The muppets are strange little creatures that exist in our reality but half way like all good actors do but I wanted to try to make sense of their physicality even if thatβs a foolβs errand.
So to start off while it is the name of the theatre troupe, muppets are the all encompassing term for these creatures we are getting into. The thing that they have in common is felt or felt like skin even if they have fur, hair or feathers over top- they also have non standard aging and many different cultural norms. But the fabric like nature of these guys is what groups them together, probably some divergent evolutionary trait rather than all of these animals, monsters and whatnots being exactly from the same family tree but close enough. Like how both octopi and chameleons both have chromatophores but are vastly different.
We do know that these creatures have internal organs and structures due to a variety of reasons but muppets can get drunk,smoke, do drugs, get plastic surgery,have sex and reproduce. They also have teeth,flesh,blood and organs as a lot of actions cannot be done without those things/ we have dialogue confirming it. Juries still out about bones though
Iβm not going to be expounding on puppeteers much but they seem to act more like movement/ mobility aids to those who need it like how you need wires in stunts.
Monsters are some of the most recognizable muppet creatures we have with their own specific canon names and everything which is very nice for actually categorizing them. This is the luxury of having so many with a lot of them on Sesame Street. But these guys are fuzzy, donβt tend to need clothes and range wildly in size. Most adults seem to develop a large appetite/ hunger but this is variable between individuals. Thereβs also a few subcategories of monsters with their own distinct cultures and builds since monsters are more variable overall.
Frackles: these guys are birdlike in features with long unfuzzy bills or fuzzy snouts with feathers/ fuzz covering the main body. They tend to be either ornery or depressed in mood (gonzo used to be classed as one of these guys but on review he is just a weirdo, he is not in fact an alien that was for the movie for they are a whatever)
grouches: The begrudging tv star on Sesame Street is a great example of what these guys are like. Fuzzy in dulled or cool color tones with unibrows and very distinctive culture. That being one of being grouchy, liking to be annoyed and living in trash (and loving the stuff too) you can see these guys in cities but have their own as well.
Whatnots or anything muppets are terms for your humanoid muppets, though that is a very vast scale with a rainbow of colors to choose from. We also have seen their lifespans much more closely though we still arenβt too sure when they exactly turn over in life stages. We do know that they donβt always need standard eyes to see and that for some of these figures they can remove features from their face with little pain though that is not the case with every whatnot (take beakerβs well everything, though he is always back to normal by the next time around)
J.p grosse-staler and Waldorf-Wayne and Wanda-lew zealand-walter-scooter(heβs a hybrid but still counts)
This sliding scale is the level of stylization that each whatnot has from most βrealisticβ to most cartoonish. Basically the difference between a little felt human to something more abstract- which is very funny since the ends of the scale Iβve included are related to one another but that goes to show that whatnots are very diverse in terms of their look
I am not going to list every muppet animal since that would bloat this section ridiculously but we will touch on the fact that these guys are seen as their non fabric counterparts and therefore are treated with less respect even though they tend to be able to stand upright and talk. Each muppet animal has their own cultural norms and different degrees of βhumanityβfor lack of a better word. Take pigs, they all wear clothes and most of them have hair on their heads but for the most part muppet animals are not naked unless they arenβt wearing accessories and even then- if they are covered in feathers or fur that tends to count.
With muppet animals in particular we run into the Pluto goofy problem with them a lot, letβs take well dogs as our control here. It seems to be a sliding scale of both humanization and independence.
Rowlf-Baskerville-sprocket-muppy-foofoo
On one end we have Rowlf, who walks on two legs, talks and does everything for himself really though even then he is still a dog with dog tendencies and can speak dog, this is generally the peak of humanity for a muppet animal but on the other side you have foofoo who walks on all fours, canβt talk in human dialects and is not independent, in fact they are owned by miss piggy and sometimes is an actual non felt dog.(im sure that is more a production thing than a canon thing but it does tell us how we see foofoo) now foofoo could just be very young or not enjoy independence and these are possibilities but unfortunately we arenβt going to get answers
(To the question of hybrids the answer is yes that is a possibility with both creatures in this subset and also with both monsters and whatnots. We donβt know the specifics but thats going to be a lot of this essay)
Now you might be typing now about all the muppets subcategories I missed and honestly Iβm not going to talk about clothes,food or houses since they are mostly inanimate objects brought to light with felt based technology(?) but I will touch upon the magical or otherwise
Ghosts,aliens and fairies: these are all real with mostly similar but slightly different stories than non felt versions of these creatures. Though they arenβt claimed to be real until seen(same with snuffy too) thereβs a lot of fairy lore and a lot of different aliens though in that case we arenβt sure if this was actual journalism or made up for entertainment
Vampirism: weβve only really seen vampires in terms of humans and whatnots so itβs unclear if monsters or animals can be affected by it but from what Iβve seen, whatnots are affected by vampirism differently than humans. They both have extended / immortal life spans though this is less impressive by whatnot standards. The main difference is that whatnots do not seem to hunger for blood or be affected by sunlight. They may not even feel hungry at all. The ones we have seen have more just been more manic for counting than anything else, whether this is a trait shared with all whatnot vampires or just the interest of a community of them is hard to say
Fraggles + the creatures around them: fraggles are also considered a story for the vast majority of the world since they hide underground from plain sight. If you think the Christmas crossover special is canon then they are in fact real. Fraggles have a lot to them along with all the creatures they have around them but that is mostly explained already
