Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
HOLLYWOOD Q&A
Q: Is “Project Blue Book” coming back on?
A: I think, at this point, we can definitively say no. However, fans of the show are nothing if not believers.
“Project Blue Book” was a scripted series on History based on a real U.S. Air Force program investigating the possibility of alien visitation on Earth.
It aired for two seasons before being cancelled in 2020. But the series creators didn’t give up hope.
David O’Leary (“Eli,” 2019) and Sean Jablonski (a writer and producer on the cable drama “Nip/Tuck”) wrote and produced the series for History. After the cancellation, they began lobbying for another network to rescue it. They said at the time that they had a full third season written and ready to film. Failing that, they even proposed turning the third season into a book.
“The studio that produces and ultimately pays for the show is committed to finding another home for it, like on a streaming service, which we feel could present a larger audience for us,” Jablonski told DenOfGeek. com at the time.
Unfortunately, none of that came to pass, and now they seem to have moved on.
In November 2021, it was announced that O’Leary and Jablonski would team up for a new series that retells an even more famous true-life alien story: the purported extraterrestrial crash near Roswell, New Mexico.
But so far that series hasn’t materialized, either.
Fans haven’t given up hope, though. A Save Project Blue Book digital campaign launched the moment the series ended and is continuing online. You can go to SaveBlueBook.com to sign a petition asking for a third season.
Q: Who was that playing the U.S. president in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”?
A: Perhaps you didn’t recognize him because it’s incredible that he agreed to do it: That was Oscar-winning acting great Tim Robbins (“Mystic River,” 2003) as, well, a U.S. president in the 1999 spy spoof “Austin Powers:
The Spy Who Shagged Me.”
The bigger question for many is: Which president?
The film is very explicitly set in 1969. That would mean that the president was Richard Nixon. However, though Nixon is one of the easiest presidential impressions to do, Robbins went for what film critic Jay Bastian called a “pseudo-JFK” instead.
Film trivia website TVTropes. com picked a different Kennedy, suggesting that Robbins was in fact channeling John’s little brother Robert (it then suggested an explanation: maybe they travelled to an alternate version of history where RFK hadn’t been assassinated and became president instead).
We can certainly rule out the possibility that Robbins was trying for Nixon and missed. Robbins is one of the most respected and decorated actors of his generation, star of many of the great dramas of the ‘90s and ‘00s. If he wanted to, he could have produced the best Nixon impression the retro spy-comedy sex-romp genre had ever seen.
Q: Is the Swedish Chef Muppet based on a real person?
A: It depends on who you ask. If you ask Lars Kuprik Backman — and if he remembers enough English to answer — he’ll say yes.
Backman is a real-life chef from Sweden and he claims that, in the ‘70s, he had the eyebrows and moustache to fit the part. He also claims that an early-’70s TV appearance would have looked and sounded an awful lot like the nonsense-spouting Muppet in question.
As a young chef trying to make a living in Los Angeles, he was booked to do an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” showcasing Swedish cuisine. Easy enough for a chef, he thought, until he discovered at the last minute that the appearance was live, and there would be an audience.
“I was live on TV in America, and I was paralyzed,” he told ABC News in 2009. “I couldn’t speak! I couldn’t remember any English or any Swedish. But I knew the show had to go on, so I started talking, but the only thing that came out were these guttural sounds.”
Furthermore, he said in the same interview that he also worked as a chef in the 20th Century Fox canteen around the time Muppets creator Jim Henson would have been working there.
Jerry Juhl, one of the original “Muppet Show” writers and a longtime Henson collaborator, refuted Backman’s claim. When Backman’s story first made the rounds in 2001, Juhl wrote on MuppetCentral.com that he and Henson worked closely on the character, and the Muppets creator never once mentioned a real-life inspiration. “That’s a story Jim would have told!”
Backman told ABC he’s not bothered that the mystery hasn’t been settled and that he’s moved on. However, he did jokingly name his catering business Svenska Kocken — actually Swedish for “The Swedish Chef.”