Category: Muppets

Buzz Lightyear and ‘Toy Story’ gang return for ‘Small Fry’

Buzz Lightyear, get ready to get punk’d.

The famous Toy Story space explorer gets replaced by a pint-sized impostor in the Pixar short Small Fry, released in theaters Nov. 23 with The Muppets.

Blame it all on toy envy as a Happy Meal-type toy at a fast-food restaurant yearns to break out of his display case to play like a real toy. He kidnaps Buzz Lightyear in an attempt to take over his play-filled existence.

“It’s like the Prince and the Pauper tale for toys,” says writer/director Angus MacLane. “Except one of them happens to be 3 inches tall.”

The life-reversal forces the real Buzz Lightyear, voiced by Tim Allen, to deal with a support group for discarded, unloved fast-food toys.

“These toys’ existence is about being really popular before the meal and then being totally forgotten about,” MacLane says. “And sometimes they don’t even get played with.”

Though Buzz doesn’t fit into the group, he has trouble exiting.

“There’s something funny about having the action hero have to deal with something very mundane like escaping from an awkward social situation,” MacLane says. “To me, that’s funny.”

Allen and Toy Story regulars Tom Hanks (voicing Woody, who, naturally, immediately notices the switch), John Ratzenberger (Hamm) and Joan Cusack (Jessie) return for the seven-minute short.

“They know their characters so well at this point,” MacLane says, pointing out that the first Toy Story was released in 1995. “Tim just snapped right into it. But I bet he thought the concept was pretty strange.”

Pixar director Teddy Newton was the “perfect match” for mouthy Mini Buzz, and MacLane voices several discarded mini-toys such as T-Bone and Super Pirate. Glee’s Jane Lynch makes her first Pixar appearance as the narcissistic support-group leader Neptuna.

“Jane has an appealing way of being demeaning to people but where you still like her — even though she’s kind of horrible,” MacLane says. “Right away, she got the character.”

The short film’s message is simple: Don’t forget those little toys.

Says MacLane, “You just have to give these guys a little bit of love.”

Frank Oz, Muppet old guard question Jason Segel’s new film

The Muppets are kind of like that old, favorite sweater of yours — you love it dearly and have some fond memories but you have no idea where it went or what happened to it. So, when comedy “it” boy Jason Segel offered up his Judd Apatow-honed services to reboot the Muppets, Disney execs jumped at the chance. For a while, it was good; fanboys and the 25+ set all geeked out when the first trailer was released. However, one group that is most displeased is the original muppeteers themselves.

The Jim Henson O.G. is having some difficulty accepting where Segel has taken the franchise. Frank Oz, best known as Miss Piggy (not to mention Yoda), publicly slammed the film: “I wasn’t happy with the script. I don’t think they respect the characters. But I don’t want to go on about it like a sourpuss and hurt the movie.”

Too late, Frank. Another unnamed Muppet vet is upset with the potty humor that Segel has injected. Regarding Fozzie Bear’s “fart shoes,” the original puppeteer says “[w]e wouldn’t do that; it’s too cheap. It may not seem like much in this world of Apatow humor, but the character don’t go to that place.”

The complaints go beyond the style and tone and hit the actual character arc of the film. In Segel’s script, the Muppets have broken up and much of the group is jealous of Kermit’s wealth. This “creates a false history that the characters were forced to act out for the sake of this movie,” says another Muppet vet.

Segel and his reps have no comment on the Muppet related vitriol, but we imagine a healthy box office take will assuage all concerns. Or perhaps the Muppet old guard is still reeling from the 2004 sale of the Muppet properties from Henson to Disney. Either way, we bet Waldorf and Statler will hate it.

The Muppets to cover Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’

The Muppets Barbershop Quartet will provide their own take on the seminal grunge anthem – which was originally released as a single in 1991 – for their big-screen flick The Muppets, which is set to come out in the UK next February. The soundtrack will also include a cover of Cee Lo Green’s Number One hit ‘Forget You’.

It was previously reported that former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl had landed a cameo in the film, with the Foo Fighters frontman set to stand in for regular Muppets drummer Animal while he attends anger management as part of the movie’s plot.

The new film, which was written by and stars How I Met Your Mother actor Jason Segel, will also feature cameos from Jack Black, Ricky Gervais and Lady Gaga.

