‘The Naked Gun’s Enchanted, Horny Snowman Was Created by the Jim Henson Company

Kermit the Frog, Big Bird, David Bowie’s distractingly revealing Goblin King pants — these are just some of the Jim Henson Company’s many iconic creations. And now we can add The Naked Gun’s horny, murderous snowman to the list.

One of the most memorable sequences in the Liam Neeson-starring reboot was the montage showcasing the evolution of Frank Drebin Jr.’s relationship with Beth Davenport (played by Pamela Anderson). 

In the original movie’s romantic montage, Leslie Nielsen’s Frank takes Priscilla Presley’s Jane on a series of dates to places like the beach, a rodeo and a movie theater playing the sidesplitting Platoon. And it all, impossibly, takes place in a single day.

But the new Naked Gun’s montage takes things to a much darker, far stranger place. Frank Jr. and Beth head to a rustic snowy cabin where they sing songs, make a snowman and stumble upon a book of “Spells and Incantations.” One spell brings the snowman to life, and before long they’re all in the bedroom having a steamy threeway, experimenting in ways that Frosty dared not imagine.

Beth and Frank eventually boot the snowman out of the throuple, ushering him back into the cold. But he doesn’t take that well. He gets his fingerless hands on a gun and tries to murder the couple — until Beth slices his head off with a Samurai sword. 

It’s still not as messed up as that magic snowman movie starring Michael Keaton, though. 

In a recently-released behind-the-scenes documentary, director Akiva Schaffer revealed that the goal was to do a montage that was “completely different” from the one in the first film. “I was trying to think of a fresh approach, and then at four in the morning I woke up and it came to me,” Schaffer recalled. “And I literally just wrote, beat for beat, the bullet points (of the scene) into my phone’s notes app. And it’s almost identical to what’s in the movie.”

Some thought that the snowman would be a digital character, but Schaffer insisted that it needed to be a practical effect, and hired the company that made all of our childhoods magical to make it happen. “A CG snowman is what everyone assumed it had to be right off the bat, and we kept going ‘No no no, it has to be a puppet. It should be a person in a suit,’” Schaffer explained. “And it ended up being the Henson Company that was able to do it. And they did such a good job making that suit.”

“A very nice puppeteer would get into that suit,” the director continued, “and then another puppeteer would be off to the side controlling the eyebrows, so that the eyebrows could get angry. It was just a delight every time it was on set.”

In retrospect, the Henson connection might explain why the psycho snowman looks so much like the snowman from A Muppet Family Christmas.

Although, as far as we know, that character never tried to kill Kermit and Miss Piggy following a night of passion.