Happy birthday to Steve Whitmire and Jim Henson! Steve, this year you get top billing; I don’t think Jim would mind. 🙂
I’m sure there are probably other examples of Jim and Steve singing together in harmony, but I can’t think of any of the top of my head, and it doesn’t matter because this one is probably the best anyway.
This is a song from Kermit…and FOR Kermit:
What follows is an open letter to Steve Whitmire:
Dear Steve,
Although I am a child of the ’80s, Fraggle Rock was, regrettably, not a significant part of my childhood. I saw bits and pieces of it back in the day, but I never got to watch the series in its entirety until 2013–although I’ve been trying to make up for lost time ever since. In a way, though, I think I’m kind of lucky because I think that maybe I get more out of watching Fraggle Rock as an adult, bringing my education and life experience to it, than I would have as a kid–a relatively blank slate.
Be that as it may, I identify strongly with Mokey. Her abstract, fanciful, introspective approach to life, and her idealistic worldview, remind me a lot of myself. In particular, however, I relate to Mokey in this episode of Fraggle Rock, in which she attempts to discern her vocation. I’ve been trying to discern mine for 37 years, and I still haven’t quite figured it out.
CANTUS: Listening is the first step and the last step.
MOKEY: Ohhh…then I’m on the LAST step!
CANTUS: YOU…haven’t even begun.
MOKEY: Well, I’m already there! I mean…what about the ping?
CANTUS: The ping is the start, but then comes the beginning.
–“Mokey and the Minstrels” Fraggle Rock, (Jocelyn Stevenson, screenwriter)
It’s been almost two months since I started this blog, and while I’ve created quite a bit of content that I can be proud of, in a way I still feel like I haven’t even really begun.
Not counting Kermit, who appeared on Sesame Street but wasn’t created specifically for it, Ernie is probably my favorite Sesame Street character of all time, although it is hard for me to choose between him and Bert (they’re always at their best when they’re together). If you were to ask former classmates of mine whether I was more like Ernie or Bert in school, most of them would probably say Bert. But in my own mind, I always identified with Ernie. Certainly, Ernie is everything that I would like to be: clever, funny, easygoing, with an infectious laugh and a perpetual smile on his face.
And yet, I said before that, of all of the Muppet (and non-Muppet) characters that Jim Henson created, Kermit the Frog is the most “real” to me. So when Sesame Workshop recast Ernie in 2014, my reaction was one of mild annoyance rather than panic.
It was the episode in which Bert learns to ride his bike without training wheels (clip). At first, I was happy to see a street story featuring Bert and Ernie because that hadn’t happened since who knows when. Then Ernie opened his mouth to speak and I said to myself, “Is Ernie going through puberty? Because his voice seems to have changed.”
Someone posted the following video in the Muppet Pundit comments. Steve has yet to talk about it, so I don’t know all of the backstory, but it appears that Steve returned to his old high school in 1988 with some of his characters (Muppet and otherwise) in tow to participate in a concert of some sort.
Take it, Wembley:
I have another confession to make: in all my years of studying literature, I’ve found that, a lot of times, I don’t think that an author’s–or, in a broader sense, an artist’s–most celebrated or well-known work is necessarily their best. I read The Red Badge of Courage in grad school and was underwhelmed by it; my favorite Stephen Crane work is called The Monster; you’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s utterly brilliant. Similarly, I love Madeleine L’Engle, and I love A Wrinkle in Time, but it was a early novel of hers, and I think her later works show a growth and a maturity that is missing in Wrinkle, as wonderful as it is and as much as I have always loved it.
My point is that “My Way” is so famous and so popular, and arguably so overexposed, that I’ve never been that impressed with it. In fact, I’m not sure if I ever really paid attention to the lyrics before. But watching Wembley sing this little duet, the lyrics suddenly smacked me in the face, particularly the last verse:
“For what is a man? What has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels.”
Those lyrics might have been written for and about Steve; that’s exactly what he’s doing on his blog, and he’s taken–and continues to take–the blows for it.
What follows is a clip from a 2014 benefit screening of Muppets Most Wanted at the White House for military families. Kermit speaks eloquently to the children of military personnel about the challenges they face:
You know, I’ve watched a lot of interviews with Kermit, and Steve as well, and one question that comes up a lot is who are their favorite celebrities that they’ve met and worked with. And, speaking strictly for myself, any or all of the Obamas would be near the top of the list. But I imagine that getting to do things to help kids–like this, or like the Labor Day telethon, or Make-A-Wish visits–would be the most rewarding part of being a Muppet performer. I imagine that that stuff would stick with you longer than the bits with the celebrities, although those bits would be fun too.