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s 1991 LP ‘Nevermind’. The album has sold over 30 million copies in the decades since its release, and a reissued and repackaged version of the record entered the UK album chart at Number Five earlier this month (October 2).

Grohl to drum for ‘The Muppets’
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has signed up to join the star-studded cast of the upcoming Muppets movie, according to a U.K report.
The former Nirvana percussionist will make a cameo appearance in the family-friendly film, taking Animal’s place in his band when the drum-crazy muppet is ordered to attend anger-management classes, according to NME.com.
Jack Black, Amy Adams, Zach Galifianakis, Emily Blunt and Ricky Gervais will all appear in the new film, the first in the popular franchise since 1999’s Muppets From Space.

Me want ‘SNL’! Cookie Monster auditions on YouTube

NEW YORK ñ Me want “Saturday Night Live!”
Cookie Monster has made an audition tape to convince “SNL” that he can host the show. “Sesame Street” posted the video Wednesday on YouTube and Facebook.
Introducing the tape, Cookie Monster says he wants to “branch out beyond me cookie-eating career.” The four-minute video follows with Cookie Monster doing a run-through of an episode of “Saturday Night Live.”
He performs a brief opening monologue, a “MacGruber”-like sketch dubbed “Macarooner,” a few “Weekend Update” jokes and a musical guest appearance as “Monster Gaga.”
Cookie Monster likely wants to follow Betty White’s lead. The 88-year-old White hosted an episode of “SNL” earlier this year after a Facebook campaign urged such casting.
NBC did not comment.

Muppet movie loading up on cameos
Disneyís new Muppets movie will be bursting at the seams with high-profile cameos.
Alan Arkin, Jack Black, Billy Crystal, Zach Galifianakis and Jean-Claude Van Damme are being recruited to make guest appearances in the new feature, currently shooting around Los Angeles under the direction of James Bobin.
The biggest hurdle facing the studio, as well as producers David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman, is not getting actors to say yes to appear in the movie, itís figuring out scheduling.
The story sees Jason Segel, who wrote the script with Nicholas Stoller, as the human lead who helps those wacky Muppets reunite to put on a show in order to save a movie studio.
Amy Adams, Chris Cooper and Rashida Jones are among the human actors in key roles.
Arkin is a tour guide while Black will play a kidnap victim. Galifianakis plays a hobo. Details for others were not divulged.
It was reported that Jane Lynch would be appearing in the Muppets movie, but the Glee star denied being attached to the film.

Original Kermit the Frog donated to Smithsonian
WASHINGTON ó The original Kermit the Frog, his body created with an old dull-green coat and his eyes made of pingpong balls, has returned home to the nation’s capital, where the puppet got his start.
The first Kermit creation from Jim Henson’s Muppet’s collection appeared in 1955 on the early TV show Sam and Friends, produced at Washington’s WRC-TV. Henson’s widow Jane Henson on Wednesday donated 10 characters from the show to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
She said the original characters provided five minutes of fun each night after the local news.
“I think people realized that if you put Kermit’s face up there, it was just as powerful,” Jane Henson, 76, said. “We were mostly just doing it to entertain ourselves.”
The Hensons attended the University of Maryland and got into the TV business with Willard Scott and other pioneers while in college. Their connection to the area makes the Smithsonian a perfect home for Henson’s original puppets, friends said.
“It’s not just the puppets coming home, but in a way it’s Jane and Jim coming home,” said Arthur Novell, executive director of the nonprofit Jim Henson Legacy in New York City. “They started their careers, their lives in Washington.”
Even though they were in Washington, Kermit deliberately did not do politics or dabble in religion, Jane Henson said.
The Smithsonian already has a familiar Kermit the Frog puppet made famous on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. But the original Kermit was more lizard-like, and a duller green. His body was made from an old coat thrown out by Henson’s mother.
Some of the other early Muppets donated to the museum include the puppets that inspired Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch, as well as Sam from Sam and Friends. The group also includes Henson’s oldest surviving puppet, Pierre the French Rat. The puppets mostly mimed on the show and would lip-sync to popular music.
Their first hit was I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face, by Rosemary Clooney. Donning a wig, Kermit took the lead as Kermina, Jane Henson said. In 1969, Kermit made it big and joined Sesame Street.
Curator Dwight Blocker Bowers said the Muppets will be a boon for the museum’s collection.
“It certainly shows the Muppets at the beginning of the career of a large family of entertainers,” he said. “More than anything, I think it shows the genius of Jim Henson.”
Bowers said the museum plans to have the original Muppets on display by November in the pop culture gallery.
Visitors will recognize the original Kermit, though he didn’t have his trademark collar and webbed feet. But they probably won’t recognize the other characters, so the museum will help introduce them, Bowers said. Future plans call for adding clips of their early shows.
A traveling Smithsonian exhibit of Muppets opens Sept. 24 at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
Novell, who was Henson’s publicist for more than 20 years, said the puppeteer was a history buff and fond of the Smithsonian.
Other puppets from Henson’s collection will eventually be given to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta to create a Henson gallery there, perhaps as soon as 2014, Novell said.
Still, the Hensons plan to give the Smithsonian about a dozen more puppets in the years to come, possibly including a Miss Piggy to join her boyfriend, Kermit. Part of that will depend on plans by the Walt Disney Co., which has owned rights to the Muppets since 2002.
“We would like very much to get them out while they’re still in relatively good condition,” Jane Henson said. “I think when you grow up in Washington, you get the feeling that everything important in the country goes to the Smithsonian.”

