Trivia / The Little Muppet Monsters

• Cross-Dressing Voices: Animated Miss Piggy is voiced by Hal Rayle.
• Orwellian Retcon: The show was retconned out of existence in reruns of the Muppets' 1986 30th anniversary TV special, which was made before the cancellation of LMM. The original broadcast included cameos by the show's characters, clips from the series and a mention of the show in a speech by Big Bird, which were all edited out when the special was shown on Odyssey.
• Role Reprise:
  • Richard Hunt voices the animated version of Beaker, the sole aversion of The Other Darrin for the animated Muppet characters.
  • Frank Welker and Greg Berg reprise their respective roles as the animated versions of Kermit and Fozzie from Muppet Babies, this time voicing their adult counterparts.
• Troubled Production: Things did not go well behind the scenes. Per former writer Scott Shaw!:
  "The concept of this second half-hour was neither simple nor particularly well-developed. A trio of new (live-action) Muppet Monster Kids, working from the basement of the adult Muppets' home, create their own television station which broadcasts only to the TV sets in the house upstairs... Although eighteen episodes were produced, only three of them ever aired; Henson Associates and CBS agreed that the concept had never been properly thought out and just wasn't up to Henson's high standards. To Jim's credit, it was his idea to pull the show from the Saturday morning lineup. ...I've always felt that the juxtapositioning of live-action and animated Muppets invited an unfavorable comparison, to which the cartoon version inevitably suffered; the puppetry was just too good. The combination of Muppet babies, adults and kid monsters was very disorienting. Also, due to a lack of development time, the concept — and therefore, the writing and designs — never quite jelled."
  • Another issue was that per former writer Kathryn Mullen, Marvel Productions and Toei Animation had trouble delivering the animated bits on time^note this was likely because of the studio's heavy workload; in addition to this show and Muppet Babies, they also had quite a few co-productions with Sunbow Entertainment, including G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and The Transformers, going on at the same time; along with several anime titles on Toei's end, which included Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin and Fist of the North Star and as a result, CBS put on another Muppet Babies episode to fill the slot; that got higher ratings and CBS decided to can LMM instead.
• What Could Have Been: Thanks to the swift cancellation, multiple episodes were left unfinished, and several of the puppet segments have leaked out to the internet in recent years.
  • The show would have become as Merchandise-Driven as other Muppet universes had it been allowed to continue, as a major merchandising blitz had been planned for early 1986. As it was, a Playskool puzzle was the only item to see the light of day, and in very limited quantities.
  • Newspaper TV guides continued to list the show's Saturday morning timeslot as "Muppets, Babies and Monsters" through the remainder of the 1985-86 season, although it was all Muppet Babies after the cancellation of LMM.
  • An early concept for the show was Muppet Monster Television, a talks show parody with adult monsters, as well as Floyd and Janice from the Electric Mayhem guest hosting.

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