This is just to say that my little blog here is undergoing a slight rebranding. I deemed this necessary due to a rookie mistake I made when I first started this blog: I failed to Google the name that I intended to give my blog to see if it was already taken or in use in some other capacity.
It was brought to my attention a while back that there is a play called “Frog Quixote,” and that could potentially cause confusion. I wasn’t specifically asked to change the name of my blog by either the playwright or the publisher, although I would have been happy to comply if it had been considered a copyright infringement. But I don’t think there was much danger of my harming them; if anything, the existence of the play was potentially redirecting web traffic that would have come to me otherwise. So this in my best interest as well.
I would have done it sooner, but I had a hard time thinking up a new name. I only want to go through this rebranding once, so I want to get it right. “Don Quixote” and “Man of La Mancha” are more or less synonymous, so this seems like a logical step.
Most importantly, the URL is staying the same for now. If, for some reason, that changes in the future, I will definitely let you know.
Thank you for your kind attention. 🙂
“The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
–T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
I have a confession to make: Kermit the Frog is more “real” to me than any of the other Muppets. I remember when Jim Henson died, my first thought was not “What’s going to happen to the Muppets?” or “What’s going to happen with Sesame Street?” but “What’s going to happen to Kermit?”
So when news of the Schism broke, I was less concerned about Steve’s other characters than I was about Kermit. But as I processed the news, I started worrying about Beaker.
Since Beaker doesn’t really talk, I feared that Disney would feel that it didn’t matter who performed him. In fact, the opposite is true: a character who doesn’t talk needs a skilled, consistent performer who knows how to convey an idea nonverbally.
Three years ago, the Muppets were featured on “A Capitol Fourth,” the yearly Independence Day special that airs every July 4th on PBS. In order to promote the special, Kermit the Frog and host Tom Bergeron did a series of satellite interviews with local TV new programs. One of these was an affliate in Omaha, Nebraska, which is about 175 miles, or a 2-3/4 hour drive, south of where I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota:
In the interview, Kermit mentioned the zoo in Omaha, and I freaked out: “OHMYGOSH! Kermit the Frog just mentioned the name of a place that is relatively close to where I live, and that I’ve actually visited!!!”
These are the scraps that you have to console yourself with when you’re a Muppet fan who lives in South Dakota. Although, there may be an obscure Muppet connection for those of us to live in Sioux Falls: Raven Industries is based here in town; their main thing is the manufacture of balloons and inflatables, including some of the big balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and that sort of thing. I’m not able to verify it now, but I think I remember hearing once that Raven Industries had made the Kermit the Frog balloon that appeared in the parade from 2002-2012. I haven’t been able to confirm it yet, but it’s certainly possible.
Anyway, getting back to Omaha: what really impressed me is not only that Kermit mentioned the Omaha zoo, but he actually called it by its proper name: the Henry Doorly Zoo. I think that was the first time I’d ever heard someone not associated with the zoo call it by its real name; most people just call it “the Omaha zoo,” as I have done all throughout this post.
I asked Steve Whitmire, in a comment on his blog, if he had ever actually been to the zoo in Omaha. He didn’t respond at the time, so I still don’t know, but I am not without hope that he will be able to address it someday.
But anyway, the other reason that I wanted to post this interview is because it’s really a beautiful example of the lovely, fluid, dynamic facial expressions that Steve gives Kermit when he performs him. It really makes Kermit alive and vibrant.
We don’t have footage of five consecutive minutes of Matt Vogel performing simula-Kerm yet, (at least, not through official channels) so I’m not yet able to make a fair comparison, but thus far simula-Kerm’s face seems very static.
I’m also a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and there’s a phrase related to that show that keeps running around in my head. When Bill Corbett took over performing Crow T. Robot from Trace Beaulieu at the beginning of Season 8, he had not done a lot of puppeteering before, and he apologized for the resulting mediocre performance by telling people, “Crow has had a stroke.”
And I’ll just say that, if I didn’t know what was going on with the Muppets and Disney and Steve and the whole thing, if I looked at those videos with Matt performing Kermit without knowing what was going on, I would have said, “What’s the matter with Kermit? It looks like he’s had a stroke.”
And now for something completely different.
Today I was in the early stages of thinking about a new “Salient Themes” post which, if it makes it to the publication stage, will involve Herry Monster, that gruff but lovable stalwart of ’80s Sesame Street.
