Muppets on bikes

In the coming weeks, I want to delve into some topics that reflect the darker side of transportation (e.g., safety and danger, discrimination, inequality). I decided to keep this week as filled with light and happy as possible.

I watched The Muppets recently. The show and the movies were a fixture of my childhood so it was great to see the gang reunited. Jason Segel also redeemed himself (I just don't get the appeal of most of his films). In any case, I remembered that Kermit was often pedaling around on a bike. In The Great Muppet Caper, Kermit and Miss Piggy ride rented bikes through a park in London. 

Kermit rides a bike in from his swamp home in The Muppet Movie. He crashes his bike in the opening of Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas.

In fact, there are so many bike-related Muppet moments that they're compiled on a Muppet wiki page. Puppeteer David Goelz explains the fascinating behind-the-scenes of shooting a frog using an alternative mode of transportation:

With The Muppet Movie, we had a very sophisticated bicycle rig that was a little radio-controlled car that was mounted in the bike between the front and rear wheels, and it had a mirror on it so it reflected the ground in front of the bicycle (as you saw from the camera's point of view), but it broke just before we had to shoot the bit, and so we ended up doing that with three strings from a camera crane, and there were many many takes and we ran out of time finally and never got it to work right. He was always kind of tilted on the bike -- if you look at the final take in the movie, he's not really riding a bike that's straight up and down, it's kind of tilted over to the side.