The Muppets Take Manhattan (with help from Cheerios)

Did anyone else have this storybook/record back in the day? Because seeing this ad brings back a vague memory of making my poor parents dutifully mail away Cheerios UPC symbols that I had carefully clipped — and the Muppets Take Manhattan record not quite living up to the grandeur of other storybook combos like The Dark Crystal and The Empire Strikes Back. Still, I wish I could find an mp3 of its contents somewhere around the web, just for nostalgia’s sake. Alas.

An aside: Where I lived as a kid there used to be a guy named Rizzo who owned a pizza joint. Since his name was Rizzo and he worked in a place where food was sold, I naturally made the Rizzo the Rat connection. My mother told me to never call him that, though, and young me never really understood why. Then it hit me in a flash, years later, while watching an episode of The Sopranos, that Rizzo might have had mob ties, and that the pizzeria might have been a front. And that my loose lips could have spelled my family’s doom. THANKS, MUPPETS.