I should also mention that that’s not a photo I took; it’s a screengrab from the Keloland website. Also, my milkweed plants will come back next year, so no lasting damage to my property that I am aware of. At first it looked like my milkweed plants were just broken, but now it looks like at least some of them have been pulled up by the roots, so I don’t know if they will survive to come back next year. I guess that’s all the more reason to keep trying to plant more.
DragonCon Dispatch
Steve sat down at DragonCon with a guy named Crispy(?) for an interview. It’s a particularly good one, in my opinion. It must be the hometown advantage:
It’s really great to hear Steve be able to speak freely about Weldon and explain that whole concept.
Semi-miked StocktonCon Q&A Panel
The interesting thing about searching for comic con panel discussions is that you don’t always find exactly what you asked for, but sometimes you find things that you would never have thought to look for specifically.
I checked YouTube today to see if there were any panels from DragonCon available yet. It may be too early for that since it was just this weekend. I didn’t find any new DragonCon content, but I did find a panel from StocktonCon Steve did…*checks*…a month ago already! Wow…
Word of warning before I post it: Like at OCon, Steve and the moderator were miked, but the audience questions weren’t. Why? I have no idea. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but what do I know?
One thing I want to specifically point out about this panel is that Steve talks in glowing terms about Kermit’s interview with Ellen Degeneres. That is also a favorite appearance of mine, and it was surprising to me at the time that Ellen and Kermit had never met before. That, too, seemed like a no-brainer. I really wanted to work that interview into 60 for 60, but the only place I could have worked it in was during the Kermit month, and I opted for the backstage interview instead. If I have a regret about how it turned out, that may be it.
In the meantime, I’m waiting quite impatiently to see if OCon is going to post video of Steve’s Q&A panel. I asked them via Twitter if we could expect it, but I haven’t received a response. Neither my notes nor my memory are really adequate to talk about it, but if I had the video with the notes to supplement it, I think I could recreate it for you with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Soooooooo…What did everybody think of the shoooooooow?
Oh my gosh, you guys, that was so great! I laughed SO HARD the whole time!
I have to get a microphone, though, because I’ve got lots of miserable stuff I can talk about. And I have a background in theatre and improv, so I could kind of play along. It was so frustrating watching Weldon begging for callers with problems and not being able to participate.
So, what about you guys? Did you watch? Did you laugh? Did you have sound problems? (I had to break out the headphones during the Dark Crystal parody as it suddenly went quiet. Was it just me?)
I’m all wound up now. Let’s keep it going!
Steve’s Website Goes Live and Weldon’s Show Has a Title
At long last, here is Weldon in all his repulsive glory:
It’s nice to finally see Weldon, and I like his looks a lot, especially his hands and his weird little pointy teeth.
I know that “doesn’t give a rat’s ass” is a common expression, but it also made me think of Rizzo. Poor, voiceless Rizzo.
I plan to watch the show, but I don’t anticipate that I’m going to be able to participate, at least not yet. Need to track down a microphone first.
Something Is Happening on Saturday Evening
I promised to tell you more when I found it out.
It is PM. I thought it would be.
Something Seems To Be Happening on Saturday
And thank goodness, because all the people taking Weldon’s posts too seriously was getting reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally uncomfortable.
But we can tell that Weldon is meant to be a not-nice character because he doesn’t tell us whether this is happening at 8:31 AM or PM! That nonspecific fiend!
(My guess would be PM.)
I assume that it’s happening on Steve’s new website, which kind of doesn’t exist yet, but here it is anyway: stevewhitmire.website
If/when I find out more, you’ll find out more!
Sixty for 60: Live Appearances by Muppets
Welcome to the final regular installment of 60 for 60, a year-long celebration of the work of Steve Whitmire in anticipation of his 60th birthday next month. This month’s theme is live appearances by Muppet characters.
“The trick to the show [Muppets 2015], if it works, is to make it feel for the first time that you’re seeing the Muppets in our world.” –Bill Prady, SDCC Panel 2015
Michigan Publication Interviews Steve, Fixates on Voices
This last weekend Steve was at Michigan Comic Con in Detroit, where he was gracious enough to give an interview for a publication based there, taking great care to emphasize the puppetry aspect of his work and that he’s not a voice person.
So of course, the entire written interview is all about voices, with the puppetry mentioned only as an afterthought.
Therefore, I recommend the accompanying YouTube video of the interview over the written version. Even though it looks like it’s been edited down somewhat, at least Steve gets to express himself in his own words:
This video is actually really exciting, though, because Steve explains a bit more about his live-stream concept with Weldon. This is information that Steve actually told me when I met him in Omaha, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to talk about it, so I erred on the side of caution in not mentioning it. But now he’s expressed it publicly, so I guess it’s okay for me to talk about it.
One Question and One Misgiving About The Dark Crystal Series
You’ve probably seen already that the final trailer for the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance has been released:
It’s at least as impressive as everything that we’ve seen thus far. At this point, I’m left with only one question and one misgiving.
