The Muppets in release order

About this order

Where the line is drawn

The Muppets, for the purposes of this list, are the troupe The Muppet Show established and everything Disney bought along with them. That means all eight theatrical films, every special and television film from Hey, Cinderella! to the fiftieth-anniversary show, and the eight series: The Muppet Show, The Jim Henson Hour, Muppets Tonight, the 2015 ABC sitcom, Muppets Now, The Muppets Mayhem, Little Muppet Monsters and both runs of Muppet Babies.

The pre-1974 Henson specials are here because Kermit hosts or narrates them and Disney owns them, even where the rest of the troupe is nowhere in sight. Both Muppet Babies series are here for the same reason: Disney owns them and the babies are the troupe's own characters.

Sesame Street is not here, and the reason is a good illustration of how slippery the word is. Sesame Workshop has owned those characters since 2001 and licenses the word "Muppet" from Disney to describe them. Nor are Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, The Storyteller, Dinosaurs, Farscape or Bear in the Big Blue House, none of which is a Muppet production. Muppet*Vision 3D is a theme-park film, which this site leaves off every page it could appear on. Muppets TV, a French series made for TF1 in 2006, is not part of this. Neither are the Ed Sullivan and Jimmy Dean appearances, which are segments inside somebody else's programme.

Sam and Friends is missing on purpose

It ran on one Washington station from 1955 to 1961, five minutes at a time, four hundred-odd times, and the station wiped nearly all of it. What survives as an episode list is really a log of songs and sketches reconstructed from Henson's own transcription records: no episode numbers, several entries dated before the series began, and dates that are as often a recording as a broadcast. There is nothing there that could honestly be given a row.

The Muppet Show is dated by its British broadcasts

This is the biggest call on the page. The show was made at Elstree for Lew Grade's ATV and sold into American first-run syndication, so the two countries ran it in completely different orders — Britain had series one two weeks early and series three by six months, America had series four and five by about a month, and episode by episode it is British first on seventy and American first on forty-eight.

The reason for going British rather than taking whichever came first is that **there is no single American date to compare against**. Syndication meant every station picked its own night and its own running order. What guides print as "the US date" is one New York station's schedule; other markets differed by days, and sometimes by months. An episode-by-episode earliest-of-the-two would produce an order no human being anywhere ever watched. The British run is a real sequence a real audience sat through, so that is the one this list carries.

Two things follow that are worth knowing if you check this against anything else. Almost every episode guide, and IMDb, numbers the show by production order — so what they call the first episode of series four, the John Denver show, is nineteen rows further down this page than you would expect. And the first nine of series two came from a different ITV region than the rest, running up to two weeks earlier in a different order; ITV in 1976 was fifteen regional companies, most taking the show on the same day at different times, but London came in seven weeks late and picked it up mid-run. No source gives a defensible single national date for those nine.

Three things came out abroad first

The Muppet Movie opened in Britain on 31 May 1979, three weeks before America saw it, with a royal premiere in Leicester Square. Hey, Cinderella! and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas both went out on the CBC in Canada more than a year before an American network showed them — March 1969 against April 1970, and December 1977 against December 1978.

One claim is not used. IMDb's release list gives Muppets Most Wanted the Philippines two days before America, and Chile and Peru one day. Nothing else carries those dates, and a two-day gain on a single source is not worth a row that disagrees with every other guide.

Muppet Babies can be counted two ways, and this list counts broadcasts

The 1984 series is 107 half-hours whichever way you count them, in the same order either way. What differs is where the seasons break. CBS ran eighteen new half-hours across the 1989–90 season and eight the following autumn; the production seasons behind them were eleven and fifteen. This list follows the broadcasts, so its sixth season has eighteen episodes where most guides give it eleven. Nothing is missing or added — only the fence between two years moves.

The 2018 revival is built as half-hours of two eleven-minute stories, each with a title of its own, and this list gives each broadcast one row with both titles on it. That is how the 1984 series is listed, and how this site treats a broadcast everywhere else. Seventy-one half-hours, ending on one that tells a single story.

The Jim Henson Hour, and the episode nobody has seen

Twelve hours were made. NBC showed nine in 1989 and dropped the rest. Nickelodeon aired Secrets of the Muppets three years later.

The eleventh is on this list on a technicality. Only the drama half of it, Living with Dinosaurs, has ever been broadcast — in Britain at the end of 1989 and in America in 1993 — and its Muppet half never has. The British date is the one used, which is this page's rule anyway.

The twelfth is not here. Food, paired with The Three Ravens, has never been shown in any form; the Three Ravens half went out in Britain as an episode of The Storyteller, which is a different programme. A list ordered by broadcast has no room for something that was never broadcast.

Seven days carry two things, and one of them is a guess

Most of this list is one thing at a time. The exceptions:

On three Saturdays in September 1985, CBS ran an hour called Muppets, Babies and Monsters. Muppet Babies was the first half and Little Muppet Monsters the second — which is settled by what happened next, because when the animation for Little Muppet Monsters failed to arrive CBS filled that second half hour with Muppet Babies repeats and never went back.

On 6 December 1986 a Saturday-morning cartoon shares a day with an evening special, and in August 2020 a Disney+ drop shares two Fridays with a Disney Junior cartoon; the morning and the midnight release respectively come first.

The guess is 30 December 1989, where Muppet Babies on CBS at half past eight in the morning shares a day with Living with Dinosaurs in Britain. Half past eight in New York is half past one in the afternoon in London, so it turns on a listing that has not been found. Muppet Babies is put first and that is not established.

Eleven rows carry a cross-over mark, and the small number is the point

Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie and Gonzo are in nearly everything here. If a shared cast counted as a cross-over, every row on this page would be marked and the marks would mean nothing. So the marks are for something narrower: one strand appearing inside another as itself.

There are eleven. Two specials exist to sell a film that was about to open. One is a documentary about the making of The Muppet Show. One is a thirtieth birthday clip show. The Christmas special of 1987 sits the grown-up Muppets down to watch a home movie of the Muppet Babies, which is the only time the two continuities meet in person. A 1987 episode of Muppet Babies cuts the adult Kermit into a cartoon, using footage from two real Muppet Show episodes with new lines dubbed over him. Dr. Teeth turns up in the 2018 series as a grown-up puppet among the cartoons. The last Muppet Babies puts on The Muppet Show. The opening of The Muppets Mayhem tells the band's history with real footage of them from 1977. And the 2026 special begins with Kermit going back over the original run.

No row carries a shared-arc mark, which is a finding rather than an oversight. Nothing in fifty-seven years of this franchise is a story told across two of its strands at once.

Where the links go

Every entry links to IMDb, to Wikipedia and to the Muppet Wiki.

No episode of any of these series has a Wikipedia article of its own, so every episode's Wikipedia link goes to its row on the relevant list. The Muppet Show is the exception: its list article gives all twenty-four rows of a series the same anchor, so those links go to the series' section instead.

The Muppet Wiki files The Muppet Show and Muppet Babies by production number rather than by broadcast, so those links do not line up with the numbers in the table here. They point at the right episode all the same.