And there it is! The official poster for Muppet Guys Talking, Frank Oz’s documentary about Muppet performers. Having a real poster brings us one step closer to seeing this film ourselves. It’s almost real!
According to Screen Rant, the poster was conceived by Dave Goelz himself, with the help of Pixar director Peter Sohn. In Dave’s own words:
It was just how do we convey the idea that you’re going to hear from the people under the characters. So, there were two levels of it that intrigued me. I did a lot of sketches of ideas. Hands are an obvious gateway. But if there’s nothing on the hands, there’s no puppet covering it, all of a sudden it’s unmasked. And then if the hand is coming out of a box of some kind, and we’re going to peek into the box, we’re going to find out the story of what makes the hands move.
Peter Sohn then drew the safe, took photos of the performers’ hands, and Photoshopped the heck out of it to make the lovely piece above. Even Jerry Nelson, who had already passed by the time this poster came about, is included. His hand was taken from a photo from behind the scenes of Muppets Tonight, and then touched-up by a friend of Goelz’s. Again, according to Dave:
I got this friend of mine who is a medical illustrator (Cindy Woolley)…medical illustrators illustrate medical textbooks and publications. They might look at a cadaver and draw what’s going on. They might look at a skeleton and do a graphic version of how a joint replacement works, that kind of thing. So she’s really good at drawing people. She’s really good at figuring out how to save a bad photoshop job. So she took the photoshop and just took a whole weekend figuring out how to work it, to get the colors to work. I think when Peter was working on it I switched a couple of arms so they’d be talking to each other. And between Peter Sohn and this lady, Cindy Woolley, they pulled it together. It took a lot of work.
According to Frank Oz, everyone agreed to help create the poster out of the kindness of their hearts. “What’s cool is all of these people also helped us for free. They just wanted to be part of it. Dave had such a great idea. And then he talked to Pete, and Pete suggested Michael, who suggested Peter Sohn, and Dave had his friend (Wolley). And that all of this came about like it did is wonderful.”
Fantastic stuff. And now we’re even more excited about this movie, if such a thing was even possible!
For more about Muppet Guys Talking, be sure to check out their website and keep following us here on ToughPigs!
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by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com
