Broken Lizard Wants To Make A Sci-Fi Movie Called Mickleberry The Space Cat [Exclusive]
Whenever people whine about movies that "couldn't be made today," they're usually referring to comedy films with a grossly outdated sense of humor or storylines that are blatantly discriminatory. Seldom are they referring to the truly ridiculous swings of comedy films made from the 1970s-1990s, a style that has mostly dissolved into our collective memories and only reappears when some brave soul makes an absurd laugh riot like "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar."
The sad result of every blockbuster franchise slowly attempting to push us into a nostalgia-mad monoculture has been a lack of weirdo cinema. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of folks out there making unique films, but they're typically released independently and without the marketing budget or publicity they deserve. This makes greenlighting offbeat comedies a risky move for studios and denies audiences fresh, experimental comedy adventures. The Broken Lizard comedy troupe (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske) have luckily been able to cut through some of that red tape, delivering quotable comedies like "Super Troopers," "Club Dread," "Beerfest," and "The Slammin' Salmon," that could seriously only be made by this collective.
/Film's Danielle Ryan recently spoke with the troupe ahead of their new movie, "Quasi," a satirical comedy for Hulu centered on Quasimodo, aka the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Having already tackled so many different comedy subgenres, Ryan asked if the crew would ever make a sci-fi comedy. The answer? They tried to make a space cat comedy film, but it sounds like it was just too weird for this world ... but not for us!
The Cat from Outer Space is shaking
As Paul Soter tells us, Broken Lizard attempted to get a movie made called "Mickleberry the Space Cat," which was about the first cat that went into space. "I would love to dust that off because that was always a completely absurdist, stoned concept," he says. "I would love for us to go into space." Honestly, the jokes write themselves.
"Cats are hard to train, right?" ponders Erik Stolhanske. "And they'd have to go through the NASA training program, and we thought that poses a lot of challenges." There has been a bevy of films about animals going to space, but they're usually chimpanzees or dogs — animals with a history of effective trainability — seldom adorable jerks like cats (not that they didn't try). This is not cat slander, this is cat realism.
"This one was multi-layered, because in this thing, the cat could also speak — or so people thought," says Steve Lemme. "So you would go in, and of course, the cat could not speak. And then you'd feel bad for yourself, and you'd come out of there, and then when people would say, 'Did the cat speak to you?' [and] these characters would lie. They'd be like, 'Oh yeah. That cat had a lot to say to me.' Needless to say, the studio did not make this film."
It's a shame the studio passed on Mickleberry, because we could absolutely use some more space cats. Jonesy from "Alien," Goose from "Captain Marvel," Nyancat, Sox from "Lightyear," and the titular "The Cat from Outer Space" must all be exhausted from holding down the proverbial space cat fort.