I’m really kind of desperate to talk to Weldon. The first time I couldn’t because I didn’t have a microphone for my computer. Then I bought a microphone but couldn’t figure out how to make it work in time. I thought it was a software issue, but it turned out to be a hardware issue. Once I figured it out, it was easy to correct, but unfortunately, that wasn’t until after the show was over.
Hopefully this will be my month! I just have to remember the time difference: 10/25 at 9:25 for me.
Puppet Tears is a very cool podcast that interviews puppeteers from all walks of life, asking very in-depth and intelligent questions. Today they’ve released a nearly two-hour conversation with Steve:
From what they’ve released previously, it looks like they’re going to approach the “controversial” topics from a mature, objective, and responsible point of view, which I’m very pleased to see. It’s recently come to my attention that, unfortunately, there are still a lot of unfounded rumors and misinformation about Steve festering in the dark corners of the internet, so my hope is that this will be an opportunity to bring the truth to light and clear the air.
Here’s the thing, though: I CAN’T WATCH IT NOW!!! 😦 I’ve got a ton of work that I need to get through before the end of the day today, and if I start watching it now, I know I’m not going to be able to stop.
So watch and enjoy, but please don’t spoil it for me, and maybe we can talk about it later.
I’ve seen it now, and I’m interested to hear what you think. In general terms, I find it to be a breath of fresh air.
Is it redundant of me to keep posting whenever there’s going to be a new Cave-In? I feel like maybe all of you can just follow Steve on Instagram yourselves, and then you will find out at the same time I do.
On the other hand, I feel obliged to do my part to get the word out, since the mainstream fan sites have not taken an interest.
Anyway, I figure if I’m going to post about it, I’d better hurry up and do it. Sorry for the delay; I’ve been preoccupied with other things. Maybe you’ll get to hear about them if you tune in tomorrow.
(Please enjoy this photo collage. I worked on it for the better part of an hour before trying to upload it, but my initial attempt was unsuccessful because the file size was too big. Apologies to those whose photos I’ve co-opted.)
Happy 60th birthday, Steve Whitmire! And welcome, everyone, to the final installment of 60 for 60. Every month for a year I’ve been celebrating Steve and this milestone by posting five examples of his work per month (mostly in the form of videos, but not exclusively) and making commentary about it. At this point, I’d like to take a look back of the year and choose the best from each month for a “Best of the Best” feature.
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.
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.
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?)
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
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
Of the many strange and perplexing things that happened in conjunction with the Muppets’ 2015 series, one that I found to be among the strangest and most perplexing was this bizarre statement by Bill Prady, that it would be the first time that the Muppets were in our world. How are they not in our world? Not only have six of their eight movies been set in our world, but the Muppets make live appearances in our world all the time. And when they do, it results in some of the best and most entertaining material because they’re usually a little freer to do some ad libbing and to be themselves, insofar as the Muppets have selves, which is a deep philosophical dive that I don’t think I’m ready to take at the moment and would probably require a whole other entry even if I were.
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.
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.
Today I received a comment on myprevious entryfrom 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!
Well, I decided to follow Mark Hamill on Twitter just in time to hear his version of the Skeksis Scientist’s voice as he plugs the Dark Crystal panel at San Diego Comic Con.
Frog of La Mancha 