The Muppets… Again! May Bring Back Long Lost Female Muppet Character and Long Gone Female Puppeteer

An alternative title to this post might be ‘Making A Post About a Muppet Almost No One Has Heard About and Her Performer Returning for The Muppets Sequel Constitutes a Clear Abuse of my Power As Managing Editor.’

But according to Tough Pigs sources, Annie Sue and even her Muppeteer Louise Gold will be returning for The Muppets… Again!, and that’s great, because I love the Muppets but they seriously have two female characters that anyone has ever heard of*. When you’re still disappointed, as an adult, that Big-Fat-Ugly-Bug-Face-Baby-Eating O’Brien didn’t at least become a running gag instead of a one-off joke, you get excited about these kind of things.

Annie Sue, her face cropped out of the picture above because page space requirements, is a young pig with a halo of blonde curls who showed up in the third season of The Muppet Show. Her singing talent led her to become something of a rival for Ms. Piggy, despite her quiet, humble, helpful demeanor, and the fact that she openly considered Piggy to be her role model. And yet… bad things just seemed to keep happening to Piggy when Annie Sue was around, particularly when she was trying to thwart the younger performer.

Unfortunately, Annie Sue never made more than a couple appearances on the show where she wasn’t simply a background character. But Empire Magazine’s upcoming article on the upcoming Muppets sequel seems to indicate that we’ll be seeing her again soon. ToughPigs, a Muppet fan site, has an eagle-eye reader who found this mention of her in the exclusive, from director James Bobin:

There’s a real sense that the Muppets belong here [in London]. In fact we’ve hired a woman called Louise Gold, who was the only female puppeteer on the original Muppet Show, and we’ve revived one of her characters, Annie Sue, who was Piggy’s rival, a pig that’s obsessed with Piggy, and who Piggy doesn’t like.

If there’s anybody I trust with Muppets news, it’s ToughPigs, so hopefully this quote will be verifiable in the published issue soon. Louise Gold, a native of Britain, was the only female puppeteer to work on The Muppet Show, primarily as an assistant puppeteer working with Jim Henson and Jerry Nelson on multi-puppeteer characters, though she played more individual characters on Sesame Street. Her last work for a major Muppet film was on Treasure Island. It’s very cool that they decided to reach out to her for the part rather than having somebody else reprise Annie Sue.

(via ToughPigs.)

*I stress, before you scroll right down to leave a comment: that the layperson has ever heard of. Barely anybody knows that Fozzie has a mom, for example, and Skeeter has never actually appeared as a puppet.