Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Magical Day Radio, the happiest show on
the air. Here are your hosts, Don Short and Jerry Cornell.
Hello. Good evening and welcome to Magical Day Radio. This is Don and I'm here with my
co-host, Jerry Cornell of Food Parkology. Hi, Jerry. Hello. Hello. How are you doing?
Doing good. Just super excited to do show number two with our very first guest.
Yes. Yes. I'm excited too. This is going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be great stories,
great time, and hopefully a lot of laughter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm super excited. Well,
let's bring him on. You guys, tonight we've got a really special guest, our very first guest,
everyone in Magical Day Radio. Joining us is freelance writer and director of film and television,
Mr. Kirk Arthur. Hi, Kirk. Hey, guys. Hi. Thank you for having me on. I'm honored.
Thank you. It's our honor to have you with us. So thank you so much.
Sure. This is going to be a lot of fun. So, Kirk, I understand that you have some fantastic stories
to share with us regarding the Muppets. Perhaps you can share them with us.
Yeah. Well, what I thought I'd do, because I've done a lot of interviews about
working on Star Trek and Star Wars, and you can see that in podcasts and read interviews. What
I've never talked about, particularly about Muppets, which obviously are related to Disney now,
since they've only been the last 12 or so years, is Muppet projects. Muppet projects I've worked
on that never came to fruition, usually scripts. I've written a number of scripts with Jim Lewis
primarily. Well, a couple on my own, but mainly with Jim Lewis, who's the other kind of in-house
Muppet writer, or the only in-house Muppet writer I am not. I have not been since 2000,
but a bunch of projects that people may or may not have heard about, but I thought it would be fun,
because you never read them, you never see them, and there's some fun stuff we did that,
for various reasons, never got made. Wow. Well, I can't wait to hear about this. I love the Muppets.
I get to share with my granddaughters, which is super cool. It's one of those things that you
get to pass on. Oh, yeah. Well, that's kind of what's fun about them. I guess in the industry,
they call it a four-quadrant. You know, like Disney programs, they try to appeal to everybody,
or Pixar shows. You know, everybody likes them, but I thought I'd start out with something that
go ahead. Oh, sorry, I thought I heard somebody say something. A show that actually became a video
game, it was going to be a TV special, and it became Muppet Haunted House, which is a video game,
but it was originally, yeah, it was originally, I love Halloween. I grew up, in fact, one of the
reasons is the haunted mansion at Disneyland, so bringing back full circle. I've always loved that,
and I've always loved Halloween. I was a kid who made myself up every year from about the time I was
eight, just about 20. In fact, that's why I went into creature making. So I always wanted to do the
Muppets in a Halloween kind of, you know, special or movie or something about creatures and ghosts
and all that. So it started out as a TV special, and it's like somebody's rolling a barrel down a hill.
No, I live right next to the Air Force Base, and they choose now to-
Oh, geez.
Yeah, sorry.
They're giving us a 21 jet salute. So it started out as a TV special, and the concept was that Bunsen
Honeydew's uncle had passed away, and he lived in this castle out in Transylvania. Again, I think
I can talk a lot about this one because it became a video game. And so the Muppets were all going to
go to Hawaii for a vacation, and Bunsen and Beaker were just going to go off by themselves, and they
felt bad for them. They said, look, Kermit kind of rallies everybody. He goes, well, come on, let's
we'll just go and, you know, we'll be with Bunsen in this moment of his time of need. And then
after we're there for a few days to get everything settled, we'll go as expected to Hawaii. So they
go to this creepy old castle in Transylvania, and it turns out his uncle was a mad scientist as,
you know, Bunsen carried on the tradition. And they met a butler there named Surley,
and that was one of the first jokes. He's like, I'm Surley, we gotta ask you.
No, but what's your name? And what's funny about a lot of this stuff is a lot of these ideas ended
up in the Disney haunted house movie with any Murphy. Ours was written beforehand, and Disney
was privy to it. I'm not saying they took our ideas, but there are a lot of very strong similarities.
The first one being the butler, and you find out at the end that the butler is a ghost,
but you don't know. So they meet him, and they try to find what happened to Dr. Honeydew,
because he just disappeared. And so he'd gone for eight years or seven years. And so the castle had
had defaulted in the world to his nephew Bunsen was the last living relative. And so what happens
over the course of the special is that the Muppets start disappearing and turning into monsters.
