Fox News' morning show, Fox and Friends, took aim at a recent Muppet Babies episode where Gonzo dresses up as a princess as "Gonzorella," complaining that the episode went too far in including a plotline about a gender-nonconforming character.
The amusing irony of Fox News taking issue with a Muppet Babies episode is that it was only earlier this year that Fox News was complaining about Disney+ including a content warning for 18 episodes of The Muppet Show of the 120 episodes featured on the streaming service. However, now Fox is the ones who are anti-Muppet.
It is all over a recent episode of the Disney Junior series, Muppet Babies, where the Muppets are having a ball and Gonzo wants to wear a princess dress like Piggy and Summer, but they let Gonzo know that boys are supposed to wear knight costumes and not dresses. A saddened Gonzo meets with his friend, Rizzo, who reveals that he is Gonzo's fairy ratfather and he will create a dress that has a mask so that Gonzo can attend the ball and no one will know that it is him...
Gonzo eagerly agrees and is a hit at the ball. He ran off, leaving behind a glass slipper. When the gang went to go look for their mystery princess friend the next day, Gonzo comes clean, "Everyone, there's something I need to tell you. The princess who came to your ball tonight was me." He then transforms into Gonzorella again and adds, “You all expected me to look a certain way. I don’t want you to be upset with me, but I don’t want to do things because that’s the way they’ve always been done either. I want to be me.”
The other Muppets then apologize for making Gonzo feel bad about wearing a dress, with Piggy noting, "Oh Gonzo, we're sorry, it wasn't very nice of us to tell you what to wear to our ball" and Summer added, "You're our friend and we love you any way you are."
This heartwarming sentiment did not sit well with Fox and Friends, as guest Pete Hegseth responded to the clip by noting, Is this what kids were clamoring for from the muppets? Cross-dressing? Was that a big ask? Something they were missing in their lives? What this is? I mean, you can overdo it, but we've also underdone it for too long. We've allowed places like this to say, okay, yeah let's throw a little bit of this in there, a little bit more gender-fluid, maybe we'll throw some cross-dressing in there, and expect culturally for us not to change, and we have. And that's — it's cartoons like this which influence kids which are a part of that."
The other hosts all generally agreed that this was not something that kids should be seeing on television, although they did at least note that there are a lot of different options out there for kids to choose from out there in TV Land, so perhaps having one show be like this isn't all that big of a deal.
Source: Wonkette