ABC’s Little Mermaid Live! was a strange beast, like some sort of undersea tentacle woman who really likes to cut bad deals with innocent mer-folk. The singing was largely well-received, especially from Queen Latifah as Ursula and Auli‘i Cravalho (a.k.a. Moana of Moana fame) as Ariel, but everything else was as varyingly shaky as it has been for pretty much every other one of these live musical extravaganzas the networks have been doing over the last few years. This is all a preamble to say that—despite any reservations we may have—ABC is doing it again! (It’s worth pointing out that Deadline says The Little Mermaid Live! was the most-watched made-for-TV musical of the last four years, so clearly the general TV-viewing public is still into this stuff.)
This time around, the lucky musical getting adapted is Young Frankenstein, the reasonably popular Broadway show from the early 2000s (plus a more successful 2017 revision in London) that was co-written by Mel Brooks and based on a much more popular Mel Brooks movie of the same name. This comes from that same Deadline story up above, which says Brooks will serve as a producer on this new TV production—apparently titled Young Frankenstein Live! even though Young Frankenstein It’s Alive! would be funnier—but no cast or premiere date details have been announced. We’d guess it’ll be at least a year from when ABC aired the Little Mermaid musical, which was only a few months ago.
Also, speaking of the cast, this is the part where we try to avoid reminding everyone that most of the main cast of the original Young Frankenstein movie is dead. Just don’t think about it.