Q&A Hollywood
Q: It seems that Rizzo the Rat isn't in the Muppet cast anymore. What happened? He and Gonzo made a good team.
A: It depends who you ask. Some say he was dropped as part of the high-profile firing of Muppeteer Steve Whitmire (“CAVE iN”), but if you ask Rizzo himself, he was shouldered out to make room for a new guy. Either way, it ain't pretty.
Rizzo the Rat started as a background character but came into his own when he was tasked with co-narrating “The Muppet Christmas Carol” (1992) alongside Gonzo. That partnership bore fruit for several years afterward, and Rizzo maintained his new, high profile. That is, until 2011, when he was barely seen and never heard in the big-screen hit “The Muppets.”
His screen time has been down ever since.
In the next big-screen film, “Muppets Most Wanted” (2014), he was given enough time to say that he and some of the other characters had been shouldered out to make room for new Muppet Walter (voiced by Peter Linz, “Sesame Street”).
This is, of course, a joke for the film, but in terms of screen time, he's right. Walter, a brand-new character without the decades of backstory that Rizzo boasts, has in fact been a featured character in those two movies and some other recent productions.
Meanwhile, Rizzo's screen time has decreased to the point that he's been completely absent from all of the recent Muppet shows and films; something likely to do with Whitmire's absence
— he was fired in 2017 for “unacceptable business conduct” (per Muppet Studios).
Some of Whitmire's bigger characters — including a certain famous green frog — were recast. Rizzo, however, hasn't been seen since.
Q: Is the guy who played Jason's friend on “The Good Place” the same actor who was in “Kong: Skull Island”? What else can you tell me about him? I thought he was great in both, even though they're very different roles.
A: “Kong: Skull Island” (2017) is indeed a bit of an outlier on Eugene Cordero's resume. His role as Pillboi on “The Good Place,” on the other hand, was right up his alley.
Like so many of today's comedy favorites, he came up through the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe. Since then, he's become a main player in TV creator Michael Schur's personal troupe.
Schur is one of the most successful sitcom creators of the moment, having created “The Good Place” as well as “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn NineNine,” and Cordero is the only actor to have appeared in all four series.
Mostly small roles (“The Good Place” was the only one in which he appeared for more than one episode), it's still an impressive run considering how successful each of those shows was.
Q:Wasn't there once a sitcom version of “Animal House”? What happened to that?
A: The 1970s happened to it, meaning that, ultimately, nothing happened to it.
Most post-mortem discussions of “Delta House,” the 1979 TV adaptation of the 1978 big-screen comedy classic “National Lampoon's Animal House,” say that it failed because of censorship.
It's undeniable the raunchy, juvenile laughs that made “Animal House” a hit wouldn't have worked on broadcast TV in the `70s. The show had to tone those down, losing a big piece of the movie's appeal in the process. It also started out one star short.
The show couldn't get John Belushi, the “Saturday Night Live” alum who played John Blutarsky in the film. Instead, it made a new character, Jim Blutarsky, John's little brother (played by Josh Mostel, stage actor and son of stage great Zero Mostel).
Many of the film's other stars did return, though, including Bruce McGill (“McGyver”) as D-Day, Stephen Furst (“Magic Kid,” 1993) as Flounder and John Vernon (“Point Blank,” 1967) as Dean Wormer.
It also starred then-debutante Michelle Pfeiffer, a few years before she hit it big in “Grease 2” (1982) and “Scarface” (1983).
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