Inhuman Swill

I heard a disquieting rumor a couple of months ago. For some reason it didn't come back to mind until today. First, some background:

Since the beginning of Sesame Street, the Jim Henson Company has owned the rights to all Muppets that appear on the show. This has always limited CTW's ability to license those Muppet characters, to control the way Muppets are used and drawn and portrayed, and even to put Muppets in the same picture with characters from other CTW shows. The Henson Company has always had approval rights over what we do with the Sesame Street Muppets.

Some of you may remember last year when the German media group EM.TV bought the Henson Company. It got a lot of press. "The Muppets are going to Germany, oh my!" What didn't get much press was what happened late in 2000: CTW bought the rights to the Sesame Street Muppets from EM.TV. We now own our own Muppets. For the first time ever, we can do with them what we please. We could change Grover's color to yellow. We could shave a Coca-Cola logo into Ernie's head. We could serve Big Bird for Thanksgiving. We have the power.

As this was happening, EM.TV's stock had fallen by about 90% since it bought the Henson Company. I'm sure EM.TV hoped to recoup some revenue with the cash infusion from CTW. (By the way, for the record we're Sesame Workshop now, not CTW. But CTW is easier to type.) What happened instead is that their shareholders sued them. All because they sold off those valuable Sesame Street Muppets.

(Note that EM.TV didn't sell us all the Muppets. We only got the ones that appear exclusively on Sesame Street—Big Bird, Oscar, Ernie, Bert, Grover, Cookie Monster, Elmo, Zoe, Rosita, Telly, Herry, the Count, and the rest. We did not buy the Muppet Show Muppets [Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, and so forth], the Fraggle Rock Muppets, the Dinosaurs Muppets, the Dark Crystal Muppets, the Labyrinth Muppets, or any other Muppets anywhere in the known universe.)

At the CTW holiday party in December, we all toasted and cheered and screamed over the purchase of the Muppets. How could this bode anything but good for our fair company.

Then, shortly thereafter, I heard the rumor: CTW had badly overextended itself paying for the Muppets, and there were going to be layoffs.

Well, the layoffs happened, and still more are coming in other departments. Half the rumor was evidently correct—I wonder now if the other half was too.

We've all heard of the plight of workers replaced by machines. I'm not sure how I feel at the idea that I may have been replaced by a Muppet.