Recommended music: The Smashing Pumpkins – Bullet With Butterfly Wings
We’re full of charisma or “rizz” this #SomethingElseSunday, as we’re still celebrating 70 years of the Muppets! From the Palisades Toys Muppets line, it’s Rizzo the Rat!
The most well-known rodent in the world of the Muppets, Rizzo, is a funny and friendly rat. While Rizzo didn’t make his first appearance on The Muppet Show until episode 418, he became a pretty regular character and showed up in 23 episodes over the final season and a half. Following The Muppet Show and a smaller part in The Great Muppet Caper, Rizzo had a much larger role in The Muppets Take Manhattan. The little rat has since been involved in nearly 100 different Muppet productions over the past 45 years, from movies to music to television and video games.
At the suggestion of Frank Oz, Rizzo’s name comes from Ratso Rizzo, who was the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. Steve Whitmire created the character of Rizzo and performed him from 1980 until he was let go in 2016. The character still does not appear to have been officially recast, so Rizzo has been much more of a background Muppet for the past decade outside of his inclusion in the newer Muppet Babies animated series.
In the Palisades Muppet toy line, Rizzo appeared in the fourth wave and was the smallest figure released in the entire line. Though the label shows “From: Muppets From Space,” the figure’s design also looks a lot like his appearance from Muppets Tonight. I believe he would have been the first Muppets Tonight-labeled figure in the line, but the idea was scrapped when there weren’t good reference photos for the Dancing Cheeses from the first episode, and the change was made to highlight the feature film instead.
Due to the small figure size, he came with a good amount of accessories, including a boxing glove on a spring, cheese, a hat, a headset, a slice of pizza with a box, rat poison, and a table. There was a chase version of the figure released that changed the color on a few of the accessories and a rare black jacket version given away at a Wizard World convention.
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