I haven’t managed to see the new Muppet movie yet, which seems strange considering my often-reverential attitude toward all things Muppet. (I might get a chance to do so this weekend, though.)
Truth be told, I’ve long been ambivalent about the Muppets of the post-Henson era. That dates back to when Steve Whitmire, whose previous Muppet characters include Rizzo the Rat and Wembley Fraggle, was tapped as Jim Henson’s successor. It was hard for me to accept performances of Kermit with Whitmire’s voice; from my perspective, Kermit “died” when Jim Henson did.
Earlier this year, Elizabeth Stevens wrote an article on The Awl about her problems with the post-Henson Muppets, which largely centre on the difficulty of accepting the new Kermit, and the loss of a certain anarchic vitality that occurred when the Muppets were sold to Disney. To hear Elizabeth argue the point, Whitmire’s Kermit seems akin to Coraline’s Other Mother.
[F]or me watching Steve Whitmire’s Kermit is akin to watching someone imitate a mythic and longed-for mother—my mother—wearing a my-mother costume in a my-mother dance routine. This person’s heart is in the right place, which only makes it worse. “You should be happy,” the person pleads with me, “Look, Biddy! Your mother is not gone! She is still here.” Now, no one would ever do that. No one in her right mind would think it would work. A child knows his mother’s voice like he knows whether it‘s water or air he’s breathing. One chokes you and one gives you life. Strangely, I feel the same about Kermit. Whitmire is an amazing performer—especially as the lovable dog Sprocket on “Fraggle Rock”—but, when he’s on screen as Kermit, I can feel my body reject it on a cellular level.
The thing is, this is about more than just Kermit, and the substitution of Whitmire for Henson, because the Muppets were about more than just Henson in the way that Apple is about more than just Steve Jobs.
One way I can illustrate this is to point to this video, which is from Henson’s public memorial service on May 21, 1990, less than a week after he died.
Apart from Henson himself, these six people are the soul of the pre-1990s Muppet Show Muppets. From left to right they are Dave Goelz (Gonzo, Bunsen Honeydew), Frank Oz (Bert, Cookie Monster, Grover, Animal, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, Sam the Eagle), Kevin Clash (Elmo), Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson (Floyd, Robin, Gobo Fraggle), and Richard Hunt (Scooter, Statler, Janice).
(We should probably add to the list of core Muppet performers Caroll Spinney, who performs Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and appeared earlier in the service. Of course there were and are many other excellent performers, to say nothing of writers and designers and puppet builders; there’s a point coming here.)
Of the six performers shown above, only three are still active and only two—Goelz and Whitmire—appear in The Muppets. Richard Hunt died of AIDS in 1992, Jerry Nelson is 77 and has largely retired, and Frank Oz has moved on to other work. (Kevin Clash is, of course, busy being Elmo.)1
The result is that Goelz’s Gonzo is the only top-tier Muppet character still being performed by the original puppeteer. For the most part, the original Muppets are played by a new generation of performers: Matt Vogel has inherited Nelson’s characters, David Rudman has taken over Hunt’s Scooter and Janice as well as Oz’s Cookie Monster; and Eric Jacobsen has taken on the rest of Oz’s characters. And Goelz and Whitmire have assumed responsibility for several of Hunt’s and Henson’s other characters as well.
This can be a bit jarring to listen to, because, as Elizabeth Stevens pointed out earlier about Kermit, the new guys are close, but not close enough. In particular, neither Goelz and Whitmire’s Waldorf and Statler, nor Jacobsen’s Animal nor his Sam the Eagle, ring quite true for me.
The question is whether Muppets are characters or actors, whether the puppet is inextricable from the puppeteer. It’s the difference between watching Chris Pine playing Captain Kirk and someone doing a Shatner impression in order to play Captain Kirk: we’ll accept the former and reject the latter as amateur hour.
What we have with the Muppets is something akin to this. Imagine a voice actor, doing his best to simulate the deceased original, whose appearance is digitally superimposed on top of his performance.
Elizabeth asks the question: what would have happened if, say, the remaining Muppet performers went on to create new characters instead of recasting Kermit?
It would’ve made more artistic sense than what happened. Instead of an organic personnel shift, Whitmire became Kermit, which wasn’t only a disservice to that character, but also a real disservice to Whitmire. There was no place for him to take the role. If he strays too far from Henson, embodying Kermit with the parts of his personality that weren’t in Henson, nostalgic fans will be disappointed. He can only attempt the same impression over and over. It’s not the kind of art Henson produced. It’s very un-Muppet.
Elizabeth links this to the Disneyfication of the Muppets: eternal, marketable characters à la Mickey Mouse; that’s beyond the scope of this essay.
My point is related: that a pure exercise in nostalgia can’t help but miss the target because we can’t help but notice the differences. They’re more fundamental than Scotty growing a mustache and Kirk growing a toupée; The Muppets is being put forward as a continuation of the tradition, not a reboot.
On the other hand, it may never be possible to rebottle the Muppets’ particular brand of lightning. Too many of the original Muppeteers are gone. In addition to Henson and Hunt, puppet designers Kermit Love and Don Sahlin are gone, as is head writer Jerry Juhl. You can’t get more of the same because too many of the people who gave it to you in the first place aren’t here any more.
But we don’t seem to want what’s new either. Do Pepe, Clifford and that other bear have even a fraction of the popularity of the original crew? If there were a Muppet Show: The Next Generation, would anyone care?
Footnote
- Jerry Nelson died in 2012. That same year, Kevin Clash resigned from Sesame Workshop following sexual abuse allegations. [added 2024]