As Paul Soter tells us, Broken Lizard attempted to get a movie made called “Mickleberry the Space Cat,” which was about the first cat that went into space. “I would love to dust that off because that was always a completely absurdist, stoned concept,” he says. “I would love for us to go into space.” Honestly, the jokes write themselves.
“Cats are hard to train, right?” ponders Erik Stolhanske. “And they’d have to go through the NASA training program, and we thought that poses a lot of challenges.” There has been a bevy of films about animals going to space, but they’re usually chimpanzees or dogs — animals with a history of effective trainability — seldom adorable jerks like cats (not that they didn’t try). This is not cat slander, this is cat realism.
“This one was multi-layered, because in this thing, the cat could also speak — or so people thought,” says Steve Lemme. “So you would go in, and of course, the cat could not speak. And then you’d feel bad for yourself, and you’d come out of there, and then when people would say, ‘Did the cat speak to you?’ [and] these characters would lie. They’d be like, ‘Oh yeah. That cat had a lot to say to me.’ Needless to say, the studio did not make this film.”
It’s a shame the studio passed on Mickleberry, because we could absolutely use some more space cats. Jonesy from “Alien,” Goose from “Captain Marvel,” Nyancat, Sox from “Lightyear,” and the titular “The Cat from Outer Space” must all be exhausted from holding down the proverbial space cat fort.