That reminded me that I recently read that Funko had released a Herry Monster toy (it happened almost six months ago, but I only read it recently). Which is very cool even though, like most Funko Pop figures, it has black, soulless eyes that look ready to swallow you whole. But still, Herry needs more merchandising love, so let’s take what we can get.
I sneaked a quick peek at the responses on the forum, and they were talking about Herry’s pink-striped pants and whether we actually ever got to see them on the show itself. And that reminded me: not only does Herry not wear pants on the show (as far as I know), but sometimes Herry doesn’t even have legs.
Look at this sketch in which Herry is sitting and talking with Edith Ann (Lily Tomlin) in her gigantic chair:
You could assume that he is kneeling on the chair, with his legs tucked under him (that’s probably how I interpreted it when I was a kid), but in that case, wouldn’t he have …I don’t know…knees?
In this one, Herry plays a butterfly in the school pageant about the lepidopteran life-cycle, and at the end he is hoisted into the air on a fly system, and it is readily apparent that he does not have any legs:
Didn’t they know ahead of time that Herry was going to be flying? Why didn’t anyone think to build him any legs? This is what happens when you let someone other than Prairie Dawn run the school pageant.
So I started getting quasi-philosophical about all this, and I thought, “Well, Sesame has always been good about including people/characters with disabilities; maybe from that we’re just supposed to assume that Herry just doesn’t have any legs, and they never bring it up because it’s not a big deal.”
But then I remembered the Monsterpiece Theatre sketch “Chariots of Fur,” in which Herry and Grover run down the beach together to awesomely inspirational music. Running typically requires legs, and in this instance Herry does have them, and we get several close-ups of them:
So has Herry been to a prosthetist since the butterfly pageant? Or maybe Herry doesn’t have legs, but the character he’s playing in “Chariots of Fur” does have legs, and Herry is just that good an actor!
I just blew your minds, didn’t I? 😉
I apologize in advance because there are no good copies of the song I want to talk about on YouTube; at least, not that I can find. There are two versions that I can find, both recorded by someone pointing a camera a television set.
This one has better video, in that there are no reflections on the screen:
This one has better (or at least louder) audio:
This is not one of my favorite Fraggle Rock songs. Generally speaking, I don’t really like songs that consist of one four-word phrase repeated over and over. That’s no fun for me to listen to and/or sing along with. It makes me wonder if Dennis Lee was on vacation that week or what.
So usually, whenever I watch the episode of Fraggle Rock from which this song comes (“Don’t Cry Over Spilt Milk“), I usually skip over this song and the reprise, which is basically the same thing but with the word “bad” changed to “glad”.
But last week I DID feel bad, so it felt appropriate to post a link to this song. Before I did so, I actually watched the whole song for perhaps the first time ever, and I realized that this song is really a tour de force musical performance by Wembley.
Which, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, necessarily makes it a tour de force musical performance by Steve Whitmire.
It seems to me that if you only have four lyrics at your disposal, you’ve really got to punch up your vocal performance and make each repeated phrase different from the last one. I imagine that you’d have to think about subtext and making each phrase slightly different.
The more I think about it, this may actually be one of the most challenging songs in the Fraggle Rock repertoire. You get off easy when it comes to memorizing lyrics, but everything else would be a lot harder.
Steve’s commitment to the performance is wonderful. Definitely worth a second look. I “feel so glad” that I finally decided to pay attention. 😉
I wonder what would have happened if no one had asked Disney about Steve Whitmire’s status with the Muppets.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not making a value judgment either way. But I just wonder what would be different now. Would Steve have started his blog? Would the Vogel!Kermit (henceforward to be known as “simula-Kerm”) video have dropped in July without fanfare?
That’s one thing that’s been gnawing at me all these almost two months, and nobody else seems to think that it is as significant as I do: when the news first broke back in July, Disney promised a “Muppet Thought of the Week” video with Matt Vogel as Kermit the following week. The fact that they claimed to have it cued up and ready to go, and yet didn’t make an announcement regarding the recast until specifically asked about it, implies to me that they intended to just release the simula-Kerm video on the world without comment, to try to sneak it past us and hope that we wouldn’t notice.
It’s frankly insulting. We’re Muppet fans, dammit! We notice tiny details; what makes you think we aren’t going to notice a seismic shift in the Muppet universe? We get pissed off when Fozzie wears the wrong color tie; what makes you think we’re going to let the end of the Second Muppet Era pass by without comment? What have we been doing for the past 27 years but analyzing Kermit’s voice? Of COURSE we were going to notice! We were always going to notice!
