Seth Green

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) The lights went off in Sweetknuckle Junction in August of 2002. Junction Jack, Dottie Sunshine, Greg the Bunny, Warren "The Ape" DeMonague and Fredrick "Count" Blah were all given their walking papers. For many months, it seemed like there was no place in Hollywood for the hard working fabricated Americans and their typecast human friends. As sad as it might be to imagine all of those colorful characters standing in line at the soup kitchen, having to endure racial taunts like "sock," a "Greg the Bunny" revival is building. It began, as so many cult followings do, on the Internet in chatrooms and newsgroups and spread to toy conventions where bootleg sets of the short-lived FOX series were readily available. It took the breakout DVD success of another low-rated FOX series to convince the network that there might be ancillary gold to be found.

"The response to ’Family Guy’ was so intense, and knowing that ’Greg the Bunny’ had a cult following and that there was a petition of like 400,000 names to try to get the DVD released, they figured that there was a market," explains Dan Milano, who originally co-created Greg for New York public access with Sean Baker and Spencer Chinoy.

"Greg the Bunny" averaged only 5.7 million viewers during its 11-episode run on FOX and earned a premature cancellation with two episodes left on the shelf, following in the footsteps of such adored but swiftly truncated FOX offerings as "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," "Firefly," "Wonderfalls" and "Keen Eddie." Milano, who insists that FOX was very supportive through the show’s production process, knows that it’s the nature of the industry. "Network television is a high stakes poker game and because the advertisers have to be pleased and have to be pleased quickly, there’s the feeling that if you don’t win your hand in the first round you have to leave the table, which is odd, because it goes against the kind of development that they do, where they’re looking for shows that are very different from something they’ve seen before," says Milano, also the voice of the show’s titular lepus as well as theatrically trained simian Warren.

Although FOX has had success nurturing innovative projects and getting shows on the air that no other network would touch, like many shows before and after it, "Greg the Bunny" fell victim to FOX’s inability to find and nurture an audience.

"I would say that all-in-all FOX was really happy with the show they got," Milano maintains. "But they became cautious and started moving the time slot around and trying to draw more people and I think, just like with ’Family Guy,’ it ended up confusing the core audience."

Preparation for the DVD, which will be released on Tuesday, Oct. 19, sent Milano back to view old episodes for the first time since the plug was pulled.

"Seth Green and I sat down and watched a bunch of them and just started laughing our asses off, just marveling at the fact that we got the show on the air in the first place," he reflects.

In addition to all 13 produced episodes (including the previously unseen "Sock Like Me" and "Jimmy Drives Gil Crazy"), bonus materials on the DVD let viewers trace Greg from his public access roots through his time as a featurette star on IFC. On commentary tracks, Milano traces a fascination with puppets that goes back to early exposure to "The Muppet Show" and through his undergraduate film studies at NYU.

"Puppets were always great because you didn’t have to worry about feeding or paying your actors," he laughs. "It was just so much fun to see a little ragdoll puppet out in the real world. Unlike shows like ’Alf’ or ’The Muppets,’ which were great, they could be shown in a much more dramatic light and dealing with dramatic issues."

Although some characters, like IQ-deficient Tardy the Turtle or the mobbed up members of the Loyal Brotherhood of Hamsters, were played for laughs, "Greg the Bunny" tried to make even its fabricated character have human problems and complex lives, like Warren’s conflicts with next door neighbor Corey Feldman or Count Blah’s extended mourning for his late wife Maldora Blah. Occasionally they even had uses outside of the world of Sweetknuckle Junction.

"Puppets can say things that people can’t, because you find them amusing, even if they’re angry," says Milano. "We’d take the puppets into FOX meetings and just sit there at the boardroom table and actually have the puppets say, ’You’re going to screw me on this deal, aren’t you?’ or ’I want points’ and they’d laugh, but if I said that, they’d kick me out of the room."

Milano hopes that a successful DVD release for "Greg" might facilitate a compilation of the old "Junktape" and IFC episodes. The show has a new "unofficial, official homepage" (at gregtbunny.com) and a new "Greg" special will air on IFC early next year featuring original stars Green and Sarah Silverman as well as familiar puppet characters. Milano’s also in preliminary talks with the Muppets Holding Company about a revitalized version of the Henson franchise, though he plans to stick with "Greg the Bunny" as long as he can, possibly even envisioning an independent feature.

He notes, "Usually the second and third seasons of most television series are the best, because it’s when the writers and actors really hit their stride and we were denied that opportunity to let this things really evolve."