"The Green Ranger": The Anxiety of Obsolescence

"Muppet Babies" is an animated "prequel" spinoff from Jim Henson's Muppets, who are featured (in live action) on the classic PBS children's series "Sesame Street," as well as in their own dramatic feature films and products. (The successful proliferation of the Muppet image led the Disney organization to negotiate for the rights to use them in their movies and theme parks, but this takeover deal fell through late in 1990 after Henson's death and resulted in bitter counter-suits.) Currently in its seventh season on CBS, "Muppet Babies" has already produced ninety-nine episodes, an unusually high number, particularly since its current ratings are lower than in the past. (For comparative ratings of selected CBS shows on Saturday morning television, see table 2.)

Segmented into two separate half-hour episodes (so that it is easier to tune in or out at the midpoint), "Muppet Babies" presents the nursery adventures of eight baby animals of varied species—Kermit the Frog, Ralph the Dog, Fuzzy the Bear, Gonzo the Blue Weirdo, Animal the Infant, Skeeter and Skooter the co-ed twins, and Miss Piggy. There is no mention of their families nor any explanation of why they are always in the nursery with their human nanny, whose head we never see. She remains an ambiguous figure, perhaps to enable a wide range of kiddie viewers to cast her as significant other in their own varied family scenarios.

As if dramatizing Piaget's assumption that assimilation

and accommodation drive cognitive development and creative invention (as opposed to mere imitation), "Muppet Babbies" celebrates interactive fantasy, in contrast to a passive reliance on high-tech toys. It constructs a space that Winnicott (one of the most influential psychoanalytic theorists of play) would describe as "the intermediate area . . . allowed to the infant between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality-testing"; like the mother's breast, this intermediate space fosters "the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant's own capacity to create."^[37] Winnicott's emphasis on this "area's" connection with the mother makes all the more significant the nurturing presence of the headless nanny (whose breasts are frequently visible, even if her maternity is denied), for she invariably encourages the Muppets in their play and sometimes even "enriches" their games with concrete objects from her own "toy chest." She is the "responsible person" de-

scribed by Winnicott, who must be present to alleviate the frightening aspects of play.^[38]

To represent this "intermediate space" of the Muppets' creative play, the series repeatedly intercuts between excerpts from live-action movies or TV programs and animated footage in the nursery, integrating the two discourses (through the wizardry of high-tech computer animation). Thus, the series consistently presents a running commentary on the relationship between movies and television and how they train youngsters to read narratives interactively.

For example, the opening title sequence (repeated every week) includes images of Kermit as Indiana Jones swinging on a rope, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark ; battle footage à la Star Wars (the film that helped promote the use of computer animation for special effects and that pioneered the marketing strategies of recycling and recombining old movie genres and creating product tie-ins for young consumers); Miss Piggy winning an Oscar, a spectacle that evokes both films and the TV coverage of this event; and Miss Piggy and friends on the yellow brick road. This shifting of scenes requires the constant redressing both of Muppets and mise-en-scène and also effaces historical distinctions between a 1940s classic like The Wizard of Oz and the two recent George Lucas blockbusters, both of which generated their own series of sequels. Most important, this opening dramatizes the system of substitutions that facilitates ego identification with fictional characters and imaginary worlds, and therefore is essential to both "creative play" and spectator positioning: animals filling in for humans, children filling in for adults, cartoon characters filling in for live-action actors, TV characters filling in for film stars, TV filling in for cinema. These substitutions help to establish the key paradigms and analogical/hierarchical sets that will guide kiddie spectators in reading specific episodes of "Muppet Babies." They also

evoke Lynne Joyrich's description of television's postmodernity: "Constantly shifting its placement of the subject (as it moves between a number of interrupted fragments), television seems to revel in a pure celebration of difference—a process that is ultimately equal to its reverse formulation, an agenda of absolute indifference."^[39]

Significantly, even in this opening "celebration of difference," traditional gender boundaries remain firmly in place. Consistent with Doane's argument,^[40] the two female Muppets present the two options constructed for the female spectator by patriarchal cinema: the transvestite position (where girls identify with male characters or their female variants) is occupied by Skeeter, an androgynous female twin; and the more potentially subversive female masquerade is performed by the narcissistic, aggressive Miss Piggy. Conveniently for advertisers, the gendering of both female roles is tied directly to costuming (either as a functional difference that distinguishes Skeeter from her twin brother, or as a form of excess that characterizes the incomparable Piggy). Thus, costumes become interchangeable software, like Barbie's clothes, and another cultural code to be mastered by young spectators of both genders.

