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Michael Frith doesn’t remember exactly who first envisioned Skeeter, the nearsighted Muppet introduced in the CBS animated show Muppet Babies (1984-1991). He suggests that it could have been Jim Henson, the legendary Muppets creator. Along with Bob Richardson and Frith, all three producers on the show, Henson recognized the need for a strong female character to balance out the chaos brought by the childlike version of Miss Piggy. As Scooter’s twin sister, Skeeter was athletic, intelligent, and self-assured—traits that little girls watching the show could admire and aspire to.
“She was a fantastic character,” Frith shares with mental_floss. “She was more outgoing than Piggy and brought a ton of positive energy to the show. I always had a soft spot for Skeeter.”
The audience felt the same way. But once Muppet Babies concluded its seven-season run, Skeeter appeared to be one of the few characters created by Henson to fade into obscurity. Over time, her fans began to wonder why she never appeared in later Muppet movies, TV specials, or even got a mention from her former playmates. Was Skeeter really a persona non grata in the Muppet universe? Was Muppet Babies considered official Muppet canon? Never made into a traditional felt puppet, could she even technically be called a Muppet? And where did this emblem of female empowerment disappear to?
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If Frank Oz had had his way, the Muppet Babies would have never existed. In the early 1980s, Frith had envisioned an idea to turn the adult Muppets—Kermit, Miss Piggy, Rowlf, Fozzie Bear, and others—into animated children. Frith believed the characters would be perfect for delivering moral and educational lessons in ways that would be harder to do once they had matured into Muppet adulthood.
“Piggy as an adult isn’t very relatable to kids,” he explains. “But as a child, she would be. Jim was really fond of the idea.”
Oz, however, disagreed. A veteran puppeteer who had portrayed Miss Piggy before becoming a film director, Oz was resolute that the Muppets should not be simplified for a younger audience. “He believed it wasn’t right to take characters with adult traits and reduce them for a child’s show,” Frith recalls. “The Muppet Show was meant to be for families, not just children. Sesame Street was Henson’s creation for children, while the Muppets were intended to be a bit more edgy.”
For a while, Oz’s stance prevailed. But during the production of the 1984 movie The Muppets Take Manhattan, Henson found a way around it. Frith recalls that Henson casually suggested the idea of overseeing a segment of the film, and shared his plans with Oz, the director.
“Sure, Jim,” Oz replied. “What’s the concept?”
“Well,” Henson responded, “I thought it would be fun to do a segment where the Muppets are babies.”
Frith and the rest of Henson’s team began working on creating live-action Muppets that would appear as children in a dream sequence. The audience reaction to the scene was so overwhelming that CBS began urging Henson to turn it into an animated series based on the same idea.
Muppet Babies debuted in 1984 to impressive ratings, quickly becoming a Saturday morning television favorite. However, during the show’s development, Frith and the other writers and producers faced a challenge regarding gender representation in the cast. Frith attributes this imbalance to the predominantly male puppeteers who had been working in the Henson studios since the 1960s.
“We had Piggy and Nanny, both strong female characters, but we needed at least one more,” says Frith. “The Muppets grew out of the puppeteers’ influence. You could criticize it as a boys’ club, but it wasn’t any different from The Beatles.”
The outcome was Skeeter, a bold, brash, and adventurous character—completely different from her shy, nerdy twin brother. In the show’s many fantasy sequences—which often used clips from films and TV shows—Skeeter took on the role of a problem-solver. (Frith, by the way, finds it amusing that these clips were seen as a brilliant move: They were actually used because the show didn’t have the budget for full animation.)
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During the show’s run, Skeeter made a brief but notable appearance in a Muppet Babies live stage performance. Instead of being a traditional hand puppet, she and the other Babies were reimagined as massive, seven-foot costumes worn by performers. This would turn out to be her only live appearance. Despite several subsequent movies and series, Frith notes that no one considered using Skeeter in other productions. In a ‘home movies’ segment for a 1987 TV special, the Babies appear as live-action Muppets, but Skeeter is notably absent.
“We never thought, ‘Let’s just take an old Scooter puppet, slap on some long hair and a dress,’” Frith explains. “One of the challenges with having such a large ensemble cast is managing all the characters and making sure they all get enough screen time. It becomes quite a task to keep track of everything.”
