I can get a little excited about the Muppets returning to the big screen under the aegis of Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, but handing Fraggle Rock over to the auteur behind Hoodwinked! doesn’t imbue me with much confidence. Fraggle Rock was underground, man. It was dark. It commented savagely on the failure of the Reagan Revolution as it barreled into its second term. This is fertile terrain for Paul Bartel (rest his soul).
Instead, The Weinstein Company (along with Lisa and Brian Henson) will waste the Fraggles on Cory Edwards, a third-rate parodist whose surprise success with Hoodwinked! in early 2006 had more to do with a dearth of family product than a genuine affection for his lukewarm riff on Shrek.
I’m boring myself with this nonsense, but I do know that a lot of our readers grew up watching and loving the Fraggles on CBC and/or HBO, so this is for y’all. I was a little too old to get into this stuff back in 1984 (at eleven years old, I was all about Donne), but I recognized it as quality television for kids when compared to Voltron, G.I. Joe and Transformers. As with The Muppet Movie, the plan for the big screen Fraggle Rock is to get the cast out into the real world, where they’ll interact with famous humans like Vanessa Hudgens, Jim Belushi and Ron Artest.
There’s no start date as of yet, but the Weinsteins’ will likely rush this into production.