Entirely omitted from the opening title sequence is the third female character in the series: the headless Nanny. Hélène Cixous has described the figure of the decapitated female as a displacement of male castration anxiety onto the woman, particularly if she fails "to submit to masculinity as culturally ordered by the castration complex."^[41] In this instance, the decapitated matriarch is stripped not only of her reproductive powers, but also of her racial specificity, though her "headlessness" evokes the Aunt Jemima–type maid from the old Tom and Jerry cartoons. Moreover, her consistent costuming in brightly colored striped stockings and baggy skirt and sweater vaguely suggests a subordinate

class position—as a hired nanny rather than a biological granny. Despite her stabilizing presence, her ambiguity makes her parental authority easily appropriable by patriarchal characters featured in specific episodes.

The "Green Ranger" episode opens with live-action, black-and-white film footage of a cowboy standing on a rock and spying on the scene below (which we do not yet see), as a male offscreen voice says, "Hmm, looks like they got some trouble at the Rusty Spur." Then there is a cut to the object of the cowboy's gaze: a still drawing of a ranch in black-and-white, with horses and other important items highlighted in color. The camera cuts back to a closer shot of the cowboy, who whistles, and then to the new object of his gaze and address—his horse, which he jumps onto and rides out of the frame; we now hear the male voice-over sing the Range Rider's theme song: "Anytime, anywhere, when help is needed, I'll be there."

This segment introduces us not only to the iconography of the western genre (the setting, cowboy hero, horse, ethos, and lingo), but also to cinema's suturing structure of the gaze (where the possessor of the look is shown to be a controlling man of action, whereas the object is immobile, domesticated, subhuman). It also teaches us how to read pictures: how color and movement draw our eyes to the most important objects and actions, and how words help to anchor our interpretation of images. This process of reading images is made explicit in a later sequence, when Kermit announces that he doesn't know how to read and Skooter (as if coaching a Renaissance courtier) tells him: "You look at pictures, don't you? Everything's drawn out for you, nice and simple like. It's as simple as falling off a horse."

From this opening black-and-white film sequence we move to an animated version of the western (which mediates between the still drawing and the live-action footage). This

fluid movement between animation and live action also occurs in other TV series ("Super Mario Brothers," for instance) and is simulated by the animated performance of PeeWee Herman. In each case the combination facilitates the kind of transgressive identification across other borders (of genre, generation, race, culture, and species) that was demonstrated in the opening title sequence and that is the specialty of the Muppet Babies and presumably of their peewee spectators. In addition to the stable costs of animated films (which now seem moderate, in contrast to the spiraling costs of live-action movies), this postmodernist superfluidity may help explain the "cartoonmania" of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which some are calling the "new Golden Age" of animation.^[42]

In the Muppets' animated version of the western, we see a green Kermit in cowboy outfit look into a saloon as a male voice-over asks: "What in tarnation is going on in there?" When the camera zooms in for a closer look, we see a ball, a doll, and other toys that do not belong in the western genre fly out of the saloon, and the voice-over quips hermeneutically: "Seems more like a question of what's coming out of there." We follow Kermit's gaze and person into the saloon, where the other Muppets are arguing as they play cards—the two activities on which we segue (by means of a dissolve) back into the nursery, where Kermit, wearing the same cowboy hat, sits before an animated blue TV set watching the black-and-white live-action western, smiling with pleasure. When the image cuts from Kermit watching TV to the object of his gaze (the fictional world of the Roy Rogers western), we are firmly sutured into identification with Kermit, from whose point of view we have been watching the western and whose fantasy recreation we soon will reenter.

Within the fictional world of the western, we see the same live-action cowboy as before, but as he gets off his horse the

Image not available.

