MuppetVision 3D, which opened at Walt Disney World over 30 years ago, is still introducing kids to the humor and joy of the Muppets, even kickstarting full-blown Muppet obsessions. I know this because my 5-year-old was recently introduced to the Muppets thanks to MuppetVision, and it kickstarted a full-blown Muppet obsession.

It could have gone another way. When my family visited Disney World last year, MuppetVision 3D didn’t even make our list of must-do attractions. 

I first saw MuppetVision back in 1993 as a teen on my family’s first Disney World vacation. The attraction, which opened in 1991 and was one of Jim Henson’s last projects, entertains with a 3D film, water and bubble effects, and live Muppets in the theater. My family and I left the show grinning from the novel-at-the-time effects and the goofy, lovable, familiar Muppet characters. 

Then, in 2001, a copy of the show opened at Disney California Adventure while I was living in Southern California. I don’t know how many times I saw it on my many, many visits to the park, but it was many, many times. MuppetVision 3D became wired into my brain as a ubiquitous Disney theme park attraction.

But by 2014, when Disney quietly replaced the California Adventure version with the Mickey’s PhilharMagic show, I’d grown a bit tired of MuppetVision. The Muppets franchise, now approaching the 50th anniversary of The Muppet Show debut in 1976, was also feeling tired. There have been many efforts by Disney to revive the classic, beloved characters for a new generation with new movies and streaming shows, but the franchise has failed to regain the popularity of its early days, even with millennials’ demand for nostalgia. Maybe the Muppets don’t feel nostalgic because they’ve sort of always been there? 

Fast forward to 2024, and here I was with my family in Florida, planning out our day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios park. Our two sons were excited about the Star Wars rides, and I was eager for Toy Story Land and the Tower of Terror. But I noticed MuppetVision on the list of attractions and asked my husband whether he’d ever seen it. No, he hadn’t. Really? Never? 

So my husband had never seen it, and my kids (who were born after 2014 and had never set foot in Florida until this trip) had never seen it. And as it turned out, this was our last chance to see it, because Disney had just announced that in June 2025, MuppetVision 3D would permanently end, and its theater would be demolished to make way for a new Monsters, Inc. land.

As we filed into the pre-show area, I began to get chills of nostalgia watching Scooter, Fozzie, Sam Eagle and others fumbling around to give us the show instructions and some wacky, classic Muppet entertainment. We pointed out to my 5-year-old, who is also Sam, that the patriotic blue eagle shared his name. I saw him gazing at the screens with a smile he couldn’t contain, a bit of wonder, and also some confusion. “Have you ever seen these characters before?” I asked. No, Sam hadn’t. We’re a big TV and movie family, a big Disney-watching family, so this was a striking moment for me. His first Muppets!

After the show, my husband couldn’t stop raving about MuppetVision or telling anyone we encountered to make sure and see it. Just as I had done 30 years earlier, my kids left the theater grinning and recounting their favorite moments. And I left a bit sad; what we had seen was more than just a fun Disney attraction. We’d experienced a bit of pop culture history that I’d been enjoying for most of my life, for the last time.

One morning about two months after our trip, Sam began reciting lines from his favorite part of MuppetVision. This was the first time he’d mentioned it since the day we’d seen it. He then asked me whether there were any Muppet TV shows or movies. Well! I pulled up Disney+, and Sam was soon sucked into a 50-year-long rabbit hole of the Muppets.

It started with an episode of the original Muppet Show from 1980 in which Mark Hamill, playing both himself and Luke Skywalker, is the celebrity host along with R2D2 and C3PO. A Star Wars fan, Sam loved the mash-up. He then moved onto The Muppet Movie from 1979, the animated Muppet Babies reboot from 2018 and the Disney+ streaming series Muppets Now from 2020. As a family, we ate popcorn together and watched Jason Segel and Amy Adams in The Muppets from 2011. The film features a pseudo-human puppet character named Walter who sees The Muppet Show for the first time, and it immediately becomes his world. It went something like that for Sam, too.

