It was recently announced that a new 25th anniversary edition of the Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird will be released on March 24, 2009. Extras will include a featurette and an interview with Caroll Spinney.
All of which is great. Follow That Bird is a fun movie with good songs, touching moments, and the lesson that it’s okay for a six-year-old to jump from a moving truck. So we Muppet fans really have nothing to complain about here… but that’s never stopped us before.
See, where the previous DVD release basically just duplicated the original movie poster, this release has a brand-new cover. And it’s hard not to notice that Elmo is prominently featured along with the other Muppets, despite the fact that the film was made before he was really a character, and he only appears onscreen for about two seconds as part of a crowd scene (and not performed by Kevin Clash).
We’ve been talking about this over on the Tough Pigs forum, and one thing led to another, and now we’re asking ourselves: Could we do a better job? A couple of forum members have already whipped up their own alternate versions, and I’d like to see more from the Tough Pigs reader population at large. (Longtime TP readers will recognize that this is the same concept as the highly successful “Muppets Magic Extreme Makeover” commissioned by Danny Horn way back in 2003.)
So here’s your assignment: Come up with a new Follow That Bird DVD cover and send it to me at ToughPigsRyan@yahoo.com. That’s it. It can be a legitimate redesign, or it can be silly, and a few weeks from now I’ll post the good ones here. Here’s something I just came up with to give you some inspiration:
Look, Big Bird has a moustache! And glasses! And the movie is called Follow That Cow! Ha ha!
Okay, that’s really terrible. I know you can do better… so get to it.
Click here to do something or other on the Tough Pigs forum!
