Kirk Thatcher's trade is putting the Muppets somewhere they do not belong, a pirate ship, Oz, a theme-park ride, and letting them bump into the furniture. He is good company and a careful host, and the films are usually gentler than the Muppets ought to be.
Fi1m perspective
In Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021), Gonzo walks into every dark room without a flicker and Pepe the King Prawn follows him in, loudly regretting it. One character who is not afraid and one who is: that pairing is how Thatcher gets most of his laughs, and it tells you what he likes about the Muppets, which is that they react. Thatcher directed the special from a teleplay he wrote with Bill Barretta and Kelly Younger, and it runs 52 minutes, about ten more than the material can carry. We had a good time at it anyway, and nearly all of it was Pepe.
He came to puppets sideways. He began in practical effects and creature design at Industrial Light & Magic in the early 1980s, on Return of the Jedi and the Star Trek films, and anyone who has seen Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) has seen him: he is the punk on the bus. He joined Jim Henson's company in the late 1980s, wrote and co-produced on Dinosaurs (1991–1994) and designed most of its characters with Henson, wrote for Muppets Tonight (1996), and shared the screenplay of Muppet Treasure Island (1996) with Jerry Juhl and James V. Hart. From It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) he directed the television films himself: The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (2005), A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa (2008), and then the Halloween special, an idea he and the writer Jim Lewis had carried around for roughly thirty years.
The pattern is plain. Thatcher takes something that already exists, a Stevenson novel, a Christmas story, a Disney ride, and drops the Muppets into it. He knows the characters from the inside, which is why Pepe and Gonzo and the singing busts share a frame without any strain, and why the house in Haunted Mansion feels like a place they have lived in for years rather than a set they were shown that morning.
The limit is gentleness. In Muppet Treasure Island the human adventure gets more room than its comic possibilities deserve, and the Muppets are not allowed to make as much trouble as we wanted; the film is genial about its source when a little irreverence would have helped. Haunted Mansion is stuffed to reach its running time. In both cases Thatcher is fond of the thing he is borrowing, and fondness is not mischief. The Muppets are at their best when they wreck something, and he keeps tidying up after them.
The one stretch of his career with an edge was Dinosaurs, which went after social and environmental questions inside a puppet sitcom, and it is the work we would most like to see him return to. The Muppets have had many Christmas specials and now one Halloween; the next borrowed house is presumably already chosen. If he ever lets Gonzo burn it down, we will be first in the queue.
Biography
Kirk R. Thatcher is an American writer, producer and director. He began his career in special effects at Industrial Light & Magic, contributing to films including Return of the Jedi (1983). He later worked as an associate producer on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and made a cameo appearance in that film.
Thatcher has had a long association with the Muppets. He co-wrote the screenplay for Muppet Treasure Island (1996) with Jerry Juhl and James V. Hart. He directed the television films It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002), The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (2005), A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa (2008) and Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021). He was supervising producer on the Emmy Award-winning series Muppets Tonight (1996–1998) and has written for Dinosaurs (1991) and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (2004).
