Evaluation

When starting this project back in January, I knew instantly that I wanted to do my essay on something Muppet related, in particular the Disney regin which started in 2004, after The Walt Disney Company bought the Muppet and Bear in The Big Blue House properties from the Jim Henson Comapny for a undisclosed fee. However it has not been smooth sailing for The Muppet characters now under the banner of the Muppets Studios and I wanted to explore where it has gone wrong. 

I had briefly considered doing my essay on something Marvel related however I could not think of a good question. And I did have a question about The Office US, about How the character change in Michael Scott saved the show from cancellation? However I discovered mutliple video essays online already talking about this so I decided to do something different and decided to go with my muppet question.

I knew that I wanted to tell a story of some sorts within my essay and I wanted to cover everything from the last decade in order starting with the success of The Muppets (film) and then the gradual decline starting with Muppets Most Wanted and then The Muppets (TV show) leading into the present day. And I needed to discover how it went so wrong. 

When researching for The Muppets, the ABC show, I knew that ratings where a huge factor in the shows canellation, however ratings are not really a thing we have in the UK so I had to research into how the Neilsen ratings woked and how they were calculated in order to understand just how big of a decline The Muppets had in ratings after it's very promising start. And after learning how the ratings worked, I decided to look at some reviews for The Muppets. 

Although reviews are personal opinion, If many reviews say the same thing, then it becomes more clear of a show is good or not. Many, if not all the reviews for The Muppets first two episodes (the only reviews available online) were overwhelmingly negative and it continued on from there and utlimately turned people away from the show, although the episodes did improve. I looked at these reviews to get an idea of how much this show was disliked and ultimately lead to the shows cancellation. I also looked at Muppet fan sites, Muppet Central Forum and Toughpigs however they are purely fan opinion and do not count towards the question at hand, I decided not too include any findings from these sites. 

I looked into the financial statistics of both the 2011 film The Muppets and it's sequel Muppets Most Wanted, to compare the two with one being a surpise hit at the box office, with the follow up, making less money on a bigger budget. This research lead to me being able to discuss the possible reasons for why this was the case in my essay. 

For my last part of my research, I wanted to discuss at length the dismissal of Steve Whitmire in 2017. Whitmire was fired from The Muppets in 2017 after speaking out at the handling of The Muppets (2015). After his dismissal, Whitmire created a blog post to speak to fans and share his experiences and his views on his sacking. I thought this would have been a great thing to look at and use in my essay. Unfortunately, Steve's website is now defunct meaning I could not access what I wanted to find. I tried using the way back machine to see if I could find what I was looking for however, only a select number of blog posts where available and none of the had what I wanted meaning I was unable to fully cover this section of my essay in detail because I was unable to gain a proper quote from Whitmire.

I thought the actual essay writing was easy enough. I know my chosen subject of The Muppets very well, so talking about the history and context behind certiain events was fine. And I encountered no problems in reaching my word count and with my references because I used the website Cite This For Me. 

However when I recieved my feedback I realised that I had made a few errors in my essay. The biggest error being that I made it far too personal, for an essay. I included my own views on the question far too often which is not allowed on an essay like this. As well as this, I had failed to back up some of my facts and certain sources in my essay in particualr when talking about previous films. However these issues were all easy to fix and adapting my essay to accomodate these changes. 

In conclusion, I feel that this has been a great experience for learning how to write essays, now I know not to make the mistakes that I have made in my first draft. It has taught me about being able to take control of a project myself, having to keep mysef motivated and having to manage limited interaction with my lecturer which I think I did successfully. Overall I have enjoyed this Unit.