Muppet Babies/Headscratchers

Why is Baby Kermit a frog?

He should be a tadpole at that age. Is he, like, actually much older than the others or something?

• Well, you couldn't very well do the show with him like, swimming around in a tank in the nursery while all the other Muppet Babies are out walking around. It definitely wouldn't be very cute (hey, there's a trope idea: Rule Of Cute).
  • We sort of have that trope.
  • We do now.
• Maybe he's just out of the tadpole stage. His nephew Robin is similarly small and young and surprisingly non-tadpole.
  • Robin was absolutely a tadpole in "Muppet Babies", which gets awkward.
• Robin is young but a frog on The Muppet Show, and the younger Robin who appears in one episode of Muppet Babies is a tadpole. Kermit is past the tadpole stage; nothing awkward about it other than anthropomorphizing the rate of his aging, which is nothing new.
  • It is actually a good metaphor for the relatively immobile infant stage versus the more active toddler stage.

When is this set? I mean, it features references to movies and TV shows that weren't out when The Muppet Show was broadcast, let alone when the characters were kids.

• The entire show is based on a fantasy/dream sequence of Miss Piggy's from the movie The Muppets Take Manhattan, where she tries to imagine what it would have been like if she and Kermit had known each other when they were little, so you could view the cartoon as either an alternate reality or an extended dream sequence.
  • That, and the Muppets never worried too much about continuity in the first place.
    • Yeah, they've always had a loose canon. (Crazy Harry: Did somebody say "Cannon"? *BOOM*)

• This troper remember a parody of Star Wars with Kermit as Luke and Miss Piggy as Leia. Did they ever follow it up and have Kermit say "That's not true! That's impossible! No, that's really impossible." Because that would've been funny.
• Skeeter: She was created to add more female characters to the cast. If they were worried about that, why didn't they just use Janice? In fact, why was so little of Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem unused?
  • They spawned on the floor of CBGB's. Under the power lines.
  • I suppose Skeeter, the budding jock girl, made a nice counterpoint to both the uber-girly Miss Piggy and the computer-nerd rewrite of Scooter's character.
  • Janice did show up on one episode as the new girl who moved in next door. She was able to read and read "The Tale of Peter Rabbit".

• Skeeter isn't Janice? I thought that from squre one.

The Muppet Babies never made my dreams come true.

Now I'm pushing 30, broke, and in a dead-end job. They LIED to me. In song, no less.

• Hey, they also told you that when your world looks kinda weird and you wish that you weren't there / just close your eyes and make-believe and you can be anywhere. I've been riding that one to avoid the soul-crushingness of a full-time job for years. Though there's fridge logic in that your world generally looks very weird when you make-believe..

Okay, if the show is based on a dream sequence in The Muppets Take Manhattan, why does A Muppet Family Christmas have home movie footage of the time period?

There goes that loose canon again.

Scooter's Age

Ignoring the Skeeter mystery, judging by this show, Scooter should be the same age as Kermit and the gang. So, when the grow up and start a theater company, why is it that Scooter is just a gofer and clearly just starting out, whereas everybody else are established actors or managers?

• He got into the busienss later than everyone else.

How old was the Nanny?

Was it ever specified how old the Nanny was? I always thought she was an old woman (with the head of Cinderella's stepmother). Why was she looking after children that clearly didn't resemble human children at all? What kind of a place was she running? "Orphanage for Abandoned Freak Babies"?

• In a world, like theirs, containing Lions and Tigers and Humans, Oh My!, her cast of charges wouldn't seem at all unusual.