Sam made it his mission to learn all the characters and their idiosyncrasies, voices, musical instruments and signature bits. He started with the most well known–Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Fozzie–but soon delved into secondary characters like the giant ironically-named brown monster Sweetums, the creepy Uncle Deadly, the 4-legged crustacean Pepe the King Prawn and the wise-cracking, curmudgeonly duo Statler and Waldorf (I finally learned their names after 30 years). He began drawing them and filled notepads and reams of printer paper with pencil-and-crayon doodles that charmingly, accurately captured their essences. He started requesting that Alexa play all the Muppet music in her repertoire (and there is a lot!). 

To know Sam is to know that he has an infectious enthusiasm for his interests, and he talks a lot at a high volume. It was only a matter of time before he started coming home from school with Muppet coloring pages his kindergarten teacher printed for him and Muppet drawings his after-school counselors made for him. His friends’ parents began telling us that their kids were requesting to watch Muppets from Space and Muppet Babies. He invited himself to our neighbors’ house one night so we could all screen the 2011 movie. One day at school pick-up, I actually heard one of his friends humming “Rainbow Connection” as he wandered by me.

My husband and I were so charmed by Sam’s love of Muppets, we began searching for other Muppet experiences beyond Disney World. There weren’t many. We live near Hollywood, but Jim Henson Studios wasn’t open to the public. We found a few museum exhibits scattered around the country in Seattle, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, but nothing local. Then we came across an exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. We had a trip to New York City planned for our kids’ spring break, so we quietly added this to our itinerary.

After a long subway ride to Astoria, Queens on a windy Spring day, our family entered what we had only told our kids would be a “fun museum” (fingers crossed). Immediately we were greeted by a small display of Muppet toys in the gift shop. Wide-eyed, Sam asked us, “Did you plan this?” 

The Jim Henson Exhibition was everything we had hoped, and then some. It brought the puppetry experience to life with interactive exhibits where the kids designed their own Muppet and even recorded a puppet show with multiple cameras.

There were plenty of Muppets on display, as well as video clips and a whole theater screening original Muppet Show episodes. One of Sam’s favorite exhibits was a recording of Sam and Friends, Jim Henson’s first TV series in the 1950s. We had been reading him a sweet kids’ book called I am Jim Henson which mentioned the series. Though in black and white and with few effects and tinny audio, there was something about the simple zaniness of the clips that Sam appreciated. Jim Henson showed us that you could entertain with nothing but expressive felt, distinctive voices and a passion for creating.

Sam and his older brother have now begun creating their own puppet shows out of googly eye-adorned socks. Our walls are covered with Muppet drawings and our ears are often filled with catchy, heartwarming and wacky Muppet music. We gave Sam a plush Kermit which he takes around the house like his little buddy, chatting with him and serving him breakfast. As imaginary friends go, it’s hard to imagine a better one than Kermit: a great friend who is encouraging, always helping others see the best in themselves, and a mean banjo player to boot.

There is something about 5-year-old’s unfiltered joy, but also subtly sophisticated understanding, that is extraordinary each time I catch it. Although I grew up with these familiar characters, my son gets the Muppets in a way I never did. He now knows they are puppets, and he knows who created them. But he somehow loves them more for it. He sees the creativity and dedication that went into developing their world. How they’ve endured through the decades. The showmanship and the musical talent. He’s entertained, yes, but he’s also inspired.

I never thought I’d feel anything about MuppetVision 3D ending, but now it borders on heartbreaking. I find myself wishing it will replace PhilharMagic at California Adventure so my family can see it many, many more times. But even if that really was our last time experiencing the show, it’s hard to imagine a better outcome than the Muppet magic that now lives with us. I think we’ve found the Rainbow Connection.

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MuppetVision 3D’s last day in Disney’s Hollywood Studios will be June 7, 2025.