FILM (1996)
Muppet Treasure Island Tim Curry, Kevin Bishop, Billy Connolly Director: Brian Henson
Before Captain Jack Sparrow, there was Long John Silver, played with gleeful theatrical relish by Tim Curry in Muppet Treasure Island. The Rocky Horror star's performance is reason enough to see the film, but there are others.
Based - pretty loosely - on Robert Louis Stevenson's 19th-century classic, this wonderful children's movie casts Jim Henson's famous creatures in the other key roles: Kermit the Frog as Captain Abraham Smollett, Miss Piggy as 'Benjamina' Gunn and Fozzie Bear as a particularly absurd Squire Trelawney.
Treasure Island, published as a novel in 1883, was originally serialised in the British children's magazine Young Folks, for which Stevenson adopted the pen name Captain George North. The story, one of the most frequently dramatised of all time, created the popular image of pirates: from Stevenson we inherit the treasure map marked with an X and the one-legged villain with a parrot on his shoulder.
Naturally, the Muppet version (directed by Henson's son, Brian) is less violent than the book or earlier film versions aimed at adults. But it is no less entertaining for its young target audience. In fact, in an age when children's movies are more sophisticated than ever in content and form, it's great fun to rewind a decade or two and get back to some old-fashioned silliness.
In this version, for example, 'Polly' is a lobster, and among the supporting characters is Mr Bimbo - a tiny, imaginary man who lives in Fozzie's finger. Meanwhile, the Great Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat play 'themselves' as sidekicks to the main character (and Stevenson's narrator), Jim Hawkins. Billy Connolly, as the pirate Billy Bones, and Jennifer Saunders, as landlady Mrs Bluberidge, make up the rest of the speaking human cast.
Rizzo sets up the parallel storyline by selling tickets to a 'rat cruise' on board the Hispaniola - one of the most famous pirate ships in literary history. As the drama breaks out on board, somewhere between Bristol, Britain, and the Caribbean, we pan to a series of ridiculous and totally incongruous vignettes of rat puppets engaged in various cruise ship activities.
In the novel, the baddies are searching for buried gold left by the pirate Captain Flint. Ben Gunn is a former member of Flint's crew who has gone insane after being stranded on the island for three years. He leads the good guys to the treasure, which they divide with him. But he spends it all within days of returning to Britain and becomes a beggar.
In the Muppet movie, 'Benjamina' Gunn is Frank Oz voicing Miss Piggy. Having had an affair with Flint, she lives as the rich queen of a tribe of wild boars led by chief Spa'am. Things go awry when her beloved ex-fiance, 'Smolly', arrives on the island.
