You don’t know me, but if you read Steve Whitmire’s blog at all, I often comment over there.
First of all, I wanted to wish you a happy birthday. When it was Steve’s birthday recently, I wished him a happy birthday on his blog, and I sent good wishes into the ether for Jim Henson, and even though you’re not part of their “birthday club,” I didn’t want you to feel left out. I hope you have a very happy and special day.
Secondly, I wanted to apologize to you; as I’m sure you understand, this whole situation with Disney letting Steve go from the Muppets is very upsetting to me. I’ve never been very good at pigeonholing my emotions, and writing (whether it be on a blog or elsewhere) is often the “safe” medium into which I channel my negative thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, there are times when I’ve been lashing out at Disney and you’ve sort of gotten caught in the crossfire, as it were. If I seem angry, I want you to know that I never meant to take it out on you.
(And if you spend any time on my blog, you’ll notice that I often express myself through song lyrics or paraphrases thereof.)
“‘Manny’s Land of Carpets’–I love that show. It was really a show about television; a show about the kind of delusional system that’s projected by people’s belief in, you know, the world that seems to be inside that box in the corner of the room, and that’s the way I saw it in the beginning, anyway. And then it just got crazier and crazier as time went on, and it’s sort of one of those one-sentence ideas that you can crack it open and start to uncrack it a little bit, and it starts to really suggest there’s an entire universe in here–Manny’s Land of Carpets.” –David Young, writer of “Manny’s Land of Carpets“
So, here is David Young, a writer working for a TV show, writing an episode of said show about how television is a “delusional system.” You’ve got to admire his audacity and the unapologetic relish with which he bites the hand that feeds him.
(This is the topic about which I was going to write last week but had to postpone when I was beset by a migraine. But maybe it’s just as well, because what I’m going to write now is different than what I would have written last week.)
When I heard that Disney’s rationale for dismissing Steve Whitmire from the Muppet Studios was “unacceptable business conduct,” I laughed–loudly and derisively, without mirth.
Paging Mr. Kettle: Phone call from the Walt Disney Company regarding your color!
Disney’s shady business dealings are the stuff of legend. They could fill several books–and have. What follows is not intended to be a comprehensive account of Disney’s propensity for screwing people over. We’ve got a loooong journey ahead of us; this is just the first step.
Well, the best-laid plans of Fraggles and frogs often go awry, I suppose. I had a whole Fraggle Friday feature all planned out…and then I developed a migraine, with its attendant photosensitivity, which means I can’t turn on a light to see my notes, at least not without feeling as though a Doozer with an ice auger is standing on my head trying to bore its way into my skull.
So instead, let’s focus on the night when the lights went out in Fraggle Rock: episode 218, “The Day the Music Died,” aka The One With the Ditzies.
Today, while doing research online, I found a quiz that was put together a week ago by Slate Magazine asking the reader to identify (by voice) the puppeteer performing Kermit in various audio clips.
Sarcastically, I thought, “Oh, that’s nice. Turn Steve’s professional tragedy into a party game.”
But I took the quiz anyway, hoping to prove the point that, as wonderful as Matt is, he doesn’t sound anywhere near as much like Jim as some people would like to believe he does.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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 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.
Frog of La Mancha 