Anti-Capitalist TV Puppets

Right-wing conservatives in the United States accuse the film industry of having an environmental protection agenda and a bias against capitalism. They have singled out The Muppets for criticism, but The Muppets are fighting back.

It’s not every day that a frog and a pig made of felt give a press conference. And doing so put them in direct confrontation with conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. I’m referring, of course, to Kermit and Miss Piggy, the Muppet dream couple, who vented their displeasure with Fox News. Eric Bolling, a moderator on Fox Business News, blasted the latest Muppets movie as “anti-capitalist” because a successful oil industry character named Tex Richman was a villain in the story.

The plot has The Muppets reuniting after many years in order to rescue their old theater in Hollywood; the aforementioned Tex Richman wants to drill for oil beneath the theater. That, says Bolling, amounts to a Hollywood call for class warfare and a brainwashing of American children.

Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center, an organization founded by conservative activist Brent Bozell, seconds Bolling’s call. Bozell is on record as saying that Barack Obama looks like a “skinny ghetto crackhead.” Gainor also claims that Hollywood and the liberals have hated the oil industry for years, as evidenced by the animated movie “Cars II” — in which the vehicles are powered by a kind of eco-friendly gasoline — as well as by the George Clooney movie “Syriana” and the brutal western “There Will Be Blood.” Big oil is negatively portrayed in all three. Now completely wound up, Gainor continued his list of films that supposedly prove Hollywood’s long anti-big oil bias: “Captain Planet,” the Roland Emmerich apocalypse movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” Al Gore’s documentary “An Uncomfortable Truth” and the cult movie “The Matrix” which, according to Gainor, teaches our children that mankind is a virus on the earth. These children, he claims, have now become the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The fact that Fox has chosen to attack a couple of sock puppets may seem bizarre, but right-wing conservatives in the United States actually do accuse the supposedly liberal media and Hollywood of following an agenda of environmentalism and anti-capitalism. Of all entities, the Disney Company — Disney now owns the Muppets — has been a target of religious fundamentalists for years. They even called for a complete boycott of Disney in 1995.

They condemn Mickey Mouse’s company of sponsoring gay pride parades in Disneyland and promoting child pornography and underage sex with movies like “Pulp Fiction” and “Kids,” both produced by Miramax, a Disney subsidiary. They deplore the animated film “Pocahontas” for portraying native Americans in a more flattering light than white people. And “The Lion King,” according to tea party queen Michele Bachmann, spreads homosexual propaganda. Even “Cars,” with its eco-friendly gasoline, was produced by a Disney affiliate, and Walt Disney himself was noticeably right-leaning.

The Muppets themselves consider the accusations leveled against them ridiculous. At their London press conference Kermit croaked, “And besides, if we had a problem with oil companies why would we have spent the whole film driving around in a gas-guzzling Rolls-Royce?” And Miss Piggy squealed, “It’s almost as laughable as accusing Fox News of, you know, being news.”