Kermit Love dies at 91

[mikebennidict]

Where will I get my hot dogs now?

Good one.

 

[lowercasegods]

I was listening to NPR last night when the announcer says "And coming up next, we remember Big Bird's creator...", and my heart just sank. My first thought was "Please let this be a retrospective of Jim Henson", though I knew it didn't coincide with either his birthday or date of passing. But my greatest fear was that we'd somehow lost Carroll Spinney. Having just lost makeup and special effects genius Stan Winston, I didn't think I could handle it. But when I found out it was Kermit Love whom we lost, it was far from a sigh of relief that Carroll was spared. Granted, Love led a long, wonderful puppet filled life, but any loss of a Muppet great is a loss to the fans. He will be missed and loved eternally.

 

[Zack the Dog]

Very sad news, He was just as much a part of Big Bird as Carroll Spinney is, it's good to know that Kermit Love lived a long life to see how his puppets evolved and continued to be a part of peoples lives every day.

 

[Daffyfan4ever]

If you read Carol's book he explains that one day he was ready to quite. He was walking up the stairs in the Henson NY building crying thinkiing he could not do Sesame Street anymore. Kermit saw him and talked with him, and they worked out the problem Carol was having.

That's interesting information, especially considering that to this day Spinney is still willing to perform Big Bird until he is no longer able. Kermit Love must have been a great mentor to him.

 

[Traveling Matt]

from the Los Angeles Times...

Kermit Love, 91; helped create memorable 'Sesame Street' characters

His design work on one of the most influential television shows in history made him a partner in the early education of generations of children.

By Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 26, 2008

After years of designing costumes for ballet and theater, Kermit Love found his way to "Sesame Street."

Working with Jim Henson, Love helped create Big Bird, Mr. Snuffle- upagus and Oscar the Grouch.

The funny-looking creatures became a magnet for preschoolers, pulling them in to watch "Sesame Street," helping them to learn.

Love, whose design work on one of the most influential television shows in history made him a partner in the early education of generations of children, died Saturday of pneumonia in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said Arthur Novell, executive director of the Jim Henson Legacy, an organization dedicated to preserving and perpetuating Jim Henson's contributions.

He was 91.

Though most adults knew Love for designing characters, children who saw him on "Sesame Street" knew him as Willy the hot dog man.

Love also created Snuggle Bear, the pitch man for Snuggle Fabric Softener.

Long before "Sesame Street" and children's television, Love had transformed his childhood love into a successful career.

Born in Spring Lake, N.J., on Aug. 7, 1916, Love began staging puppet shows while in his teens.

Later he designed costumes for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater and made a name for himself as a marionette maker and a stage and film designer.

For decades he collaborated with some of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century: George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Robert Joffrey, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp.

His many ballet credits include the 28-foot marionette for Balanchine's "Don Quixote" in 1965 and the masks for Pulcinella in 1972.

But it was on "Sesame Street" that Love's work found its largest audience.

"Kermit was for 20 years kind of the father to Big Bird," said Caroll Spinney, the performer inside Big Bird who has played the part since the show's inception in 1969. "He was well pleased" with his creation.

The collaboration that led to the birth of America's best-known bird almost did not happen.

After he met with Henson in the late 1960s, Love thought "no two people have less in common."

But Henson, who knew of Love's successful career in theater and ballet, invited Love to join him on the nascent "Sesame Street" project.

Love often explained that he was not the namesake of Kermit the Frog, whom Henson created before the two men joined forces.

The idea for Big Bird was Henson's, but Love's expertise "made the realization of that character possible," said Rick Lyon, who once worked for the Henson Company.

"Frankly a lot of people who design stuff don't really have a working knowledge about how things are made," said Lyon, who designed and built the puppets in the stage production "Avenue Q."

"Kermit had a really good sense of how to engineer something."

Big Bird is a puppet that Spinney steps into. He uses his hands to move the character's head and arm.

Creating a puppet, Love once said, is an organic process, "it simply grows," he said.

Eventually Love used about 6,000 dyed feathers from domestic white turkeys to make the more-than-8-foot-tall Big Bird.

Big Bird is known all over the world, and often Love traveled with him. Once in 1972, Big Bird was scheduled to give a live performance for children on a college campus.

Love and Spinney arrived at the location where they'd stored him to find that college students had ravaged the character, plucking out feathers, and nearly one of his eyes. Love and Spinney were mortified and worked to glue the feathers back in, sew the eye, and perform, Spinney said.

At his New York studio, Love also designed puppets for overseas versions of "Sesame Street," whose casts often feature different characters.

In Israel the cast includes a pink porcupine. For the version that ran in Kuwait, Love designed a Big Bird-like character that was not an animal or a person, but a talking shape, said Spinney.

The puppets on "The Great Space Coaster," a children's television show that ran in the 1980s, were Love's designs, and he also had a public television puppet show called "Whirligig."

"The scope of Kermit's work is truly astonishing," Lyon said. "He had such a diversity of output."

Frustrated by the more narrow scope of projects at Henson Company, Love often pressed them to do more productions for adults, Lyon said.

Though born and raised in New Jersey, Love spoke with a British accent. He looked enough like Santa Claus to portray him on the cover of New York magazine.

"He was a mentor to so many young people in" puppetry, Spinney said. "He would spot children on the subway and say, 'Madam, we could use your child on "Sesame Street.'"

Love also helped jump-start the career of Kevin Clash, the performer who plays Elmo. Clash's portrayal made the character a hit.

Though he had no children of his own, Love said in a 1991 Newsweek article he had "raised so many people's families.

"I have a million children."

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-love26-2008jun26,0,1027932.story

 

[Traveling Matt]

and from The Guardian...

