Photo: Owen Richardson Illustration Courtesy of Penguin Workshop Disney/Muppets
There’s a fun way for elementary school kids (and parents!) to engage in literary classics: Let the Muppets help.
TheMuppetsMeet the Classicsbook series — for kids 9 and up — first launched in 2017 withKermit and crewstarring in aMuppet-y version of thePhantom of the Opera. Now, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Rizzo and more return to take on another literary favorite withMuppets Meet the Classics: Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm(out this week).
Plus, they’re not just tales with the Muppets layered on top — Jackson wove in fun, and sometimes surprising, pop culture references throughout the book. (Like when Miss Piggy was annoyed to be wearing a dirndl and clogs because her contract “specifically said Prada would design all my outfits.”)
“For five decades, the Muppets have been part of the cultural conversation,” Jackson tells PEOPLE. “It’s natural that, as pop culture icons themselves, they’d interact quite easily with whatever is happening in contemporary life.”
Owen Richardson Illustration Courtesy of Penguin Workshop Disney/Muppets
The author — who himself is a pop culture expert as a former editor atInStyleandEntertainment Weekly,both sister publications of PEOPLE — read hundreds of Brothers Grimm tales to narrow it down to the 18 included, then he says he “cast” them all to get the mix just right.
“I actually created an Excel spreadsheet to calculate which Muppets fit best into the 18 selected stories, making sure no Muppet appeared too much or too little,” he explains of how he created the lineup. “Miss Piggy was, of course, very insistent that she had plenty of page time, and you don’t say no to Piggy.”
“The Muppets always embrace throwaway gags, and I couldn’t resist putting some into the book,” says Jackson.
“Koozebanians are Muppet aliens from the Planet Koozebane,” explains Jackson. “Sure, they might at first seem to be nothing like the Kardashian crew… until you consider just how much they all live in an entirely different universe from the rest of us.”
See if you catch all of the pop culture references — there are a lot! — inMuppets Meet the Classics: Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm($12.99), out now.
source: people.com
