Bill Barretta: The Disney Muppets, that I can see being more of the situation where there's obviously more men for the core cast,
and I think that's because that's where it started, right? It was a group of mostly men and those characters have kind of maintained that, and you know Frank Oz's been saying for years and I have too, we just want to create new characters, trying to find an opportunity to create new characters is I think the way you can start integrating more people of color and women and, you know, the variety. With the Muppets, it's always kind of you're in this pre-existing bubble of core characters and I just keep trying to push for "can we do a little side series about a group of rats?" Just try and pull out from the tree trunk so that we can create new characters, more diverse characters, you know?
Colleen Smith: Well, I think the other problem is if you only have one thing, whatever it is, that anytime you bring something in that's different than that, they're usually like a tool for that main group of people, or they're an accessory, or they get boxed in. So if it's only male characters, any women that get introduced are usually introduced as mothers or girlfriends, and it doesn't really give them a lot of room to be explored as characters, they're usually the nag or the straight one, and so it's hard to enter something like that when most of the characters are sexual objects, so you need that offshoot where women don't have to be one thing. And also, if you only bring in one person, then if they're an idiot or a weirdo, it's like your only female character is a terrible person, but if there's a lot of female characters, then you can have terrible people and good people, and smart people and dumb people.
Bill: Right, and like with the Muppet Show characters, there's all these pre-established relationships, right? And they tend to already fill the idiot void or the boring character, you know, those combinations, that if you bring in a new character it's almost like, well we've got that character, but I'm always like let's just create new characters like Joe from Legal. It's a male character, but he popped out of nowhere, and I can see more happening with him, but it would be great to see more happen with Julianne's character, the Beverly Plume character.