One Year to the Day

Jim Henson died before Muppet*Vision 3D was finished. This month, a piece of it outsold Disney's own roller coaster at auction.

Disney held its first-ever public sale of stuff from its own parks on August 16 — partnered with Heritage Auctions, everything from a Wilderness Lodge trash can to a full Big Thunder Mountain Railroad car went under the hammer. The single highest bid of the day, $115,900, went to a foot-and-a-half molded ornament of Kermit the Frog in a laurel crown, holding a megaphone, that hung over the theater doors at Muppet*Vision 3D for 34 years.

That's more than the actual Big Thunder Mountain ride vehicle sold for ($51,240), and more than a chunk of that same ride's track converted into a bench ($79,300). A molded frog outbid a piece of a roller coaster.

Muppet*Vision 3D opened at Disney's Hollywood Studios on May 16, 1991. Jim Henson wrote (with Bill Prady — then a Muppet writer, later the co-creator of The Big Bang Theory), directed, and performed in it, filmed the January before. He died on May 16, 1990, before it was finished. The show opened exactly a year later, to the day. He never saw it running.

It stayed open 34 years. Disney closed it in June 2025 to build Monstropolis, a Monsters, Inc.-themed land, and said at the time it was “exploring ways to preserve the film and other parts of the experience for fans.” What happened instead: the physical pieces went to auction, one lot at a time, to whoever bid highest. Miss Piggy's matching ornament — same theater, same year — went two lots later for $73,200.

Disney's own framing for the sale was that these pieces would otherwise go in a landfill. Nobody paid $115,900 to keep something out of a landfill.