Explaining the appeal of the Muppets – going on for 40+ years now – is probably an outright impossibility. There is no “one thing” that can explain the charm. There are certainly identifiable elements, which includes the craftsmanship and variety of each puppet’s design, the voice acting, the subtle touch with which the puppeteers manipulate the character, solid writing, etc.; but on the surface one wouldn’t expect all the parts to pull together so crisply. And yet they do, time and time again.

Jim Henson once described the “magic” of the Muppets as beyond even his understanding, but he did know this much: if the performance, writing and craftsmanship clicked, even viewers of a live Muppet performance – who could see behind the curtain and watch the puppeteer’s manipulations – would be drawn without reservation to the character and engage the puppet as the sole performer before them.

Henson’s last Muppet feature film he was involved in for all aspects of production was 1984′s The Muppets Take Manhattan. The film was the third such outing for the gang that had keenly twisted ever-so-slightly the television variety show formula for The Muppet Show in the late 70s and early 80s. It relies on the tried-and-true formula of the backstage musical – particularly the Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland 30s-40s “Let’s get the kids together and put on a show!” subset – and mashes it up with such well established characters as Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and Rowlf the Dog.  Like The Muppet Show, the strength of The Muppets Take Manhattan is not that it mocks or finds its humor in mercilessly skewering the genre it inhabits, but rather in how it embraces the genre sincerely, allowing the set-ups and payoffs of the comedy to come from the absurdest alternate reality ever-present when you have talking “frogs and dogs and bears and  chickens and… and whatever,” as Kermit so plainly states.

This isn’t to say that Henson and company don’t walk the extra mile to milk a cliché. Kermit’s various turns as a sleazy agent, a smarmy producer, and an amnesiac corporate yuppie (complete with corporate yuppie frog business partners) are straight from Lampooning 101. The writers are just so dang kind about it. They even send up themselves by having amnesiac Kermit, in one of the funniest bits of the film, mock the concept of a frog-pig love affair to Miss Piggy’s face (“Ahhh… the sounds of love: su-EEEEE! Oink, oink!”).

And it’s the little touches sprinkled throughout the movie that pop up from time to time that keeps the film and the formula conventions fresh: Fozzie Bear tagging along his own teddy bear, Rowlf managing a dog kennel, and my personal favorite, the Swedish Chef speaking gibberish. The musical numbers are approached and executed with keen precision, as any worthy backstage musical should be. The kitchen number involving Rizzo the Rat and his rodent pals is an imaginative winner.  Most memorable is the Miss Piggy imagined “what if” scenario of the Muppet gang as infants, which later spawned the Muppet Babies Saturday morning cartoon series. Topping it off is the multi-sequence concluding numbers from the “Manhattan Melodies” Broadway show itself, wherein Henson, director Frank Oz, and the Muppet Studios staff reveal their fine-tuned attention to film history, invoking the grand finale set designs from such classic Broadway inspired musicals as An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.

Not to be left aside, there are of course the one-line zingers, complete with Janice being indiscreetly overheard after everyone in the group abruptly ends their conversation (“So I told him ‘Look, buddy, I don’t take my clothes off for anybody, even if it is artistic’…”), a cop overhearing something Kermit says out of context (“I gotta get a contract so I can go out and kill ‘em”), and even Kermit’s brief awkward matter-of-fact statement to newly introduced friend Jenny (“I’m a frog”). And, of course, cameos left and right, from then New York City Mayor Edward Koch, to Brooke Shields. The best cameo may belong to Joan Rivers, who takes part in a gut-busting scene of make-up madness with Miss Piggy.

Bringing it all together is Kermit and his pals, ever endearing, whimsical, and flat-out charismatic. “Charisma” is not the adjective one would expect from cloth, felt, ping-pong balls and foam rubber, and yet there it is, and not at all lacking. The Muppets Take Manhattan, like all the best Muppet adventures, embodies the very “magic” Henson himself could not fully explain: true heart and soul.

The Muppets Take Manhattan is available on DVD and Blu-ray Disc from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.