A Muppets Lifetime

[D'Snowth]

How long does a certain muppet last, until it has to replaced with a new one?

 

[Vic Romano]

I'd imagine very short, don't they use like three of the same Muppet (especially the popular ones) in the movies?

 

[BorkBork]

Hasn't Carol Spinney performed the same oscar puppet since the beginning? At least that's what i read somewhere...

 

[shtick]

The sad thing is with muppets, that they get incinerated when they wear out. Too bad. I'd kill a dozen baby manitees for an old muppet.

 

[D'Snowth]

Hasn't Carol Spinney performed the same oscar puppet since the beginning? At least that's what i read somewhere...

No, if that were true, Oscar would still be orange. It is a fact that they've reused the same eyebrow since the beginning.

 

[Jinx]

It's a bit like asking "how long does a car or truck last"? Of course it all depends on the amount of use, the amount of (necessary) abuse, the materials used, etc, etc, etc.

As for my puppets, I just use them until they begin to show too much wear or they don't manipulate as smoothly as needed. I've had puppets last for only a couple of months (stunt puppets, as it were) and others for many, many years. Garth (http://home.mcn.net/~fantom/pages/puppets.html) is 15 years old and is in surpisingly good shape considering his age and use. The one thing that I find especially amusing about him is that he is starting to go gray! I really don't understand how, as he is stored in the proverbially "cool, dry place" and out of direct light. But his blue mohawk has begun to show small streaks of gray that have grown and spread over the past 2 years!

 

[Melonpool]

I'm not sure that they incinerate the puppets after any given amount of time. I know that the foam begins to break down, causing the puppeteers to refer to the puppets as "toast" because the foam hardens and crumbles like burnt toast.

At this point, I believe some of them are rebuilt from scratch and others are disassembled, either to be used as patterns for the next batch or because of things like the eyebrow mechanism and skins which might be reused for the next round.

I do know that during the crowd scenes at the end of Muppets from Space that a lot of the old Muppet Show puppets were brought out of storage, including the old Link and Strangepork Pigs in Space puppets, Wayne and Wanda and Chickens. They were all falling apart, according to a friend of mine that was on set, but there wasn't time or any reason to rebuild them.

It seems to me that if these puppets had degraded to this point that they'd have been incinerated years ago rather than being in storage, so I have an idea that most Muppets end up finding life in later puppets or end up in storage.

Steve