A Fraggle Rock movie has been talked about for a while, but now it is finally getting kickstarted with the hiring of two writers to come up with an original screenplay. The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Jim Byrkit (Rango) and Alex Manugian have been hired to write the script for the beloved Jim Henson show.
The film was first announced to 2005, and was scheduled to hit theaters back in 2009. Obviously, that didn’t happen. It has been picked up by several studios and numberous writers have been hired on to take the helm, but each time it has slipped through the cracks. In 2006, the original writer, Ahmet Zappa, was hired to do the movie as a musical. In 2008, The Weinstein Company bought the right and hired Cory Edwards to write. Last year New Regency bought the rights from Weinstein and finally a writing team has been hired for them.
With the movie changing so many hands and two rewrites under its belt, one has to wonder if Fraggle Rock will ever make its way to theaters. And if it does, will it ever live up to the whimsical childhood favorite 80’s hipsters love. Fraggle Rock is arguably the edgiest, hippest (or hippie-est) Jim Henson creation, so one worries if this version will try too hard to be just that, without capturing what made it fun to begin with.
Hollywood loves to bank on our love of nostalgia. Characters like The Muppets, The Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks become like childhood friends to a lot of people. This is fine as long as you don’t wind up with the later two on the list. It’s one thing to extend the life of these character we grew up with. It’s another thing to just cash in on these ideas without doing justice to the original. Which one will the Fraggle Rock movie be?
