Good Burger 2 Team Talks Celebrity Cameos, Easter Eggs, and What’s In Ed’s Secret Sauce!

Twenty six years after the iconic Good Burger, Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell reunite as Dexter and Ed to save Good Burger yet again. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with Good Burger 2 director Phil Traill and executive producers and writers Kevin Kopelow and Heath Seifert about celebrity cameos, Easter eggs, and what is really in Ed’s famous sauce.

Based on the Nickelodeon comedy sketch from All That, the first Good Burger film became an instant cult classic when it premiered in 1997. So what made now the right time to bring the iconic comedy duo of Kenan and Kel back together again? “The timing was right,” Seifert told me. “We found a story that was really relevant to what's going on in the world today and I think it's a film that people wanted to see. Kenan and Kel wanted to make it and have wanted to make it for a while. It was really just a matter of the stars aligning and everyone's schedules working out. We hit the ground running once we found the time.”

Even though its been two decades since the original film, it feels like almost no time has past as the film is such a seamless continuation from the first. “Kel keeps calling it Good Burger on steroids. We definitely used the first film as sort of a template, but knew we wanted to get bigger, crazier, more current,” said Seifert, with Traill adding: “We watched the first one a lot lot of times — I've been a fan of the first one forever and these guys wrote the first one so they knew what they were doing — but it was to see what worked in the first one and then do that and do it more. Do it bigger.”

Eagle eyed fans will spot tons of references and connections to the first Good Burger, All That, Kenan and Kel, Saturday Night Live, and even Single Drunk Female. “It was a collision of many pop culture worlds, right?” laughed Seifert. “We know there's a lot of fans of the original movie and all that. We basically just spent 25 years fielding questions from people telling us, ‘Oh, I grew up on that. I want to be in the sequel. When are you guys making a sequel?’ We did the All That reboot a few years back and we did Good Burger sketches again. Everybody wanted to be in a Good Burger sketch and every musical guest we had on the show would be like, ‘Well, we'll perform if we could be in a Good Burger sketch. We knew we'd be able to get a lot of people for this film and I know there's other people that wanted to be in it that just couldn't make the schedules work out. We wrote a couple sequences specifically to be a little loose so that you can add more people if you were able to get people.”

One example was a “We Are The World”-style collaboration where we get to see stars like Zoe Saldaña, Maya Rudolph, and even OG cast member Shar Jackson make cameos. “It's just so random the people who are in it. It's so silly,” laughed Traill. “Hopefully that video gets its own Wikipedia page just breaking down who's actually in it.”

The trio shared the Easter eggs they had to include in Good Burger 2. “Some of the characters that came back for me like bringing Lori Beth [Denberg] back in the Connie Muldoon character from All That, which was a nice little touch,” revealed Kopelow, with Seifert adding: “Bringing Josh Server back. We had the idea of of how to work him into the story that we personally found hilarious. Not everything fit at the end of the day. There's a lot of people you would love to get in. There's a lot references you want to make and at the end of the day you can't do all of them, but that was one that I really really wanted to keep in the script. I'm glad that one worked out.

Traill continued: “I like the rooftop scene from the original movie when they're sitting there on the rooftop. I was like, ‘Oh, we get to do that?’ They sit in the old deck chairs and sit and shoot the breeze. Things like that were like, ‘Oh wow, this is kinda cool.’”

The biggest question after watching Good Burger 2 — what does Ed’s famous sauce taste like? “It's like if Thousand Islands were in the clouds. No, I don't know,” joked Kopelow. “Originally, we did write a recipe for it, just because. So only we know it, but we've never tasted that particular recipe.”

“The one person who really does know is Flula Borg. The actor who plays the Das Food Dude because he gets sprayed with so much of it. It's probably still in him somewhere,” revealed Traill. “He doesn't know what's in it, that's true. He knows what it tastes like.”

“Maybe Good Burger 3 we’ll give the secret away of the secret sauce,” teased Kopelow.

Good Burger 2 is streaming now on Paramount+.