Nearly 50 years ago, a prima donna pig made her first appearance on “The Muppet Show” and quickly became its breakout star. Within a few years, she was a sought after Hollywood celebrity, a pinup model and the author of a best-selling book.
Well, Miss Piggy is ready for her close-up once again. Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone and Cole Escola (“Oh, Mary!”) are currently developing a movie for the character. And a new “Muppet Show” special will premiere on Disney+ and ABC on Wednesday. Piggy is front and center in that special, making snidely aristocratic remarks in a Regency-era sketch, hijacking Kermit’s duet with Sabrina Carpenter and “giving the people what they truly want: Moi.”
For Eric Jacobson, playing a glamorous pig has been the role of a lifetime. In recent decades, he has become the lead voice and puppeteer behind several instantly recognizable Muppets, among them Bert, Grover and Oscar the Grouch on “Sesame Street” and Fozzie Bear. But when it comes to aura and cultural significance, he said in a recent phone interview, “Miss Piggy’s on another magnitude, as she would tell you herself.”
It wasn’t always the case. An early version of Piggy appeared as a minor player in one of Jim Henson’s failed Muppet television pilots, which aired in March 1975. The puppet was designed and constructed by Bonnie Erickson, who had fond childhood memories of chasing piglets for her pig farmer uncle.
“Jim knew that story,” Erickson said. “It must have been why he chose me to do it.”
Over a few weeks, Erickson carved the pig out of a 1-foot cube of soft foam using nail scissors, then used a belt sander to smooth the contours and curves. Crucially, by the time “The Muppet Show” premiered in September 1976, she had infused her creation with something extra: Piggy became the only major Muppet to get eyes with irises. The pupils even have highlights.
“I wanted her to have eyes that were expressive, that looked real,” Erickson said.
A sow in opera gloves would have been a decent gag in itself, but it soon became clear that the character was destined for greater things. In rehearsal, a script specified that she deliver a mere slap, but the puppeteer Frank Oz instead had Piggy execute a swift karate chop — preceded by a full-torso windup and accompanied by a “Hiii-yah!” — that sent Kermit flying. Miss Piggy was born. (She was named Piggy Lee in honor of Peggy Lee, Erickson said, until an attorney advised a name change.)
Oz went on to devise an elaborate back story for the character involving the loss of her father in a tragic tractor accident and a fraught mother-daughter relationship. His voice for Piggy alternated between a dainty coo and a withering growl that recalled Bette Davis in “All About Eve.”
Piggy was deeply insecure yet utterly convinced of her own star quality, girlish and refined but occasionally compelled to, say, maul Florence Henderson in a jealous rage. She was desperately in love with a frog who didn’t feel the same way.
Balancing those sometimes conflicting impulses could be tricky, according to Jerry Juhl, the head writer for “The Muppet Show.” Juhl, who died in 2005, said that writing for Miss Piggy hadn’t been easy.
“You’re walking a fine line with that character,” Juhl said in an archival interview, as quoted in “Jim Henson: The Biography” (2013), by Brian Jay Jones. “If she isn’t a bitch, she isn’t funny. But you’ve got to feel the other side.”
It was a winning combination. With the critical and commercial success of “The Muppet Movie” (1979), the Muppets ascended to a new level of cultural prominence. And Piggy’s dreams of superstardom became reality.
In 1980, dubbed “The Year of the Piggy” by TV Guide, there were cover stories, crackling with porcine wordplay, in Life magazine (“A Sweet Sow for All Seasons”) and People (“the acme of porkitude”). That year brought the first in a series of Piggy calendars, with the puppet posed as a film-noir femme fatale; as a motorcycle babe; as the frilly mademoiselle of “The Swing,” the Rococo masterwork by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
Then there was the 1981 best seller “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life,” written by Henry Beard, a founder of National Lampoon, and edited by Robert Gottlieb. (Opening line: “Call me Moi …”) There was a Miss Piggy television special and an aerobic workout album.
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Certainly, it must have had something to do with the diva’s uncompromising fashion sense, with the costume designer Calista Hendrickson serving as Piggy’s full-time personal dresser. Piggy is also perhaps the most messily human of all Muppets — in 1979, at the advent of Piggymania, The New York Times argued that “Miss Piggy’s emotional range may be the broadest of any puppet in history.” It’s hard to think of another puppet that has topped her since.
This is more remarkable given that Piggy lost some flexibility and expressiveness by the third season of “The Muppet Show,” when the puppet’s materials and construction process were streamlined. “It takes quite a bit of muscle to get the smallest expressions out of her face,” Jacobson said. (Another byproduct of that streamlining process is that her expression became noticeably sassier.)
And yet Jacobson agreed that “she is a very layered and complicated character, perhaps the most complex in the pantheon of Muppets.”
“She yearns for things like we all do,” he continued, adding that Piggy also has a kind of drag allure. (RuPaul is a fan.) “She’s this fantastic mash-up of masculine and feminine. I think it counts for why so many people of all stripes love her.” Oz once described Piggy as a “truck driver wanting to be a woman.”
Oz largely stepped away from his Muppet duties in the 1990s. Jacobson took on the majority of his characters, as well as Guy Smiley (originally voiced by Henson), Oscar (voiced by Caroll Spinney) and others. His first appearance as Miss Piggy was in a video segment at the Muppet Fest fan convention in 2001. Die-hard fans were convinced it was Oz. “That kind of gave me the bona fides I needed to go forward,” Jacobson said.
For the relatively mild-mannered puppeteer, putting on the puppet is emboldening as well as exhausting. “She definitely gives me license to say whatever I want to say,” Jacobson said. “But she is a lot of work, emotionally and physically.” Apart from his debt to Oz’s formative work, Jacobson draws inspiration from silver screen goddesses like Katharine Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe.
Piggy love can be cultish — Jacobson regularly meets fans whose dream is to be on the receiving end of her signature move. “It’s a delightful thing to see a room full of people, from news reporters to A-list celebrities, get in line to be karate-chopped by a pig,” he said.
The new “Muppet Show” special has Kermit, Miss Piggy and the whole furry, felted company return to the variety show format of the original, with an array of cheerfully bonkers acts, that irresistible theme tune and chaos behind the scenes.
Alex Timbers, the Tony-winning director of Broadway musicals like “Moulin Rouge!” and “Here Lies Love,” directed the Muppet special. “There’s a lot of responsibility in helping bring Miss Piggy to the screen,” he said. “She has impacted generations of fans, writers and comedians. People love and adore her.”
The writer Albertina Rizzo said that the writing team had been honored to cook up new outrageous things for one of their comedy heroes to say. “Strangely, I think reading Barbra Streisand’s autobiography really helped,” Rizzo said. Streisand “has such a strong sense of self,” she explained. “So if you mix that with a boatload of delusion and some beginner French, you’re kind of on the right track.”
“The thought process was, What would a reasonable, grounded, normal person say?” she added. “Then write the opposite of that.”
Additional cinematography by Joel Barhamand.
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