And so Kremit becomes Frog and Shrine, basically a top green version of Frankenstein.
Miss Piggy becomes the bride of Frog and Shrine. Gonzo, one of my favorites, because you wanted
to keep it, you know, not not blood or gold or anything. Gonzo became Nosferatu, the vampire of
sweat. And so he would stick his nose in people's armpits and sniff deeply, and that would that's
would give him life. It was weird and creepy, but it wasn't necessarily disgusting. Well,
it wasn't bloody and disgusting. Wow. Resume being a fun to film. Well, what's funny is we
came this bizarre video game. And so a few of the Muppets were left who were not changed. Fawzi
became a rare bear, which was funny. And we kind of were making fun of the old Alvin Costello movies
with, you know, panels that move. And what you come to find out is that Dr. Honeydew, his uncle,
I forgot his name, it wasn't Bunsen, but it was like, you know,
well, whatever, I can't recall. But he was trying to distill pure goodness,
as like a Dr. Jekyll formula, or you could give it to anybody. And what happened was the side
effect, the the byproduct was pure evil. And he accidentally spilled it on himself and became
like a mad crazed scientist. And so yeah, he'd been going down and causing problems like the
Phantom of the Opera. So there'd been this phantom character. And the Butler, certainly,
was trying to help the guys find him. And what you realize was he was the one giving this potion
to the this evil Dr. Honeydew was giving it to everybody because he wanted to make them evil
also. So certainly the Butler, I think Clifford, Kermit's nephew, Robin, and a couple other Muppets.
What about trying to, well, first they discovered Dr. Honeydew and changed him back,
and they found his notebook in a, you know, secret laboratory. And then they spent the rest of it
trying to get everyone back and save them before, you know, midnight or whatever the clock was.
But it was just really fun and silly. And we got to turn the Muppets into monsters,
which was the, which was the dream. That's a fantastic film. Well, thank you. It started
as a special and they liked it. And then we're going to do it as a movie. So we kind of fleshed
it out. And then different executives took over and handed off the idea of a Muppet. This
movie has this idea as like four variations. It then went over to a couple other writers,
and they turned into a more of a parody of, you know, I wasn't involved in this part. It was more
of a parody of a horror movie, like a Freddy Krueger kind of thing. And that script was written.
And then everyone decided, well, that's too scary. It was too scary because you're, you're
parodying and also the scary movie parody movies were kind of doing that. So it came back to us
and we pitched to Jim Ross and I, so let's do a, let's do something more in the line of Ghost
Busters. Let's, let's do an afterlife movie. And then everyone's like, well, how are you
going to, how are you going to do that? I mean, you know, you have to kill the Muppets if you're
going to be ghosts. And I said, yeah, we'll figure it out. So we, we came up with this scheme that
acted in here. They ended up in this big haunted house. And I think it was an, again, an inheritance,
but this was in the south. It was an antebellum manor house. And there was a portrait. Again,
this was very much used. This idea was in the Disney haunted house movie. Again, these were
written before the Eddie Murphy one. There was a portrait on the wall. It looked like Ms. Piggy.
But you know, it was someone from the 1700s or the 1800s. And it was the, the owner of the house,
the, the, it was a general, I think, in the summer for me. And this was the longest life. It had this
portrait painted over, but he had died in the house. It had gone on to airs. And I forget,
I can't remember exactly how the Muppets ended up in it. But so they're all looking around and
just kind of checking out this big house and a, and a bookcase falls up like six of them,
but not Ms. Piggy. And so that's, and so they turn into ghosts. And what you find out is the spirit
of the owner of the house has, has turned them, has killed them and made them into ghosts. And he's
using their energy to become human again, because he's seen Ms. Piggy. And he's realized that he
has to have her because it's his, the reincarnation. It's like, again, the Medi Murphy thing of his
long lost love. And so he has taken the Muppets. He doesn't really kill them, but the bookcase thing,
he takes their life energy and becomes human. And so then he starts, it's two parallel stories. So
it's this ghost now looking like a dapper, like it was sort of like a Clark Gable type. He had that,
he was a southern gentleman, you know, it was very, very charming. And then he just buttered
up Ms. Piggy left and right. And so she thinks Kermit is right off and left him because she
doesn't know where he is. And so Kermit and whoever was with him, again, it was like five or six of
the core Muppets like Fawzi and Gonzo. And, um, uh,