Then the whole thing became a bit like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Steve took a Harry Potter-like stand by starting his blog to tell the world the truth of what had gone on at Disney. In response, Disney took a…well, to be fair, a relatively mild Dolores Umbridge-like stance and started trying to discredit Steve in the press. And a sizable chunk of the Muppet fandom started taking an Dumbledore-specific-to-OotP-like stance and started ignoring Steve just when Steve needed them the most. This was a rare miscalculation on Dumbledore’s part, but at least he had good intentions behind it. Perhaps the fans that have turned away from Steve have good intentions as well; history will be the judge. But I digress.
Amidst the fallout from all that, the simula-Kerm video drop was delayed by over a month.
This, I think, was a diabolically clever move by Disney. It gave people the opportunity to get used to the idea of Matt performing Kermit, to convince themselves that even a simulacrum of Kermit is better than no Kermit at all. (On which issue, by the way, I am still undecided.)
If, on the other hand, Disney had released its simula-Kerm video in July with no fanfare, the way it seems to have wanted to in the first place, not only would there have been confusion and uproar, but it would have demonstrated dramatically how little respect Disney has for us Muppet fans: the insult of thinking they could recast Kermit without our noticing or caring, added to the injury of ripping away the soul of our beloved froggy friend.
Then again, maybe it would all have come to the same pass anyway. Forced to do damage control, maybe Disney would have still released their same statement about Steve’s “unacceptable business conduct” and the Hensons’ support of their decision, and maybe the Hensons would have chimed right in on cue with the Steve-bashing, and maybe that same contingent of Muppet fans would have been convinced that they are right.
I don’t fault the guys at ToughPigs or The Muppet Mindset for investigating and publishing their findings; if anything, I wish they had been willing to do more investigating, to use the unique resources available to them to uncover the truth of the matter. In any case, what had seemed initially to have been an embarrassing inconvenience for Disney actually ended up playing right into their hands. Disney, with its Machiavellian efficiency, managed to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
On the other hand, it also led to Steve starting his Muppet Pundit blog, which has become a joy and a blessing in my life, so I’m grateful for that. Nothing is so evil that good cannot come out of it, one way or another.
Well, it’s Labor Day, the traditional time of the annual MDA Telethon. Videos have surfaced lately in memory of the recently deceased Jerry Lewis (R.I.P). Among them is my new favorite rendition of “Bein’ Green” (with all due respect to Ray Charles, this one actually features Kermit). It’s from the 2001 telethon.
I also love the bit at the end where Wayne Brady fanboys over Kermit saying his name.
I KNOW, RIGHT?!?
Getting slightly off-topic, I had the opportunity to fangirl over Wayne Brady once. Back in the late ’90s or early ’00s, Wayne Brady actually came to my hometown–my podunky hometown in South Dakota–to do a show. It was a show that had been booked quite a few years in advance–before he became famous doing “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?”–but he still honored his previous engagement, which I thought was really classy of him. So my younger brother and I scored tickets and went to see the show, and it was just fabulous. It was an evening of “Whose Line” style improv, and he made a point at the beginning of saying that he wanted to keep things family-friendly because there were kids in the audience. Then, in the very first game, he asked for suggestions of genres of movies and some wiseacre yelled out “Porno!” And Wayne shamed him by finding a little girl in the audience, sitting in an aisle seat, and saying, “Hello, little girl. How are you? [then, to the wiseacre] Do you feel proud of yourself, sir, yelling out ‘porno’ when there are little kids in the audience?” There were no more inappropriate suggestions after that.
After the show, my brother and I saw some friends who were also in the audience, and somebody got the idea that we should slip out in the hallway where Wayne Brady would be exiting the building. So we did. I thought it was not the best idea, but I gave in to peer pressure. And Wayne did come down that hallway on his way out, and it looked as though he was kind of bewildered to see a bunch of awkwardly beaming white people standing expectantly in the hallway, but he just said something like, “Have a good night, folks,” as he walked by.
Anyway, my point is that seeing Kermit and Wayne Brady interact with each other makes me double-fangirl.
Getting back to the telethon, there was another number from the same year; Kermit singing “I Got My Mind Set On You” with the Snowths. This is appropriate, because my mind is set on Kermit pretty much all the time, especially now:
Okay, so it’s not a perfect vocal performance. But that’s what I like about it. Sometimes true art is in the imperfections. The imperfections can reveal the craftsmanship that goes into it.
