For people who didn't live through the era, it's a bit hard to quantify just how huge the Muppets were between 1975 and 1985. For five seasons, they were the stars of the beloved and wildly popular syndicated series "The Muppet Show," rubbing shoulders with celebrities like Liza Minnelli, Sylvester Stallone, and Mark Hamill. (Hamill's episode of "The Muppet Show" is pretty notable, bringing the worlds of the Muppets and Lucasfilm even closer together.) During that show's run, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie Bear also made the leap to the big screen with the absolute, stone-cold classic 1979 film "The Muppet Movie," which only proved how talented they were while giving the world one of the most instantly iconic songs in "Rainbow Connection." While "The Muppet Show" ended its run in 1981, the Muppets would continue making successful films, such as that year's "The Great Muppet Caper" as well as the end of the would-be trilogy of sorts, "The Muppets Take Manhattan." This 1984 musical comedy is set in the Big Apple and is a riff on old-fashioned MGM musicals in which a group of young hoofers decide to put on a show.
But the one show that the film managed to set up was something for an even younger part of the all-ages audiences that flocked to Muppet movies. In one key scene of the film, we get to see what it would be like if everyone from Kermit to Piggy to Scooter was a baby, all living in the same nursery together. Whatever your opinion of the scene and its accompanying song, it was designed to help set up a spin-off show that would start airing later that fall on CBS. Yes, folks, this movie is what gave us "Muppet Babies."