Nationality American Creator Jim Henson | Gender Male | |
 | ||
Movies The Muppets, The Muppet Christma, Muppets Most Wanted, Muppets from Space, The Muppets Take Man Similar Gonzo, Pepé the King Prawn, Bunsen Honeydew, Scooter, Sam Eagle | ||
Skateboarding dog gets served rizzo the rat and rowlf the dog the muppets
Rizzo the Rat is a Muppet character, created and performed by Steve Whitmire. He is a fictional rat who appeared on The Muppet Show and numerous films, with a starring role in the 1992 film The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Contents
- Skateboarding dog gets served rizzo the rat and rowlf the dog the muppets
- Rizzo the rat s biggest fan muppets most wanted the muppets
- Character
- History
- References
Rizzo the rat s biggest fan muppets most wanted the muppets
Character
Rizzo is a streetwise and sarcastic rat with a New Jersey accent. He is a self-proclaimed acrophobe. His humor can be risque, as in the TV series The Muppets he was given the line, "Is ABC going to be OK with 'Mother Teresa on a stick'?" To avoid potential difficulty with real-life censors, alternative lines were filmed.
Rizzo's family has been mentioned in Muppet media. He has 1,274 brothers and sisters, as told to Gonzo in The Muppet Christmas Carol. In 2016, Disney announced Rizzo came from a family that traditionally cooked pizzas. This addition to his story was in light of a new pizzeria at Disney's Hollywood Studios dedicated to Rizzo, called PizzeRizzo.
History
Rizzo's name is derived from Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo character in Midnight Cowboy. Steve Whitmire created the character, based on rats he had previously made out of bottles.
Rizzo first appeared in episode 418 of The Muppet Show, as one of many rats following Christopher Reeve backstage. He can be seen mugging and reacting to practically every line of dialogue. He remained a scene-stealing background figure through the final season, occasionally performing with Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem. By the time of The Muppets Christmas Carol, Whitmire had been performing Rizzo for around 12 years.
After that he appeared in The Great Muppet Caper as a bellboy in a fleabag London hotel. He has appeared in most later Muppet projects, including The Muppets Take Manhattan and Muppets Tonight. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, he developed a double act with Gonzo, with director Brian Henson and the crew envisioning Rizzo as "pain-in-the-neck sidekick." The Gonzo and Rizzo partnership was continued in Muppet Treasure Island and in Muppets from Space. While formerly associated principally with Gonzo, he transitioned to being more often a sidekick to Pepe the King Prawn.
Rizzo appears as a background character in the 2011 film The Muppets, without a spoken dialogue, although he is seen singing along during the finale, as well as the scene in which Kermit the Frog addresses a large crowd of Muppets. In Muppets Most Wanted (2014), he appears to decry his lack of screentime in the previous film, along with Kermit's nephew Robin.
Rizzo returned to prominence in the TV series The Muppets, where he was on a writing crew with Gonzo and Pepe, as he was paired up with them again.