobson said of the shows, which included classic Muppets numbers like ‘Mahna Mahna’ and ‘Rainbow Connection.’ “There was a real conscious effort to go back to the Muppets’ roots, to play up the personalities and that sense of abandon that people really respond to,” he added. Like Mickey Mouse or the Simpsons, he said, the Muppets are meant to “live among us — they’re not a nostalgia play, they just exist in whatever time we’re in.” What makes the Muppets work, Silver said, can be found in something as rudimentary as the early test footage for The Muppet Movie that shows Henson and Oz roaming the countryside as they ad-lib dialogue for Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear. “But there’s nothing that we’re ready to reveal at this point.” In the meantime, the creators and performers on Muppets Now said that, in trying to reproduce the do-it-yourself aesthetics of the internet, they felt they had also tapped into something essential about the Muppet characters: They are proud underdogs who seem to do their best work with limited resources.