Hey, I tell you what is. Big city, hmm? Live, work, huh? But not city only. Only peoples. Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatoes, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit returns this week with Emily's take on The Muppets Take Manhattan. Although this 1984 film, directed by Frank Oz, still offers plenty of comedy, music, and whimsy, its treatment of women is a little less charming than the Guy Girls remembered.
Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the gang have just graduated from college and bring their senior musical Manhattan Melodies to New York to try to make it on Broadway. Of course, it's not so easy to find a willing producer, and Oz's storytelling scatters the Muppets across the country while Kermit stays behind. Unfortunately, the screenplay also seems to think that misogyny is just a fact of nature that women must deal with, so the audience must watch Miss Piggy become a badass in the face of catcalling construction workers and purse-snatching scumbags.
And all women in the film are similarly treated, with Janice remarking that she won't take off her clothes no matter how artistic the shoot is, Yolanda the rat constantly getting hit on by Rizzo, Brooke Shields also getting hit on by rats, and the Muppets' college audience laughing off Animal chasing a co-ed. So much for Gen X nostalgia if this was the pop culture written for children.
Still, as Pete might say, Muppets is Muppets. So please, join us!
We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.
We both have super-serious personas in our "day jobs." No, really. Emily is a Finance writer who used to be a classroom teacher. Tracie writes and consults on social justice and mindfulness and works as a copywriter and project manager for non-profits. If you really need to see the bona fides, please visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com
For our work together, what you need to know is that Tracie is older (3 years), Emily is funnier (by at least 3 percent), and we're both hella smart, often over-literal, and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction and murder mysteries, good storytelling with liberal amounts of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find there.
Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video version, and early access to Deep Thoughts by visiting us on Patreon.
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