Kermit Love

He designed and nurtured Big Bird, doyen of Sesame Street and the Muppets

by Veronica Horwell
Friday, June 27, 2008

Although Kermit Love, who has died aged 91, costumed the first great all-American ballets, Rodeo and Fancy Free, was George Balanchine's prime visualiser for half a century and perfected Twyla Tharp's modern look, his legend lies in his work on the gawkiest creature ever to waddle down a sidewalk.

Love made and maintained Big Bird, the 8ft 2in core character on Sesame Street, the US television learning show that was the foundation of the Muppet universe. He made other Jim Henson and Frank Oz imaginings feasible too, for 22 international versions of the Street, and sometimes wandered down it himself as Willy the Hot Dog Man (he looked like a grumbly version of Father Christmas). But the Bird was family, and he never gave up supervising its welfare.

Love came from a craft background, the son of a plasterer in Spring Lake, New Jersey, but was raised by his grandmother and great-grandmother, who introduced him to 19th-century amusements - Punch and Judy and magic lanterns. He imitated the fashion for shadow puppets, the basis of Lottie Reiniger's early, ballet-like, animated films. Love's legs were seriously injured when a horse threw him, and between the ages of 12 and 15 he was confined to bed, drawing characters he knew only as voices in radio serials.

He started work at 19 making masks and marionettes for a New Deal Works Progress Administration theatre, then did a little acting and costumes for Orson Welles's Mercury theatre in New York. He discovered the workshop of Barbara Karinska, an émigré Russian, who had made costumes for the Ballets Russes in Europe, and did the same for Balanchine's American dance troupes. Love admired her work, and she executed his sketches for the cowboys of Rodeo (1942) and the sailors of Fancy Free (1944). It was difficult to make the girls the matelots picked up look like ladies rather than tarts, but he did it with genteel matching accessories.

Love worked on Broadway, including the 1943 musical One Touch of Venus, and after the war went to Europe, first to spangle the girls at the Paris Lido (they taught him about the kinetic possibilities of feathers), then to work in film in London. On his return to the US in 1962, he began his close collaboration with choreographer Balanchine. He told Dance magazine that they had been like a couple of kids together, thrilled at living in Manhattan with all its toys (Love drove a red Porsche), regarding themselves not as artists but as craftspeople, even tradespeople.

Together, they set and solved problems for the New York City Ballet and other companies. Love's gift was for textile sculptures that transformed a dancer into a combination of human and puppet, while retaining character, and among other wonders he made the truck-height marionette for Don Quixote (1965) and the wings of The Firebird (1972). Their finest synergy was on Ravel's short opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges. Love designed decor and costumes for a stage production in 1975, and redid it for a Public Broadcasting Service television version in 1981, with magical full-body-puppet clock, chairs and teapot all singing away, and a corps de ballet of frogs and butterflies.

Love was proud of the fantastic panto horse, to a sketch by Picasso (who adored the snorting-nostrilled result), for a 1973 revival of Parade, and he lost count of the Nutcrackers he had garbed, his favourite being the 1987 Joffrey Ballet presentation with the mice in full armour and a bemedalled Mouse King, every medal different. He mutated the ballet's Mother Ginger, usually a character role, into a huge rag doll.

Working for the Judson Dance Theatre in the 1960s, he met Tharp just as she began as a choreographer, and was among those who helped sharpen her image (she and her dancers stopped wearing sneakers and had their hair cut by Vidal Sassoon). Later he costumed more than a dozen Tharp ballets with what he called "stuff that didn't get in the way" - and did not romanticise.

While with Judson, Love was asked to lunch with puppeteer Henson. They came up with a proto-Muppet dragon, swishing its tail catastrophically down a supermarket aisle for a television commercial. Later Henson called, asking for help with a tricky character that would not move right. It was Big Bird, for Sesame Street, first broadcast in 1969. Henson had the drawings, Love made them real, basing the Bird's lankiness, loping gait and lolloping feet on Henson's own. Some of the feathers were loosely attached, so they would shed on screen. Henson also contributed to the shaggy mammoth Snuffleupagus, Oscar the Grouch and the Cookie Monster, although, as he told inquirers, he did not lend his name to Kermit the Frog. Love worked through old age on Muppet creation, sometimes puppeteering as well, and articulated a manky teddy for Snuggle commercials, and other beastie mascots.

But Big Bird was Love's baby. He carried pictures of his Muppets in his wallet. He and Caroll Spinney, now 74, who has been inside the bird get-up from the start, travelled the world doing live shows for children. Big Bird was given his own seat on the plane to Beijing for a gig in 1973, but was charged half-price, as the character was meant to be forever six years old. Everybody was enchanted by Big Bird. Love said Balanchine "believed in Big Bird, he accepted it totally - there was nobody inside it, it was Big Bird." It was the only compliment Love ever needed.

He is survived by Christopher Lyall, his partner of more than 50 years.

· Kermit Ernest Hollingshead Love, designer of entertainments, born August 5 1916; died June 21 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/27/television1

 

[fuzzygobo]

What a week. Kermit Love and George Carlin, RIP

 

[SesameStMuppets]

In Memoriam: Kermit Love

This is definetally a loss to the entire puppetry community...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25375721/

We will miss you Kermit

 

[erniebert1234ss]

I heard about this over at MuppetCast.com, so RIP Kermie.

What a weird couple of weeks, Kermit Scott, George Carlin, and Kermit Love. The "rule of 3" takes three more geniuses from us.

BJ

 

[mbmfrog]

Dang, this is a sad weekend for me, first Comics book artist Micheal Turner dies due to cancer and now this happens to the Muppets.

Any reason for the cause of his death ?