Short thread: This weekend I spoke with someone who was involved with what was going to be the first The Simpsons spinoff, a live action Krusty The Clown series, where the premise was that Krusty moved to Hollywood and became a talk show host.

There had always been some question in my mind about whether a full script was written or whether it was more of an outline and presentation to the network. But it was confirmed that a full pilot script was written by Matt Greoning and Michael Weithorn.

Apparently the pilot script had Krusty falling into worse and worse gigs in Springfield, finally leading to him doing a public appearance at a piano & organ store at the Springfield Mall.

During the appearance an organ rolled out of the store, hit a man, knocking him over a balcony and down to the lower level killing him, with Krusty getting the blame for the man's death. (Remember this was going to be live action.) He is cast out of town and moves to Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles he appears as a guest on a David Letterman-type talk show on Fox & during the segment the host puts on virtual reality headset and goggles (remember this was around 1993 or 1994 so the tech was very very new) & ends up walking outside and getting killed by a car.)

After that Krusty is called in for a meeting at Fox, where he believes that he is going to be told that he'll never work in show business again. Instead he's told the ratings for the episode where the talk-show host was killed were fantastic & he is asked to be the new host.

That's the general premise of the Krusty spinoff pilot script as it was described to me. It was planned to be live-action, shot in a "surreal" style, with effects throughout. Dan Castellaneta would have played Krusty.

Apparently when it was presented to Fox, they liked the concept, but felt it probably worked better as an animated series, so they asked it be changed, and Matt Groening agreed to that change.

It's worth stopping at this point to mention a live action series that Fox had picked up in 1993 called Circus, by the late writer Kevin Curran, who would also later go on to work on The Simpsons. That series & what happened to it is the stuff of writing legend.

Fox had agreed to pick up Circus, a live action series about an alcoholic clown, and production of the series began. At least 2 episodes where filmed.

Then Kevin Curran had a meeting with Fox executives where he famously screamed at an executive that confused Judd Hirsch (of Taxi) with Judd Nelson (of The Breakfast Club). She show was immediately cancelled by Fox and never aired.

A great overview of what happened with Circus was written by Will Harris @NonStopPop and can be found here: https://willharris.substack.com/p/pilot-error-revisited-kevin-currans

And one of the unaired episodes of Circus was shared on YouTube in December.

I shared that Circus story first, because it's a great story, but also because it reflects why Fox may have been gun shy about another live-action sad clown series, and asked that the Krusty show be animated from Groening

What ended up stopping the Krusty spin-off from moving forward was money. No details were given, but apparently they couldn't get the numbers to work. (It's unclear if Fox wanted too big of a cut, or perhaps Gracie Films would have been entitled to a cut & wanted too much.)

But regardless, that was the end of what was going to be the Simpsons Krusty The Clown spin-off series.

End thread.