Any fan of the Muppets should be so lucky as to have these cantankerous hecklers sitting in the balcony of their collections!
About 10 years ago (maybe more… I’m old and everything past the last year just kind of blurs together), I was in a KB Toys outlet and I found a Statler and Waldorf set. Having left my wallet in the car, I put the set down and went out to grab it so I could buy my two favorite Muppets. When I came back, just a few minutes later, the figures had disappeared. It was a disappointing day, to be sure. And I’ve been frustrated about not getting those figures for a long time.
Thankfully, though, Diamond Select Toys put out a new set of the curmudgeons as part of the second wave of their Muppets line in 2016. It’s been on my Amazon wish list for a while, but it was finally removed when my wife bought it for me as a belated Valentine’s Day gift!
All the figures in the set included their own little stage set-up. Bunson Honeydew and Beeker have their lab. Animal has his drum set so he can go nuts on the skins. And Statler and Waldorf come with their own little balcony, so they can be perched somewhere and make fun of all the other toys in your collection. These aren’t cheap cardboard sets, either. The hard plastic sets have a good weight and seem really sturdy.
I don’t usually expect this much assembly with the figures I get, but this is totally worth it.
The balcony set even comes with a couple of chairs so the two old malcontents can relax, I guess, but they’re plastic and don’t pose into seated positions well. They’re really just there for some impressive levels of attention to detail.
The figures themselves might be one of the best representations of the two characters I’ve seen, accentuating the height difference between the two (the 5-inch Statler towers over the smaller Waldorf) and giving them the perfect dumb-founded expressions, like they just watched a Fozzie Bear comedy act. They’re pretty posable, too, which is nice but not really something that’s all that important to me, since they barely moved on The Muppets.
Of course, once the balcony set is assembled and the chairs are in place and Statler and Waldorf are shown to their usual seats, there’s really only one thing to do with them – put them up high where they can heckle everything you do.
Hey guys, what do you think?
“Hey Waldorf, we finally came to my favorite part of this post!”
“Oh yeah? What part is that?”
“The end!”