This Tim Hill-directed comedy brings together the Muppet gang for an out-of-this-world adventure that explains the back story of Gonzo the Great and where he comes from. It’s a laugh-out-loud adventure that is sometimes overlooked as the film does feel the absence of Jim Henson to a certain degree. But did you know that the movie was made in North Carolina? Well, let’s look at this interstellar comedy and see if any locations are familiar.
The house that Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the gang live in is actually a well-known house in Wilmington, North Carolina. The Fennell-Crump House was used for all of the exterior shots in the film. The scene where Gonzo is on the roof and gets struck by lightning, the scene when Gonzo is mowing the lawn, and the scenes when the entire group is leaving or entering the home were all shot on location at this house.
The exterior of the fictional alien investigation building, C.O.V.N.E.T., was the Ideal Cement Factory located in Castle Hayne, North Carolina. If this location sounds familiar to you, that is because it was used in other films, such as The Super Mario Brothers Movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Crow, just to name a few. There are many other movies that this location was used for that we have not touched upon yet, so keep checking back for more films that used this location.
In the finale of the film, the Muppets meet up with Gonzo’s family at an outdoor location that was meant to be a dessert area known in the film as Cape Doom, when in reality, it was the Fort Fisher State Recreation Area located in New Hanover County, North Carolina near Kure Beach. The rocky beach area proved to be a perfect location for the Cape Doom area.
Finally, any time that we see the Muppets on-screen in any interior setting, all of those shots were filmed at Hollywood East, also known as Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina.