Sesame Saturday: A Panel Discussion With Sesame Street’s Gordon and Alan
Yesterday I mentioned the existence of full panels from last year’s OCon on YouTube, but what I failed to mention was that one of them featured Sesame Street actors Roscoe Orman (aka Gordon) and Alan Muraoka. I thought about it today and realized that might be of interest, so here it is:
Also, it appears from this that OCon just doesn’t provide microphones for audience questions at all, which seems to be very unusual. Nevertheless, given how hard it is to hear the audience questions on the video, it makes me very glad that I have notes of Steve’s Q&A, although it remains to be seen how helpful they will be.
Brief Footage of Steve Whitmire’s OCon Q&A
If the pattern holds true, it looks like the full video of Steve’s OCon Q&A may be going up within a few weeks. I don’t know for sure that that is the case, but they have full panels from last year that went up in early September, so that’s reason to hope.
Because my memories of the Q&A are so sketchy, even with my notes, I’m going to hold off publishing my impressions of it for now.
To tide us all over in the meantime, I found this highlight reel of the days’ events. A few moments of Steve’s Q&A, sans audio, are shown at about 43 seconds in:
I looked to see if I could see myself in the background of any of these clips, but I didn’t, not at the Q&A or in any of the other footage.
Sixty for 60: Interviews
Welcome back to 60 for 60, a year-long celebration of the work of Steve Whitmire in anticipation of his 60th birthday in a couple months. The theme for this month is interviews of Steve (not his characters), and it is unique in that not all five examples are available in video form. As a matter of fact, most of them are not.
(Technically not a picture of an interview, but one I happen to like.)
I planned out the themes for each installment of 60 for 60 ten months ago. At that time, of course, I had no idea that I would actually have met Steve by this time. A lot has changed since I planned out this project, and the plan for this month has changed more than any other in the interim as I re-evaluate interviews that I was going to use and new interviews emerge. But what hasn’t changed is my wish to celebrate Steve himself rather than just his characters, although they’re important too.
I’m not a Muppet performer, and I’m not really a puppeteer despite a brief amateur stint. So I can’t say that I really know what it’s like, but I imagine that it must be an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, the anonymity that it affords you could be very valuable, but on the other hand, I can imagine that it would sometimes get frustrating to be part of something that is so popular and well known but only rarely get credit or recognition for it.
This month is all about that recognition.
Emphasis
Today I received a comment on my previous entry from Dane Mychal, one of the hosts of the CF3 podcast. I want to pull out a quote from that comment for emphasis:
“Steve, as you know much more than I, is an incredible talent and wonderful human being, but I wanted to give this specific anecdote for perspective: This was early Sunday morning on the last day of a 3-day convention. Media guests tend to get burned out by Day 3 and 4 of these things and start to just mail it in. The MAC had been open for an hour that day by the time we came up to see Steve. Out of the 10 or so celebrities in Media Guest Row, he was the ONLY one there promptly at the prescribed time and remained the only one there for quite a long time. It was just about the first thing we discussed with him before we had even turned the recorders on. This man is a professional and puts his best effort into everything he does. We also requested to pay him for his time because we believe in compensating talent for such things. He was floored and insisted that we take autographed photos with us, which I am happy to have!”
This was the first convention of this kind that I’ve ever attended, so I don’t know what the norms are, but I can confirm that Steve was the first media guest on the floor that morning, the only one on the floor for some time thereafter, and although I wasn’t paying a lot of attention at the end of the day, I know that there were several who left before he did.
Thank you, Dane, for the benefit of your perspective!
CF3 Podcast Interviews Steve Whitmire (and I WAS THERE!)
In the first part of my OCon “saga,” I talked about how Steve was in the midst of a podcast interview when I met him. The podcast is called CF3 (Cult Fans, Films & Finds), and the episode just went up. In addition to Steve’s interview, it also includes an interview with Gigi Edgley, a review of The Dark Crystal, and some other stuff.
A word of caution before I post a link to the content: while the interview segments are safe and appropriate for everyone, the rest of the episode contains some explicit language. I don’t think I’m able to link right to one particular segment, unfortunately.
Oh, and by the way…I’M IN THIS PODCAST! They paused it briefly so Steve could talk to me but resumed it when they realized that we were acquainted. So you can hear me say hi to him (which I have NO MEMORY of doing, by the way), and then you can hear me getting giggly from nerves when Steve compliments my blog.
For some reason, the embed function isn’t working, so here’s the web address:
http://cf3pod.com/022-the-dark-crystal-1982-w-steve-whitmire-gigi-edgley
I’ve been told that it is also available through the various podcast apps, if that’s more convenient.
I wanted to give you timestamps to help you find the most relevant content on your own, but for some inexplicable reason, the points where I’m finding the content are different every time I try to seek them out, so I can only give you approximate time stamps:
- Start of Steve’s interview: Approximately 5 minutes (plus or minus 15 seconds)
- My brief contribution: Approximately 6 minutes (plus or minus 40 seconds)
- Steve’s rating of The Dark Crystal: Approximately 1 hour (plus or minus 6 minutes)
It’s not ideal, but that’s the best I can do.
