If you stopped by ToughPigs on April 1st, you were lucky enough to meet a brand new Muppet. That’s because we celebrated April Fools Day by spoofing the Muppets’ 70th anniversary celebration with a character no one had ever heard of before: Korbett the Frog!
A lot went into this year’s April Fools Day. The entire ToughPigs team collaborated, not only to develop the idea, but to figure out who this new weirdo was going to be. It took weeks of conversation to agree on Korbett’s name, look, and backstory. He ended up being a perfect mix of bizarre and believable, while also providing a lot of fodder for other folks in the Muppet fan community to play along with their own “memories” of Korbett.
Although everyone from ToughPigs contributed, the first concept sketch of Korbett was created by Becca Petunia, who also mimicked the Muppets’ 70th art style for the key art, as seen above. Since Korbett needed to look like a real Muppet, I took to Photoshop to composite pieces of other Muppets (can you guess where each part of Korbett came from??). And for his personality and backstory, the bulk of the work was handled by Matthew Soberman.
Speaking of which, you can read Matthew’s original article detailing the secret history of Korbett the Frog by clicking here!
As you may know, the real Muppets 70th campaign gets its own weekly merchandise in the form of magnets (and some other stuff) sold at the Disney theme parks. So of course, we had to provide the same, and you can buy a Korbett magnet (and some other stuff) on the ToughPigs TeePublic shop!
Since we’ve been playing along with the real Muppets 70th campaign by producing the weekly companion podcast “70 Years, 70 Muppets,” we knew we had to pay homage to Korbett in the same way. So we put together a three-part podcast, representing the three basic podcast styles our series has fallen into: a casual interview (hosted by Jarrod Fairclough), a pretentious monologue (hosted by myself), and whatever weird stuff Shane put together (hosted by Shane Keating). The Korbett episode will continue to live on the 70 Years, 70 Muppets channel, and you can listen to it below.
Speaking of merchandise (as we were a couple paragraphs ago), Ryan Roe wrote an article spotlighting some of his favorite bits of Korbett merch. And while they don’t exist any more than Korbett does, it’s still fun to dream. You can read Ryan’s article by clicking here!
Every week near the end of every featured Muppet’s week in the 70th campaign, the official Muppets Instagram features a collection of fan art. So of course, we had to do the same. So we reached out to some of our artist friends and folks who’ve been creating weekly artwork for the 70th. Thank you so much to all of these talented artists who opted to draw a character that doesn’t exist for our silly April Fools Day gag.
You can see all the incredible Korbett fan art below!
And with that, another April Fools Day is wrapped! But stay tuned, because we’ve got more April Fools surprises coming real soon… Or do we???? Yeah, we actually do.
Click here to celebrate the life of Korbett the Frog on the ToughPigs Discord!
by Joe Hennes – [email protected]
