Golden Girls 3033 animated pilot envisions TV's most iconic foursome in the future

Thank you for being a congenial humanoid biomass.

Allow us to introduce you to our latest obsession: the five-minute pilot for Golden Girls 3033, which launches legendary TV foursome Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia into the future courtesy of BoJack Horseman supervising director Mike Hollingsworth.

The animated episode overlays original audio from the 37-year-old sitcom The Golden Girls with Jetsons-eque visuals for a trippy juxtaposition of familiar sass and speculative futurism. It finds beloved quartet of Betty White (Rose), Bea Arthur (Dorothy), Rue McClanahan (Blanche), and Estelle Getty (Sophia) still sharing a home in Miami, but now they're living a millennium beyond the present thanks to their discovery of the Fountain of Youth. Also, Sophia is encased in a giant yellow mech suit.

Hollingsworth told IndieWire that he grew up watching The Golden Girls and tossed out the suggestion on a whim.

"Out of frustration, I just started coming up with the craziest ideas, like the most ridiculous concepts," he said. "I was just riffing in the directors' room at BoJack, like, 'Well, of course, I'm also working on a show — it's The Golden Girls, [but] they find the fountain of youth, and now they're in the future.' It made all the directors laugh, so I would return to it conversationally."

But as time passed, Hollingsworth started to take his joke more seriously. "I realized I'm having so much more fun talking about this ridiculous [show] and ideas for it — like Dorothy's ex-husband, Stan, is a squid alien — than I was while trying to pitch what they were asking for," he said.

The good news is the Stan-as-squid alien brainstorm survived the pitch stage, with Hollingsworth using the 10th episode of The Golden Girls season 4, "Stan Takes a Wife," as the basis for the episode he made himself during the pandemic.

In the Golden Girls 3033 pilot, Stan shows off the invisible-to-the-naked-eye diamond he's purchased for his new fiancée, and the girls tear him to shreds, just as they did in the original episode that aired in 1989.

The difference now? In Hollingsworth's version, Stan's voice is a barely comprehensible alien garble, and he flings the saintly Rose around with his tentacles. The episode also features the women living in a home where bots rebuild a lost appendage, lipstick gets lasered on, and the kitchen comes equipped with a food dispenser that offers up Lonely Lady Lasagna and Dateless Desert for One (it comes in "sorrow" flavor). Even the cherished theme song gets a boppy electronic overhaul, although the laugh track remains in place.

"It's ultimately a celebration of the material," Hollingsworth told IndieWire, which premiered the pilot Friday. "With this concept, you're getting the original performances. These are the words that Susan Harris wrote, and these are the performances that she oversaw as a director."

He considers the original scripts jumping-off points, and if the show gets picked up to series he hopes to pack it with as many gags as BoJack. "It's just cramming jokes in, no wasted opportunities, with visual jokes everywhere."

Hollingsworth envisions the episodes as 30 minutes in length, and he promises that if the show is picked up, he'll add more LGBTQ voices "in the driver's seat" given the original series' iconic status in the gay community.

Golden Girls 3033 has attracted network interest, according to Hollingsworth, but his dream is to see it on a streamer like Disney+ or Hulu.

"The show that I'm pitching could just be the beginning of the whole Golden Girls-a-verse," he said. "Like the Marvel Universe, but with The Golden Girls."

Imagine! In the meantime, do yourself a big favor and watch the Golden Girls 3033 pilot below.

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