Skeeter did make appearances in various Muppet Babies-themed storybooks and toy lines throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but always as a two-dimensional illustration, never as an adult. By the time Disney acquired the Muppets from The Jim Henson Company in 2004, her chances of making a comeback seemed even more unlikely. It would take a devoted Skeeter fan to finally answer the question of what happened when she grew up.
Amy Mebberson
Amy Mebberson was one of many young girls who found herself captivated by Skeeter while watching her on television. Originally from Australia, Mebberson moved to the United States in 2006 to pursue a career in illustration. In 2009, she was brought on board as a penciler for Boom! Studios, which was launching a Muppet Show comic book. It didn’t take long for Mebberson to pitch her own ideas.
“I consider the Muppet Babies cartoon an essential part of Muppet history,” Mebberson shares with mental_floss. “Even though Skeeter was created specifically for the cartoon, she left such a lasting impression on fans that we all couldn’t help but wonder what happened to her when they all grew up. The comics gave us a chance to explore that mystery.”
In 2009, Mebberson pitched the idea of bringing Skeeter back to the comic’s writer, Roger Langridge, sketching her possible appearance as an adult. Langridge and Boom! Studios then had to seek approval from Disney. The company’s response sheds light on why Skeeter has remained such an elusive figure in Muppet history over the past quarter-century.
According to Jesse Post, a former Disney employee who acted as a liaison for licensees like Boom! and the custodians at The Muppets Studio, Disney supported Frank Oz’s preference to maintain the Muppets as characters geared toward an adult audience. This sentiment was echoed in a 2008 article in The New York Times, which noted that some children had difficulty recognizing Kermit and his fellow Muppets.”
“Muppet Babies was off-limits at the time,” Post recalls speaking with mental_floss. During a conversation with Susan Butterworth, then in charge of all Muppet-related affairs, Post says she was enthusiastic about the idea of bringing Skeeter into the comic series. However, she didn’t want to make any direct ties to the animated show. (According to an anonymous Disney insider, Skeeter hasn’t been featured in any projects because she was never technically classified as a Muppet.)
“The issue with Muppet Babies was that between Disney’s 2004 acquisition and the 2011 Jason Segel movie, the company had primarily marketed the Muppets to an adult audience,” Post explains. “There was some secondary focus on different children’s age groups, but the primary concern was that an adult-targeted movie might struggle if the market was flooded with Muppet diapers and baby bottles. That made sense from a business perspective.”
The unofficial rule was that the Muppets were gearing up for a major film comeback aimed at adult moviegoers and didn’t need to remind the audience of their baby versions. This made referencing Muppet Babies problematic. Initially, Mebberson and Langridge weren’t given permission to mention Skeeter by name, but that permission came later. In the four issues in which she appeared, a framing device with Statler and Waldorf in the balcony helped clarify that the story might exist outside the main continuity. It seems Disney is not invested in treating Muppet Babies as part of the official Muppet canon, and neither is anyone else.”
“It had its own universe, much like the Muppets did,” Frith reflects. “If you try to make sense of the movies and the shows, you’ll notice all sorts of contradictions. I’m not sure if they’re alternate worlds or parallel ones. It’s like quantum physics.”
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Mebberson’s The Muppet Show run concluded in 2010. Since then, she’s managed to sneak in a few brief appearances of Skeeter while working on Muppet storybooks. In the imaginative timelines created by both Mebberson and Frith, Skeeter has become a globetrotter, always finding herself in the most remote corners of the world. “People love to portray fraternal twins as total opposites,” Mebberson explains. “It just made sense that if Scooter is the homebody who adores his mother, Skeeter would be the rebellious one who ran away to join the circus or something.”
Frith, who has since retired from Muppet-related work but recently teamed up on an app called Leonardo’s Cat, imagines Skeeter is now involved in philanthropic endeavors similar to his own. Frith is part of No Strings International, a program that uses puppetry to offer comfort to children in impoverished regions of the world. “I picture her in the Arctic,” he says. “Or perhaps in the Middle East.”
“Skeeter is currently studying abroad,” he adds. “And if she ever finds her way back to dry land, she’ll stop by for a visit.”
