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After a staggering 15 years of being on the air, you'd think that The Walking Dead franchise has no surprises left in store. But you'd be wrong. Speaking at Nightmare Weekend Chicago 2025, series producer and makeup head Greg Nicotero revealed scrapped plans for a kind of Walking Dead episode that would have been unlike any that existed before or have existed since - that is, a musical episode.

The idea came up during a discussion of families that have told Nicotero and other producers that they watched The Walking Dead 'as a family.' You know, despite it not really being a 'family show.' Nicotero joked that "maybe we should change it to Walt Disney's The Walking Dead on Sunday nights," and naturally, the Disney talk sparked Nicotero's musical memory. But how close did singing, dancing walkers actually come to being broadcast to our TCV screens? Let Greg answer that.

"We did talk about doing a musical episode a few times,” Nicotero said, claiming that "Scott [M. Gimple, series screenwriter] was really close to writing one, actually."

That's... a surprise. No offense to the musical theater genre, but it is a sweeping departure from the gritty, horror tone of The Walking Dead franchise. But apparently, the team had gotten so far as to plan for how big a shift it might be.

"It was going to be like a hallucination," Nicotero concludes, "Someone was going to be hallucinating, and it was going to be walkers singing and stuff."

Ah, that makes a little bit more sense - maybe the whole singing walker thing would work, after all. If Star Trek: Strange New Worlds can get away with a musical episode, why not The Walking Dead? Of course, the main Walking Dead series ended in 2022, and I doubt the currently running spinoff (Daryl Dixon) has much us for a musical episode.

But maybe the situation could be flipped? Maybe instead of a musical coming to The Walking Dead TV universe, a Walking Dead story could come to Broadway? I mean, live theater is working for Stranger Things.

The Walking Dead is streaming now (musical-less, I'm afraid) on Netflix.

Follow AMC's entire zombie saga with Popverse's The Walking Dead watch order.