Trailer
Plot summary
Gonzo is the Muppet whose species no one can name. Nights of dreaming that he is turned away from Noah's Ark leave him feeling alone, and he tells Kermit he is tired of being called a whatever. Then his bowl of alphabet cereal seems to carry a message from somewhere off Earth, and a lightning strike on the boarding house roof lets two cosmic knowledge fish tell him that he is an alien. Eager to reach his own kind, Gonzo turns up during a live broadcast of UFO Mania, where Miss Piggy works. A government operative, K. Edgar Singer, who runs the clandestine C.O.V.N.E.T., sees the broadcast and thinks Gonzo can convince his superior, General Luft, that aliens exist.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Muppets from Space (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Frank Oz, the longtime voice of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal and Sam Eagle, was unavailable for most of filming because of his own directing career, so other puppeteers physically performed his characters on set, including Peter Linz as Miss Piggy, John Kennedy as Fozzie and Sam Eagle, and Rickey Boyd as Animal, with Oz dubbing the voices afterward.
- Director Randal Kleiser had already been hired for the film, but the Jim Henson Company fired him shortly before shooting began because they felt he was not "bringing enough vision," and co-writer Joseph Mazzarino then brought in Tim Hill, who wanted the story "more real" and cut the planned Men in Black, Contact and Alien parodies.
- Scooter had not appeared in a Muppet production since the 1991 theme park attraction Muppet*Vision 3D, and when the character returned in Muppets from Space he was voiced by Adam Hunt, the real-life brother of Scooter's original performer, Richard Hunt.
- The band G. Love and Special Sauce was in Muscle Shoals Sound Studio recording with Little Milton when their manager, Jason Brown, called mid-session to ask them to cover "Dazz" for the movie; former Bonnie Raitt guitarist Will McFarlane joined them on the recording.
- An early draft included the original song "Eye 2 the Sky," written and recorded by the band Ween for Gonzo to sing, but it was cut from the film entirely and left off the soundtrack, unlike a re-recorded Gonzo song from 1979's The Muppet Movie that was also dropped from the film but still made the soundtrack album.