Inside his interactive fantasy (which was generated by watching TV),
Kermit, a would-be western hero, learns how to mount
a horse by watching his idol, the animated headless
Range Rider. ©Henson Associates, Inc., 1987.

image changes to color animation (colored figures against a black-and-white background) and the blue frame of the TV set disappears. Once inside the saloon, an animated Range Rider (whose head we never see) mediates the argument among the Muppets, sounding suspiciously like Nanny: "What seems to be the problem here?" In case we've missed these visual and verbal associations with the matriarchal guardian, he adds: "Seems to me we're going to have to sort this one out with your nanny." This body shot of the heroic ranger draws our attention to his groin (rather than to his breasts, as in similar shots of Nanny). Although these headless body shots emphasize the signifiers that distinguish these two characters by gender, their formal similarity and the dialogue simultaneously identify them as members of the same paradigm: adult authorities. As in the Thorndyke ex-

periment, the combination of similarities and differences leads the young subject to a more complex restructuring of cognitive categories.

At this point in the story, Kermit, who has been watching his hero in action, breaks out of the cinematic suture, proclaiming the "moral" to us in direct address: "The Range Rider doesn't like cheating!" On the surface, the blatant message of "The Green Ranger" concerns how to define the hero: as a male who instinctively helps others without self-consciousness or vanity. This is what Kermit learns from watching his favorite TV show, through both identification with and direct address from its hero. This moral would probably satisfy the 1990 Children's Television Act, which requires stations to serve "the educational and informational needs of children." Yet the episode teaches children many other things besides.

Perhaps most important, it explains how a genre (or TV series) can be replaced or recycled. Kermit is devastated when he discovers that this is the last episode of "The Range Rider" (which in turn is actually a composite of several classic westerns, including "Roy Rogers" and "The Lone Ranger"), for the program is being replaced by a soap opera called "As the Toast Burns." But we also learn from this episode that the iconography of the western still survives in television. The ongoing card game (which is carried over from the western fantasy to the nursery) is still found on the never-ending game show genre; the heroic horse is still featured on "Mister Ed" (a show that is brought to mind by the talking horses in Kermit's western fantasy and that is now in syndication for a new generation on the children's cable network, Nickelodeon); the desert landscape and chase narrative are still central in Road Runner cartoons (which are included in the newly resyndicated "Looney Tunes" on Nickelodeon, and which are evoked when Animal plays

"Road Crawler" as an homage to his favorite western hero); the western clothes and jargon (if not the ethos) could at that time still be found on prime-time soaps like "Dallas" (which is parodied when Miss Piggy Sue Ewing plays "a modern cowgirl with beauty, brains, and a great head for business . . . just like on nighttime TV"); and the western is still a popular generic motif in music videos (what Kermit calls "songs written about stuff you never did").

This "lesson" in survival through compatibility is presented in the form of a catalogue (of various Muppets offering their own favorite version of the western genre and their interactive notion of how to make Kermit a western hero), which ruptures the coherence both of the narrative line and of Kermit's unifying point of view. This catalogue structure implies that, like any genre, the western is an open system that allows room for both assimilation and accommodation, or in Fiske's terms, "a shifting provisional set of characteristics which is modified as each new example is produced."^[43] It also evokes what Roland Barthes calls "the extension of a paradigm onto the syntagmatic plane"—a form of "semiotic transgression" around which "a great number of creative phenomena are situated" (and perhaps an elaborate version of what Victor was doing in his stroller when he was stringing together all the names he knew before he knew how to make a sentence).^[44]

In trying to console Kermit for the loss of his hero (this "reopening of the gap of desire" over which he has no control), Nanny explains TV's structural dynamics of reruns, syndication, and cancellations: "Well that show's been running since I was a little girl. They probably ran out of episodes to rerun. . . . You can't ride the range forever, you know . . . someone new always seems to come along." By supporting Brooks's claim that extended serialization merely postpones the inevitable end of all narrative, this speech im-

plicitly addresses the deeper fears that underlie Kermit's separation anxiety, for absence and economic obsolescence can easily be read as aging, castration, and death.^[45]

The "Green Ranger"'s recuperative model is a generational discourse well suited to a successful prequel that reverses the aging process and that now, in its seventh season, is proliferating in syndication even as it anticipates the threat of cancellation. It presents a consumerist oedipal narrative that conflates several familiar paradigms: a young "green" hero displaces the retiring Range Rider the way sons traditionally displace fathers, patriarchs eventually displace nannies, new TV shows annually displace cancellations, and television historically displaces cinema. Thus, not only does this episode help children structure a diverse set of categories into complex hierarchic systems, but it also fosters a creative use of transmedia intertextuality to forestall obsolescence and death.