In the nearly two years that Disney+ has been up and running, it has often felt like two of their star intellectual properties have kind of gotten short shrift. Disney Parks content, while highlighted by some great material including The Imagineering Story, has been fairly thin considering the wealth of content that has to be in the company archives. Similarly, Muppets fans waited a long time for the vintage The Muppet Show episodes while the uneven Muppets Now were left to fill in the gap. So it’s one of the streaming services’ most pleasant surprises yet to find that Muppets Haunted Mansion is not only one of the best pieces of parks-themed content Disney+ has produced, but the best new Muppets material for any medium that Disney has produced in ages as well.
The simple premise finds Gonzo (Dave Goelz) and Pepe the Prawn (Bill Barretta) passing on the annual Muppets Halloween party to take on a challenge: staying overnight in the spooky mansion where legendary magician the Great MacGuffin disappeared. No sooner have they met their “ghost host” (Will Arnett) than it becomes clear that this mansion bears quite a bit of similarity to one that we know and love from Disney Parks, including a strange stretching room and a creepy bride named Constance (Taraji P. Henson).
On its own merits, aside from its connection to these beloved properties, Muppets Haunted Mansion proves wonderfully entertaining. The brisk 50-minute running time includes a trio of lively musical numbers, like a clever spin on “Be Our Guest” that turns the Haunted Mansion’s ballroom into a somewhat creepier dinner party. The cameo appearances that seem inevitable in Disney content are here, but they somehow feel less obtrusive than usual. And it threads the challenging needle between something that’s got a few Halloween chills and something that isn’t going to be too scary for kids—kind of like the Haunted Mansion itself.
Perhaps that’s the thing that makes this such an effective creation: It truly respects both the Haunted Mansion and the Muppets. Director Kirk Thatcher is a veteran of recent Muppet content (including Muppets Now), but here he and his writing team find that sweet spot of silly vaudeville-style humor and self-awareness that always characterized The Muppet Show at its best, while also focusing on a character that still comes with his original voice.
While references to features from the theme-park attraction could have been simple nods to familiar things, the creative team finds great ways to incorporate the Muppets into those nods, like the stretching room portrait of a man standing on a dynamite keg turning out to be explosives-obsessed Crazy Harry, or the Haunted Mansion ballroom calling back to the old Muppet Show “At the Dance” recurring sketch. Those two things in the title, the Muppets and the Haunted Mansion are balanced to perfection in a way that should be satisfying to fans of both.
For some folks, it might be disappointing that there’s relatively little Kermit, Miss Piggie or Fozzie to be found in Muppets Haunted Mansion, while Pepe takes on such a large role. Other Muppets content, however, has leaned much more heavily into those characters without feeling as genuinely “Muppets-like” as this does. It’s funny, charming, engaging and just the right amount of spooky. If Disney+ wants a model for how to please fans of the Muppets and fans of Disney Parks, it looks just like this.
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