Conan O'Brien Making SNL's Cancelled Hans & Franz Movie As a Podcast

By Russ Burlingame

Not long after actor Dana Carvey referenced a failed Saturday Night Live spinoff movie on an episode of Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, O'Brien will produce a podcast adaptation of the films' screenplay beginning in two weeks on Earwolf. Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey are joining O'Brien and his Team Coco to make Hans and Franz, a podcast based on the characters Nealon and Carvey played on SNL. The popular series of sketches featured Nealon and Carvey as a pair of musclebound, oafish Austrian bodybuilders inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Lost Hans & Franz Movie will drop weekly, beginning on Wednesday May 17, according to Deadline, who first reported the story. The project was originally developed in the 1990s, with an eye toward getting Schwarzenegger to make an appearance himself, but it bounced around between a few studios and finally died in development.

"Revisiting this madness with Dana, Kevin, and Robert was insanely fun," said O'Brien. "Sometimes, the projects that don't get made make me laugh the hardest."

O'Brien and his frequent writing partner Robert Smigel wrote the original script along with Carvey and Nealon. At one point, the movie was envisioned as a musical, which is a lot less confusing when you remember that O'Brien was the credited writer in The Simpsons's famous "monorail" episode.

The movie was one of a number of SNL-adjacent movies that was in development around the time of Wayne's World. Unfortunately for Hans & Franz, the failures of Stuart Saves His Family and It's Pat, as well as Schwarzenegger's much-hyped Last Action Hero, contributed to the studio pressing pause on the movie.

Nealon, Carvey, O'Brien, and Smigel have now adapted the film script into a four-part podcast series, which will be a kind of combination of actually making a version of the movie, and a commentary track on the script and their experiences developing the ill-fated film. Per the Deadline stor, "The group will read selected scenes from the screenplay and use those scenes as a jumping off point to reminisce and riff about this formative time in their lives."

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