Muppets Tonight was a variety show that debuted on ABC on March 8, 1996. Like The Muppet Show, it was a comedy/variety series which featured some of the biggest stars of its day. There were, however, some key differences. The most notable was that Kermit the Frog was not the host. While he was present, the reins of emcee were handed to the now-obscure Muppet Clifford. And with Frank Oz focused on directing, Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear’s roles were significantly reduced.
While those changes may have been enough to throw the chemistry off, the current “puppet captain” of the Muppets, Bill Barretta, tells Polygon, “There weren’t a lot of variety shows at the time and Muppets Tonight didn’t fit in the lineup.” Whatever the reason, Muppets Tonight only lasted 22 episodes over two seasons.
It did, however, prove to be the launchpad for Barretta’s biggest original character, Pepé the King Prawn. Beginning as a minor role on a now-forgotten show, Pepé has not only become one of the troupe’s core characters, but probably its most significant addition since the death of Jim Henson in 1990.
Spawning the prawn
Much like the first Kermit the Frog puppet was made from a coat once owned by Jim Henson’s mom, Pepé began with a family connection.
“I met my wife in 1994,” Barretta says. “She was born in Madrid, Spain and I met her aunt, Maria Teresa, shortly after. Her aunt was just the funniest little character, a little Spanish lady with a great sense of humor. The funny thing was, our connection was kind of through laughter, because she didn’t speak English very well. She would start off in English with me, then quickly it was into Spanish. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I knew she was making jokes about things. She liked to tease and have fun. The unique thing about her was, she would say things like, ‘Hey, time to go to the mall, Bill, okay’ or ‘Hey, you’re wearing a blue shirt, okay.’ She spoke in statements, it wasn’t ever questions, and I thought: Well, that’s kind of an interesting trait.”
He’s a king prawn because he’s got a bigger attitude.
Soon after Barretta met Maria Teresa, she began her journey from flesh to felt.
“It was coming to the end of Muppet Treasure Island, and Brian Henson was talking about doing a new series. He wanted to workshop some new characters,” says Barretta. “I was at dinner one night with Muppets writer-director Kirk Thatcher, my wife, and her aunt. And in typical fashion, Maria Teresa was very funny and teasing and naughty and very brutally honest with just no boundaries. She just said what was on her mind, which I loved.”
After the dinner, Barretta began telling Thatcher about how he wanted to shape a new Muppet around his wife’s aunt, so they began discussing her character traits. Barretta described her as “mischievous and a little naughty.” He also meant to say that, in a funny way, she was “selfish,” except he said “shellfish” instead. Then Thatcher replied, “Wait, maybe it’s a shellfish of some kind.” Before long they landed on a shrimp, but Barretta insisted, “He’s a king prawn because he’s got a bigger attitude.”
Veteran Muppet designer Michael Frith designed the character, which began as a more Kermit-sized Muppet before Barretta insisted on a smaller character with a mechanism similar to Rizzo the Rat. “Rizzo has this little rod inside of him and it has a little ball at the bottom that hits your palm. [With that], you can rotate his head and pull a little string that goes to his mouth,” explains Barretta. From there, Pepé was built by the now-deceased Eric Engelhardt, who spent a few years in the 1990s with the Muppets before moving on to Disney’s The Book of Pooh. Finally, to the best of Barretta’s recollection, Tom Newby, whose electromechanical work with the Muppets dates all the way back to the early 1980s, built Pepé’s control mechanism.
Pepé hits it big
On the short run of Muppets Tonight, Barretta was still figuring out the character, who got paired with an elephant named Seymour performed by Brian Henson. The duo had a minor recurring role in the series and their partnership didn’t extend beyond the show, which Barretta attributes to Henson being busy with running The Jim Henson Company. Pepé’s breakout performance came three years later in the 1999 film, Muppets from Space, where Pepé suddenly became a part of the core group and got paired with Rizzo. Barretta attributes much of Pepé’s personality to the help he got from Rizzo performer Steve Whitmire.”
