Sesame Street Explores National Parks

[Drtooth]

People, get with it: Kevin is gone, and whoever takes over Elmo, they're not going to sound 100% exactly like Kevin...

There's a very subtle glottal thing, but as I've said before, getting the personality down trumps sounding like the character. Ryan's doing a great job as Elmo, and it seems that they're not going to scale him back once they run out of Kevin appearances that were taped well in advance. Elmo is too important a character for Sesame Street to let go of, and there was no doubt an understudy considered if something happened.

Somehow, it seems that across the board, they're more willing to recast characters in the event of a death/departure. It took how long to get Ernie back on Sesame Street? Not to mention Guy Smiley, and that was a one shot appearance. Since Matt's been Jerry's copuppeter, the recasts of his characters were smooth and quick.

 

[D'Snowth]

Not only that, but look how long it took for us to get Rowlf back... of course, Rowlf had actually been completely retired after Jim died out of respect for him... not sure why they decided after all these years to bring him back like that, but Bill Barretta has been doing a decent job with him as well.

 

[Drtooth]

Yeah. I never understood the "he has to remain silent out of respect" stuff. Other than a grunt in MFS (that we were all insanely happy about at the time) and some very small background thing here and there, he really didn't appear in modern media until that MTV making of special for the Weezer video. Bill did a great job with Rowlf, then they shoved him back into the obscurity corner until LTS, a couple Virals, and TM. I don't see how making the general public forget about a signature character is respectful.

 

[D'Snowth]

Didn't they retire him because they felt Jim himself was too much the heart and soul of the character?

 

[WillyThePig]

I don't really care for Murray. He's kinda annoying. And I feel so sorry for Kevin. I don't think he would have done what those kids accused him of. They needed cash and blamed this guy because he works with children and has a lot of money.