Once you’ve done Ebenezer Scrooge, the next logical step is Long John Silver, right? That’s what Disney, Jim Henson Productions, and director Brian Henson apparently thought. After the success of 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol, the Muppets stuck with literary adaptations, this time plugging them into Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island.
On this episode, screenwriter Bri Azmoudeh joins us to talk all about 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island. We’ll discuss why making a pirate movie in the mid-1990s was such a bold move, how Henson’s film works as an adaptation of Stevenson’s book, and — naturally — the splendor that is the great Tim Curry’s performance as the duplicitous Long John Silver.