Hear Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, and Conan O'Brien read from their scrapped Hans and Franz movie
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Hear them now and believe them later: Conan O'Brien assembled Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, and Robert Smigel to read from their unproduced screenplay for the Hans and Franz movie.
More than 30 years after the conception of the Austrian bodybuilder brothers and supposed cousins of Arnold Schwarzenegger, O'Brien welcomed his former Saturday Night Live colleagues on his Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast to look back at the unmade film and read lines from the opening scene.
In it, Hans and Franz (voiced by Carvey and Nealon) are faced with a problem: the TV network behind Pumping Up with Hans and Franz, their informative training program for the serious weightlifter, wants to pull the show after the two described civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. as "flabby." Later, outside of the studio, a dejected Hanz says, "This phase of our lives is over. It's time to start from scratch."
NBC Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon as Hans and Franz on 'Saturday Night Live'
As the story goes, Schwarzenegger inspired the conception of the popular SNL characters after former cast member Nealon had watched a TV interview with the bodybuilder discussing his exercise methods. Hans and Franz would go on to make their debut in season 13, taunting viewers and guests, including Patrick Swayze and Rick Moranis, as "flappy, pathetic losers" in their exaggerated Austrian accents.
Schwarzenegger himself made two cameos in Hans and Franz sketches (first in 1988 and later in 1991) and also expressed an interest in co-producing and starring in the film adaptation that never came to be. Nealon, who wrote the script with Carvey, Smigel, and O'Brien, previously told EW that time thwarted plans for the movie, a musical titled Hans and Franz: The Girlyman Dilemma.
"I guess when push came to shove, Arnold and these big movie stars have like six films in development at a time, then they have to decide what to do," Nealon said. "Arnold had just parodied himself in Last Action Hero, so he opted not to do this one."
The original plan, O'Brien revealed in the podcast, was to write a cameo role for Schwarzenegger, but in revisiting the original script he found that Schwarzenegger was "in it more than anybody."
"We hung the entire project" on Schwarzenegger, O'Brien said. "At the time, he hadn't done anything like this yet. He was interested in it and I remember thinking, 'If Arnold says yes, this is going to get made, so we can make this as silly as we want. If Arnold says yes, all the craziness is gonna happen.'"
The first part of the musical film follows Hans and Franz's trek to Hollywood, while the second half is a "parody" of Schwarzenegger's life. O'Brien and co. will be reading the screenplay in its entirety in upcoming podcast episodes, with Smigel doing his best Schwarzenegger impression.
Listen to the opening scene above.
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