Only now does it occur to me... MUPPETS FROM SPACE (1999)

Only now does it occur to me... that F. Murray Abraham, playing the Biblical Noah, once barred Gonzo from entering the ark,


damned him to death by drowning,

and then gave him a tiny umbrella to rub salt in the wound.

This is a wonderful fusion of the kind of miserable bastardry we expect from a typical F. Murray Abraham performance and the light-handed pleasure of a Muppet movie: the result is truly a commendable tableau of Delightful Dickery. 

If you've ever seen a Muppet movie, you know that the human cameos are a well-curated highlight: look no further than Danny Trejo playing himself as a prisoner in a Siberian gulag. In MUPPETS FROM SPACE, some of the prominent appearances include David Arquette as a mad scientist who, warden-like, sends his lab rats to 'The Maze' when they break the rules:

One might even say that he imbues the role with a Steven Weber panache.

 

Pat Hingle (BATMAN, NORMA RAE, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE) as a no-nonsense general:

Ray Liotta as a security guard who falls victim to Miss Piggy's love potion:

 (A comic Liotta performance is always welcome––see also: his JUST SHOOT ME episodes, as a Christmas-obsessed version of himself)

Kathy Griffin as another security guard who falls prey to Animal's charms:

Hulk Hogan doing some bizarre promotional bit relating to his rebranding as "Hollywood Hogan":

It's no GREMLINS 2

Andie MacDowell as a local newscaster who battles Piggy for the spotlight:

Perhaps she is still "Rita" from GROUNDHOG DAY?

and, as if to prove that it's 1999, Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson as their characters from DAWSON'S CREEK.

I obviously approve of all of this, even the DAWSON'S CREEK nonsense. I could see MUPPETS FROM SPACE––a post-Henson Muppet movie which received middling press and underperformed at the box office––eventually securing something like a cult following.

My latest short story, "For Want of a Better Word," is featured in the new issue of The Cincinnati Review as the winner of their ninth annual Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Prose. Fiction Editor Michael Griffith writes, "Sean Gill’s excellent 'For Want of a Better Word' begins with a clever premise—a lab assistant inventing words for an experiment in artificial intelligence—and then does ingenious things with tone and timespan to make that premise far more than merely clever. The result is a surprising, touching, funny, and bittersweet story about the ways being smart can help us, and the ways it can’t." The entire issue (which includes fiction by Steve Almond, Jameelah Lang, and George Singleton, among others) is available for purchase in print here.