In early October, fans of the original Frasier series and admirers of esoteric screen oddities packed the house at Vidiots, an indie theater and video store in Los Angeles’ Eagle Rock neighborhood. The occasion? A one-time screening of Our Frasier Remake, a frame-by-frame, collaborative reimagining of an episode from the sitcom, which starred Kelsey Grammar and David Hyde Pierce as brothers Frasier and Niles Crane and ran on NBC from 1993 to 2004.
The exquisite corpse project was pieced together by more than 100 artists, animators, and filmmakers during the recent WGA/SAG strike, under the guidance and organization of L.A.-based director Jacob Reed.
During a post-screening interview, Reed says that he was inspired by other collaborative, internet-famous projects such as Star Wars Uncut, Our Robocop Remake, Our Footloose Remake, and Shrek Retold. “There is a language to these kinds of projects on the internet, which is much to my benefit, so I wasn’t inventing a format,” Reed explains.
When he first heard the rumblings of the Frasier reboot on Paramount+, Reed sent an email to a couple dozen friends and acquaintances to see if they were interested in participating. “It looked like a really fun thing to do,” he says, “and I love Frasier.”
Our Frasier Remake recreates the show’s first season finale, “My Coffee With Niles,” which originally aired in 1994. Reed chose the episode not only because it’s one of his personal favorites, but it also made a number of Frasier top episode lists. “I wanted it to be something Frasier fans would love,” Reed elaborates. It also helped that it was a self-contained, real-time episode set in one macro location, which made it easier to reimagine.
On a more philosophical level, Reed says that the episode focused on Frasier’s happiness as he looked back on whether all the changes in his life—primarily his move from Boston to Seattle—were worth it. “As a spinoff of Cheers, people didn’t expect it to succeed at all,” Reed says. But the OG Frasier caught on with audiences and lasted for 11 seasons. Nearly three decades later, the same question arose with the reboot: ”Is it worth it to do a spin-off Frasier called Frasier?” Our Frasier Remake simultaneously celebrates Frasier, but also critiques the current culture of endless remakes.
Reed dissected the episode into 184 sections, each approximately six seconds long. There weren’t many rules for participating artists, but artists could only take on two back-to-back segments; if they wanted to do additional sections, their visual styles needed to be different. Reed wanted to avoid putting visually similar segments together, creating a cadence and coherence to the episode. In other words, making sure that “My Coffee With Niles” was…watchable.
The work was slow-going at first. Reed and his small cohort were going to need help to finish the project. So Reed posted on Frasier subreddits as well as illustration, filmmaking, and animation message boards. He turned to Star Wars Uncut’s Casey Pugh who advised him to create a website. Word then spread about Our Frasier Remake. It also didn’t hurt that the film and TV industry slowed and a number of participants had extra time on their hands. “I don’t know if this would have been able to happen if the strike wasn’t going on,” Reed admits.
Reed is bemused about the project’s talking points for interested artists: “The value proposition for everyone was, ‘This is going to be a lot of work, and no one is going to get paid, but wouldn’t it be cool if we did it?’” But it worked, and the result is audaciously visual storytelling: Hand-drawn segments follow stop-motion ones, with wildly abstract renderings of the episode’s characters (Frasier, Niles, Roz, Martin, and Daphne) mixed in with truer renditions.
Philly-based illustrator and animator M.K. Komins heard about the project from friend and animation director Harry Chaskin (Bygone Behemoth, Buddy Thunderstruck). “Turns out we’re both Frasier…zealots,” Komins says during a phone interview.
“I found my love for [Frasier] when it hit streaming,” they say. “It spoke to me when my life was in complete turmoil.” As their go-to comfort show, Komins estimates that they’ve watched the original series at least a dozen times all the way through.
Komins animated a segment in which Niles talks about his relationship with his wife Maris, who’s never seen in the original series. Komins included a couple of Easter Eggs, such as a painting of Niles as the satyr Pan, god of the wild and debaucherous, for fellow “Frasier-heads” or “Craniums” (as Komins calls fellow fans during the interview).
Rebecca Avalos, an L.A.-based artist, found the project on Instagram. Though not quite old enough to appreciate the first-run of Frasier, she remembers her aunt watching the show as she was growing up. It wasn’t until college that she binged most of the series. Her segment covered Niles and Frasier trying to cover up the fact that they forgot their father’s birthday. Avalos mixed 2D hand-drawn rotoscope, stop-motion with clay, and photoshop, and even added a nod to The Simpsons—as Kelsey Grammer also voices Sideshow Bob on the animated series.
She also recruited her sisters Sofia and Rocky Avalos to contribute as well. They banded together, using stop motion with fabric in all their frames. “We had lots of all-nighters,” she says.
In addition to the screening at Vidiots, DIY showings have taken place in Austin, Seattle, and Brooklyn. But unless Reed can figure out a way to compensate participants (and himself) for their time, fans shouldn’t hold their breath for another episode. But he’s now channeling his fanboy efforts into a Frasier-themed art show.
“It was always the goal to very clearly not profit off of [the project] because we are clearly operating in a very gray area as far as the legalities of parody and criticism,” Reed explains.
Though he’s heard positive comments from some people involved in the original NBC series, Reed can’t help but worry about the legal department from Paramount+. He hasn’t received a cease-and-desist letter yet, “But I’ve been waiting for it.”
Watch Our Frasier Remake on YouTube.