Watch The World's Least-Appreciated Puppeteers Make The Muppets Perform 'Jungle Boogie'

Before we show you this clip, something needs to be said.

As stoked as we are that The Muppets are returning to television, we can't help but feel, in the wake of yesterday's mass-media coverage of the "break-up" of fictitious characters Kermit The Frog and Miss Piggy, that maybe everyone's just getting a little too carried away with the breathless nostalgia of the whole thing for comfort.

It's one thing for Kermit and Miss Piggy to have, say, broken up in the canon of the show, and for a few pop-culture outlets to have covered it with a tongue-in-cheek sense of sincerity; it's another whole ballpark of lunacy to expect (and, worse, actually succeed in getting) the world's journalists to turn up to a real-life press conference fronted by two glorified socks with arms up their butts to end up writing thinly veiled plugs for ABC's new golden-goose series based on story developments that have nothing to do with the show itself because they were briefly deluded into believing it's OK to write about inanimate objects as if they can develop long-standing romantic feelings and media training.

Hey, we get it — that kind of thing sells. It's a lot easier to tell people to "watch Miss Piggy sing Rihanna" than it is to say "watch the people who bring Miss Piggy to life make it look like she's singing Rihanna", and the world loved the Kermit/Miss Piggy break-up story, as evidenced by its high-placed trending status on multiple social media platforms around the world. Mega-clicks were generated; mission accomplished.

Still, it's important not to forget that, beneath the bulging eyes and colourful hair and outlandish costumes and ridiculous voices that make up the majority of The Muppets' characters, there's a team of real, breathing human beings whose dedication, talent and hard work are essentially being totally ignored in any meaningful sense all for the benefit of keeping up some insane facade of Muppet sentience for brand maintenance, and we're all complicit in it.

Well, no more (today, at least).

In bringing to you this video of The Muppets "performing" a cover of Kool & The Gang's 1973 hit single Jungle Boogie — just the latest in the long line of meta promotional material being seeded onto the web ahead of the series' debut this year, which, despite the vitriol positively dripping off the majority of words in this article, is actually a damn endearing thing to behold, and just a ridiculous amount of fun — we're avoiding the easy road altogether and giving all the credit to the folks who managed to not only make these fluff-headed friends of ours come to life, but did so with immaculate rhythm and some truly fabulous musical flair under what we can only imagine are working conditions somewhere in the vein of "nightmarish".

Here's to you, The Muppets puppeteers. You bring magic to life, and you can't all be lucky enough to have a documentary made about your career — but you're all important and wonderful and remain unforgotten, even if we'd all prefer to pretend like you just don't exist. Jungle boogie.

The Muppets is set to start airing on ABC (US) this September.