Disney picks Pixar brains for Muppets movie
SAN DIEGO — The Muppets are getting Pixar-lated.
Principals involved with Disney’s upcoming live-action pic toplining Jason Segel flew to Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., on Wednesday for a table read of the project with the animation powerhouse.
The involvement comes just months after Pixar helped shape reshoots for Disney’s upcoming sci-fi tentpole “Tron Legacy.”
In other words, this is the second recent example of the animation house assisting parent Disney with a live-action feature.
Some of the members of the so-called “Pixar Brain Trust” — filmmakers John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, Michael Arndt, Bob Peterson and president Ed Catmull — were there for the consultations. Docter is a particularly avid Muppets fan, so he almost certainly was one of the attendees. On the Disney side, Muppets director James Bobin and producers David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman were likely in the room along with Segel. Neither Pixar nor Disney would comment.
Beyond whatever advice might have come down for the project at hand, the fact that Pixar has its fingers in the Muppets pie suggests that Disney, under the new regime of Rich Ross and Sean Bailey, is intent on taking advantage of its subsidiary’s storytelling abilities.
Pixar still is batting 1.000 with critics and commercially, with “Toy Story 3” being its 11th hit in a row. The film has grossed $366.9 million since its June 18 release, becoming the top domestic grosser of the year, surpassing the $334.2 million collected by Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.” (Worldwide, “Alice” still is far ahead with $1.02 billion in grosses; the global tally for “Toy” stands at $634.4 million as its international rollout continues.)
At the same time, the new Disney regime has been hampered by a string of underperformers — “When in Rome,” “The Last Song,” “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” and the just-opened misfire “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” — that it inherited from the studio’s previous administration.
Despite his success at the Disney Channels, Ross has no feature filmmaking experience, and Bailey, though seasoned as a producer, is new to top studio management.
As they develop their own slate, the new Disney team is eager to avail itself of Pixar’s expertise — and the filmmakers involved don’t appear to harbor any reluctance about taking advice from Pixar, either.
“If you want to get good ideas, why not talk to the Brain Trust?” Bailey said several weeks ago in remarks about the “Tron” meet-up, which took place in March.

Henson Co. to make “Dark Crystal” sequel
SYDNEY (Hollywood Reporter) ñ The Jim Henson Company is to partner with Australian production outfit Omnilab Media to make “Power of the Dark Crystal,” a sequel to Henson’s 1982 fantasy hit “The Dark Crystal,” the companies confirmed Wednesday.
“Daybreakers” directors Peter and Michael Spierig will helm the film, which is to be made in stereoscopic 3D with a mix of live action and Henson puppetry, and is being billed as one of the most ambitious projects ever to be made in Australia.
“Power of the Dark Crystal” will be produced by the Australia-based production arm of Omnilab Media, Ambience Entertainment, while Omnilab-owned special effects house Illoura will work on the CGI elements of the film.
Set hundreds of years after the events of the first movie, when the world has once again fallen into darkness, “Power of the Dark Crystal” follows the adventures of a mysterious girl made of fire who, together with a Gelfling outcast, steals a shard of the legendary crystal in an attempt to reignite the dying sun that exists at the center of the planet.
The screenplay was written by Craig Pearce based on an original script by Annette Duffy and David Odell. Fantasy artist Brian Froud will reprise his role as conceptual designer of the film.