Ugh, symbolism.

January 15, 2021 10:51 PM

"The Great Gatsby" has entered public domain as of 1/1/2021, and a Reddit post suggesting a Muppet Great Gatsby adaptation went viral. Now Redditor Ben Crew has written a 104-page Muppet Great Gatsby adaptation, complete with songs and a poster.
posted by skycrashesdown (37 comments total)

(I forgot to include the author's actual Reddit post with his dream cast.)
posted by skycrashesdown at 10:59 PM on January 15, 2021

Relevant XKCD.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:16 PM on January 15, 2021 [7 favorites]

There’s no way Kermit should play Gatsby. See, this is the classic mistake when you make a Gatsby movie. It’s always someone charming and handsome. It’s always Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio. That’s not the character in the book! The guy in the book is awkward and out-of-place and honestly quite stalkery. Like a lot of rich people, he uses money in place of standard social niceties, and then people who are taken in by it *say* he’s charming. He’s a gangster. He’s garish and uncouth.


The obvious choice is Gonzo.
posted by chrchr at 12:00 AM on January 16, 2021 [76 favorites]

is Michael Caine free
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:07 AM on January 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

By a most fortuitous happenstance, Melvyn Bragg & Co covered The Great Gatsby in this week’s In Our Time.
posted by bouvin at 2:32 AM on January 16, 2021 [10 favorites]

There’s no way Kermit should play Gatsby [....] The obvious choice is Gonzo.

Right. Kermit is Nick Carraway!
posted by kewb at 3:44 AM on January 16, 2021 [34 favorites]

Is that why there is a four and a half hour long episode of Planet Money where they read this in its entirety? Interesting.
posted by robotmachine at 4:00 AM on January 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

I love Gatsby. I love The Muppets. But no thank you. I know people are losing their minds from covid isolation, but the line must be drawn here.

(Also, before you click the "104-page Muppet Great Gatsby adaptation" link you should know that it's a PDF! WARNING, WARNING, DANGER KLAXON!)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:05 AM on January 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

But if Kermit is Nick, does that mean Miss Piggy has to be demoted to Jordan the Tennis Player?

I say cast Miss Piggy as Gatsby! She's bombastic and larger-than-life, but she can turn in the charm when she wants to. It'd be a great reveal. Then Kermit as Daisy (she always pursues him more than the other way around). Now I'm imagining a genderflipped The Great Muppet Gatsby and I'm kimda liking it.
posted by basalganglia at 4:21 AM on January 16, 2021 [33 favorites]

There's also The Great Gritty.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 5:43 AM on January 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

The secret to a Muppet Gatsby adaptation is that you have to play it straight- no comedy or music- EXCEPT for Statler & Waldorf, who are de-aged to reveal that they are/were actual background characters in the 1920's East Egg scene. All the comedy comes from their merciless takedowns of the main characters and plot from the sidelines.
posted by KingEdRa at 6:43 AM on January 16, 2021 [19 favorites]

Also, more Muppet dream casting:
Bunsen Honeydew as Owl Eyes
Sam the Eagle as Tom Buchanan
Fozzy as Klipspringer
Dr. Teeth as Meyer Wolfsheim
Beaker as George Wilson
Janice as Myrtle Wilson

I'm OK with Gonzo/Gatsby and Kermit/Nick. If you want to keep the Muppet relationship pairings, Miss Piggy could be Jordan and Camille the Chicken could be Daisy Bucahanon (but I think Piggy's a better Daisy).
posted by KingEdRa at 6:55 AM on January 16, 2021

This needs to be greenlit.
posted by chavenet at 7:29 AM on January 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

This needs to be greenlit.

It isn’t easy, being greenlit.
posted by notoriety public at 7:50 AM on January 16, 2021 [38 favorites]

This needs to be greenlit.

It won’t be. With all these fanfic stories out there Disney won’t want to risk a lawsuit if the choices they made were the same as the choices made by someone on the internet. The grounds to prove they didn’t steal it would be very hard to prove.
posted by jmauro at 7:54 AM on January 16, 2021

Or, you know, being Disney, they could BUY it and then use it without having to prove anything.
posted by hippybear at 8:00 AM on January 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

The problem with EVERY movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby is that everyone in Hollywood wants to BE Gatsby, so that they make the parties as glamourous as possible and Gatsby's life as glamourous as possible, and that's not the point of the book. Ben Crew seems to get that.
posted by dannyboybell at 8:05 AM on January 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

→ The obvious choice is …

Fozzy. Awkward, out-of-place, garish, uncouth: check check check check.
posted by scruss at 8:19 AM on January 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

By a most fortuitous happenstance, Melvyn Bragg & Co covered The Great Gatsby in this week’s In Our Time.

