You might have thought it was a joke when you first heard the news, but it's totally happening -- Ellen Degeneres is teaming up with Netflix to produce a TV series based on the classic children's story "Green Eggs and Ham," as she announced to a live audience at her talk show "Ellen" on Wednesday.

Deadline reports that the series is set to debut in May 2018, almost 3 years from now, and that Warner Brothers expects it to be "the highest-end, most expensive animated program ever produced for television." How much money are we talking, here? The rumors are that it will cost $5 to $6 million per episode, which means that at 13 episodes, the show might take up to $78 million altogether.

Obviously we're guessing that most of that budget will go towards, you know, actually making a TV show. But what if they spent the whole shebang just on the iconic food from the book? We did the math, and they could feed a LOT of green eggs and ham to people with that kinda money.

Green Food Coloring

A 1 oz bottle of McCormick Specialty Extracts Green Food Color retails for $2.98 at Walmart, so you could buy a lot of them with $78 million -- 26,174,496 bottles, in fact.

Eggs

According to the United States Bureau of Labor, the average retail price for two dozen eggs in this country is approximately $2.02, meaning that each egg is 17 cents. With the "Green Eggs and Ham" budget, you'd be able to score about 458,823,529 eggs.

Ham

Whole portions of bone-in ham like the stuff Sam's trying to hoist on our poor narrator can run you a lot -- at Harrington Hams, a 6 to 12 pound ham costs $74.95. $78 million could get you at least 1,040,693 of those hams.

Put It All Together...

When you add up the individual cost of each part of the meal -- two eggs, half a ham, and two to three drops of food coloring -- then with the rumored Netflix budget you can make green eggs and ham for exactly 975,622 people, which is roughly the population of San Jose, California according to 2010 U.S. census data. Man, that's a lot of eaters.