For example, if you have a piece of furniture that was made by a machine, it will be perfect and look exactly like every other piece of furniture that was made by the same machine. Compare that to a similar piece of furniture that was made by hand, and you see the irregularities and inconsistencies that reveal the human touch. Machine-made furniture is serviceable and affordable; hand-made furniture is a work of art.
Much of the time, Muppet music is recorded by the Muppet performers beforehand, and the Muppets lip-sync during the performance itself. I understand why that is often necessary, especially in situations where they are doing multiple takes. But I love it when the Muppets sing live, because that seems so much more authentic, and it’s the little mistakes or ad-libs that reveal that it’s being done live, that reveals the craftsmanship that’s going into it.
“I am the culmination of one man’s dream. This is not ego or vanity, but when Doctor Soong created me, he added to the substance of the universe. If, by your experiments, I am destroyed, something unique – something wonderful – will be lost. I cannot permit that. I must protect his dream.“
–Lt. Commander Data, “The Measure of a Man,” Star Trek: The Next Generation (Melinda Snodgrass, screenwriter)
Star Trek: The Next Generation is my favorite Star Trek series, and “The Measure of a Man” is my favorite TNG episode.
If you’re not familiar, here is a very good 10-minute synopsis of the episode that hits all the important points:
The episode is so resonant and so relevant and so applicable to so many real-life issues as we continue to have debates about human rights with regard to torture, immigration, racism, GLBT issues, etc.
I don’t want to diminish in any way its applicability to the biggest and most fundamental issues that we face as a society, but I realized yesterday, as I was pulling the quotation for that other post, that it can be applied as an analogy to the Schism as well.
In this analogy, Kermit is Data–unable to assert his own rights and being treated like a commodity rather than an entity. Captain Picard comes to Data’s defense just as Steve comes to Kermit’s defense, so Steve is Captain Picard. There is also a case to be made that Steve is analogous to Data since Steve is “on trial,” after a fashion, in the court of public opinion, but since Kermit is a puppet who relies on a puppeteer for his life, that still kind of works.
In the episode, the villain is Commander Maddox, who wants to put Data through a dangerous and unnecessary diagnostic procedure to achieve his own ends–which, to be fair, are somewhat noble: advancing knowledge in the field of cybernetics. In the Schism, the villain is Disney, which views Kermit as a commodity and will get rid of anyone who attempts to get in the way of their profit margin. Therefore, Disney is the analogue to Commander Maddox, although Commander Maddox is arguably more noble when all is said and done.
The Henson children (collectively) are Admiral Nakamura, in that Admiral Nakamura supports Maddox just as the Hensons went along with Disney in its smear campaign against Steve. Admiral Nakamura’s involvement in this episode is minor, appearing only in the first 15 minutes or so, and the Hensons should have limited their involvement in the Schism as well. If I were to compare the Hensons to someone not appearing in this episode, I would compare them to Norah Satie, whom we meet two seasons later in “The Drumhead.”
Ultimately, it is Guinan (played by Whoopi Goldberg) who gives Captain Picard the inspiration he needs to see the big picture, to make the most compelling argument possible and win the case. We’re getting into a whole weird metaphysical area here, but I would say that Jim Henson is Guinan in this analogy.
Perhaps most interestingly, I would argue that Matt Vogel is Commander Riker in this scenario, forced to prosecute the case against his friend Data due to a lack of legal staff at the starbase. At first he refuses outright:
LOUVOIS: And the unenviable task of prosecuting this case would fall on you, Commander, as the next most senior officer of the defendant’s ship.“
RIKER: “I can’t! I…I won’t! Data’s my comrade. We have served together. I not only respect him, I consider him my friend!“
But when Louvois tells him that she will rule summarily against Data if Riker does not prosecute the case, Riker reluctantly agrees, and does his duty with regard to presenting the most damaging case against Data that he can possibly come up with, even though we, in the audience, can see that it is tearing him up inside.
And what of Louvois, the Starfleet JAG officer tasked with trying the case? I would say that the Muppet fans (collectively) are Louvois. I don’t know, though. Louvois eventually comes around, but it remains to be seen whether the fans will.
But what is perhaps the most interesting of all to me: Look back up at that quote with which I opened this post. Sub in the words “Jim Henson” for “Dr. Soong,” and it sounds like something that Kermit and Steve would say together, seamlessly blending into one another. It’s not something that Kermit would say, or something that Steve would say; but it’s something that they would both say together, as one, with no division between them, so that you can’t tell where Kermit ends and Steve begins, or vice versa.
(Incidentally, I bet Andy Serkis gets called a “voice actor” a lot too. Sad!)
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