Not so much happenstance as the fact that they scheduled their discussion to coincide with the book's move into the public domain - just as skycrashesdown and the Reddit posters did here.
posted by Paul Slade at 8:30 AM on January 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Erm...we all remember how The Great Gatsby ended, right?
posted by darkstar at 8:32 AM on January 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

Nevertheless, “borne back ceaselessly into the past” is a phrase I use to wryly refer to myself at least once a week.
posted by darkstar at 8:34 AM on January 16, 2021

Erm...we all remember how The Great Gatsby ended, right?

I thought the same thing! If you want to hop to pg 90 of the PDF, you'll see how this adaptation handles that.
posted by kimberussell at 9:19 AM on January 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

The NES-like game is finally legit, though Flash is pining for the fjords. (Previously)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:06 AM on January 16, 2021

FYI, the 4.5 hour planet money reading is real.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:29 AM on January 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

For anyone else who's wondering, Planet Money read The Great Gatsby, not The Muppet Great Gatsby.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:04 AM on January 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

I 80% enjoyed it! Which is more than I can say for my experience of the actual novel at age 16. TGG is improved with Muppet snark about heavy handed symbolism, but the reworked ending still didn't quite land. Which is the problem with casting Kermit — you have to, because the Piggy/Kermit dynamic is a fixed central point in any Muppet movie, but once you do that, you're trying to shove the world's most earnest frog in a Gatsby shaped hole, and that's just not gonna work.

The amphibian line works though. That I could picture.
posted by deludingmyself at 11:23 AM on January 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

In the year 2110, Twilight will fall into the public domain and we will finally have a version of it where Edward is played by The Count.
posted by chrchr at 12:19 PM on January 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

Not all Muppet fans are on board:

"No, We Don't Need a Muppet Great Gatsby" (tough pigs.com)
"I'm on the record as firmly believing that the Muppets shouldn’t shy away from occasional adult themes and innuendos. I don’t mind Muppets drinking alcohol or making PG-level naughty jokes, or Constantine cartoonishly blowing things up. But the themes of The Great Gatsby are too dark for those guys....In fact, I can think of only one reason to make a Muppet Great Gatsby, and that is the possibility of representing the setting of West Egg, Long Island as an actual giant egg laid by a giant Muppet chicken."
posted by oakroom at 2:41 PM on January 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

The guy in the book is awkward and out-of-place and honestly quite stalkery. Like a lot of rich people, he uses money in place of standard social niceties...

Yes, I can agree with this interpretation, but I'll still stand up for Leonardo's Jay, his undertone of actory-neediness/insecurity seep through his performance in a fascinating way (saying this as not quite a fan of Leonardo but I think it's his best work!). Also, Toby is the perfect side-kick/foil in this piece.

The liner notes (by William Saroyan) for my roommate's old album of Waiting for Godot mentions the intriguing idea of conceptual stunt-casting any famous story with any famous cast, even your family?

'The Great Gatsby' is not the first thing that comes to mind needing a Muppet stunt-casting (I think 'Solaris' is the first thing that popped into my head?) but there is a not-great Muppets 1984.
posted by ovvl at 4:07 PM on January 16, 2021

(having listened now to about 30 minutes of the Planet Money gatsby, imma say that Robert Smith has a pretty great reading voice. i think he's got a good second career as audiobook reader available if he ever wants to get off the econ beat.)
posted by kaibutsu at 4:23 PM on January 16, 2021

I love the Muppets, but these fancasting scenarios really highlight their Smurfette problem -- we shouldn't have to struggle to fill three female roles by trying to figure out if there's a way to use Camilla, who, bless her, can't talk.
posted by naoko at 6:05 PM on January 16, 2021 [11 favorites]

Grover, finished with air-tightening the Trashcan then nods to Oscar. Both enter the make shift submarine, 20 yards out, Grover retrieves the .177 pellet gun, takes aim and the green globe on the light dock shatters.

"Trust me Oscar, This is for everyones good."
Oscar looks away but seats in resignation, retrieves the red lamp and proceeds toward shore.
posted by clavdivs at 7:14 PM on January 16, 2021

As much as I liked Lois Chiles filmed through vaseline, and got all sweaty for Elizabeth Debicki, I don't know for sure if Janis works as Jordan Baker.
Oddly enough, I feel Rowlf might work better, vibe-wise?
This assumes that we're casting Scooter as Nick Carraway, tho.
(I don't suppose Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker could be cast as the Wilsons?)
posted by bartleby at 7:35 PM on January 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

“Camilla bocks bloody murder” is a line I needed to read.
posted by azpenguin at 9:23 PM on January 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

It is literally Piggy, Janice, and Camilla, isn't it? Like all the other female characters are either children on Sesame Street or basically unknown.

Maybe get female humans for some roles?
posted by hippybear at 9:40 PM on January 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Edit: nevermind
posted by BiggerJ at 12:08 AM on January 17, 2021

I mean, the problem is also that the female characters in the Great Gatsby aren’t great roles / too dark for muppets. I kind of like the idea of an adaptation of TGG where Daisy never actually speaks and just swans about being coy and pretty.
posted by momus_window at 8:52 AM on January 17, 2021 [2 favorites]