“When he got a relationship with Rizzo in Muppets from Space, that’s where his identity was clear to me,” Barretta says. “Steve and I had so much fun with the two of them because Steve took the position with Rizzo that he just thinks Pepé’s an idiot. That helped me develop Pepé.”
Pepé’s role in Muppets from Space was so funny and memorable that a nationwide fast food brand even noticed. Long John Silver’s reached out to the Muppets to use the king prawn to sell their fried shrimp.
“Those commercials were fun to make,” Barretta says. “I got to help develop it with them. My favorite thing was when he was sunbathing under the heat lamp.” The concept for the commercials involved Pepé selling out his family to the seafood chain. “There was even going to be a commercial where he was going to go, ‘That’s my cousin Manolo!’ but they didn’t want to do it.”
Meanwhile, Pepé continued to play a significant part in various Muppet TV movies in the early 2000s. He appears briefly in Jason Segel’s 2011 film, The Muppets, but gets significantly more screen time in 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted and 2015’s The Office-like mockumentary series The Muppets.
One Spicy Shrimp
Some of Pepé’s most memorable appearances came on talk shows promoting various Muppet projects, as opposed to the projects themselves. On YouTube, his 2012 appearance on The Today Show with Lara Spencer has garnered 1.6 million views for how flirtatious he was with her.
“Lara loves him,” Barretta says. “She made it okay, I think, to flirt with him.”
That said, Barretta notes an even more inappropriate Pepé appearance from 2008, when he was a guest on The Bonnie Hunt Show. That segment began with Pepé misunderstanding Bonnie Hunt’s name and expecting to go on a “bunny hunt,” and ends with him relentlessly ogling her suggestive Christmas sweater.
“That was pretty wild,” says Barretta. “We were promoting a Christmas special and a book by Pepé, It’s Hard Out Here for a Shrimp. I was really sick and I almost didn’t make it, but they said, ‘We have a doctor here, he can help you. Will you come anyway?’ So I went and they gave me a shot, and I was like, ‘Okay, I think I can get through it.’ I remember saying to Bonnie, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m really sick and I’ll just do what I can.’ It was all improvised. There wasn’t a plan other than to interview him about things. I remember she had these wreaths on her boobs and Pepé thought they were eyes staring at him.”
A look into Pepé’s future
Pepé’s single biggest moment didn’t come about because of any multi-million dollar official Muppet movie or TV show. Instead, it was via a viral meme begun by @caitycline21 on TikTok in December 2024, which featured a somewhat blurry image of Pepé in an apron with the caption, “The face I make when I’m trying to maintain great customer service while getting screamed at” and set to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” Within just a few days, the post had been viewed over 56 million times.
If it wasn’t already clear before then, the meme proved just how special Pepé the King Prawn really is. After all, literally dozens of new Muppets have been introduced in the 36 years since Jim Henson’s death, yet none have had this kind of impact besides Pepé. While Barretta says he’s not quite sure why Pepé caught on while other Muppets haven’t, his best guess is that the prawn follows in the hoof-prints of an even more famous Muppet.
“He’s kind of like a male Miss Piggy,” Barretta says. “I think people get a kick out of a little guy who’s got a big attitude, like a Joe Pesci.”
Despite Pepé’s big personality, if The Muppet Show does end up getting rebooted, Barretta would prefer for Pepé to take a bit of a back seat to the other Muppets.
“People like to write him as the guy that’s doing stuff and hitting on the ladies, but I don’t think of him as a lead character,” he says. “I think of him as a supporting character. As with most of my characters, I like being a reactionary instead of the one driving things.”
However, Barretta does have one big, yet-to-be-realized ambition for Pepé. “I’ve recently been talking to Muppet Studios about checking in with Red Lobster to see if we could do something with Pepé there,” he says. “Red Lobster would be fun.”
