Recommended music: Humanga Danga – Lima Bean Bunny Board
It’s time to spill the beans this #SomethingElseSunday, as we’re still celebrating 70 years of the Muppets! Here’s a character you’ve likely seen a few times, but never really cared for. From the Diamond Select Toys Muppets Select line, it’s Bean Bunny!
In 1986, HBO aired a new TV special, “The Tale of the Bunny Picnic”. The program told the story of an overtly cute Bean Bunny, who naturally came from a family of bunnies, and helped to make peace with the farmer’s dog.
The character returned in 1989, appearing on 11 of the 12 episodes of NBC-based The Jim Henson Hour. The following year, NBC aired a special, ‘The Muppets at Walt Disney World’, which promoted the planned merger of the Muppets and the rest of The Jim Henson Company into The Walt Disney Company. Bean fits right in with established Muppet characters on the special, appearing at EPCOT Center with Scooter. A walk-around version of Bean, played by a cast member at Disney-MGM Studios, was part of two stage shows: ‘Here Come the Muppets’ and ‘Muppets On Location: Days of Swine and Roses’, which ran from 1990 until 1994.
Like Sweetums last week, Bean Bunny is undoubtedly most well-known for his role in the 1991 film attraction Muppet*Vision 3D, which ran for 34 years at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park. In the attraction, Bean appears in the pre-show and main-show films and also as a physical puppet in a theater balcony, playing a critical role in the show.
With all these inclusions in the theme parks, it seemed Bean was meant to be a major player in Muppet productions going forward, but his role diminished after Jim Henson’s passing. Bean’s performer, Steve Whitmire, took over the role of Kermit the Frog around this time, and while Whitmire’s other character, Rizzo the Rat, had a bigger role in 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol, Bean only appeared in a few scenes. While Bean did show up on Muppets Tonight, Muppets from Space, the Muppet Babies reboot, and a few direct-to-DVD Muppet films, he was in a background role for these appearances as well.
Unfortunately, the Palisades Toys Muppet toy line ended before Bean was considered. Still, he finally showed up in action figure form outside of the theme parks in a couple of lines from Diamond Select Toys. When the first wave of figures in DST’s Muppets Select line debuted in 2016, Bean was packed in with Kermit the Frog. The figure was then included in the Backstage Deluxe Action Figure Box Set, which came with a half dozen repacked figures in 2023.
I typically don’t collect the DST Muppets line because of its scale and detail. However, Bean’s exclusion from the Palisades line made this purchase a necessity. His smaller size and lack of articulation are fine, as Bean will likely be relegated to a background character in my Muppet adventures as well. Also, just a heads up that you may need to apply some heat to the figure when you open him, as I immediately broke off the neck peg, which was stuck inside the head of this now hard-to-find figure.😣
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