Until it develops the technology to extract all the disturbing dreams you have while dozing off during Mozart In The Jungle, then turn them into a hit series, Amazon will settle for the next best thing by remaking Sid and Marty Krofft’s nautical nightmare, Sigmund And The Sea Monsters. The streaming service is partnering with the Kroffts to develop a new version of the 1970s children’s show, in which two brothers—already sympathetic to freaks by virtue of their 1970s clothes and hair—discover what appears to be a sentient wad of broccolini coughed up from the garbage disposal, but who turns out to be a sea monster who’s been exiled for being too friendly. Bafflingly, they don’t kill it.
Instead, the boys spend their days trying to hide their monster friend from various authority figures, all the while sacrificing their own education and development. In that sense, isn’t the real monster ignorance? No, it’s a talking sewage-ball. Though a close runner-up would be Rip Taylor as the “sea genie,” Sheldon.
“Sid found Sigmund swimming in the ocean as seaweed,” Marty Krofft tells Variety, ever adroit at not mentioning drugs.
The new Sigmund And The Sea Monsters has been ordered to pilot, which may then go to actual series, or simply live on as a vague, suppressed fear lurking just below the surface for the Amazon executives who see it.