This is a shock, even though his characters have barely been in anything new all year.
It's interesting that the news announcement was supposed to be exclusive to Tough Pigs and The Muppet Mindset, I first saw the news at Muppet Wiki - looking in the recent changes section, where I saw something about it noted in the edit summary. I wonder what the process was like for Disney wanting TP and the MM to announce it first.
After half a year of Steve being absent from a lot of things (and I've seen people remark that Dave and Bill have been absent a lot this year, have they done anything new recently, besides Waldorf appearing in a commercial?), it was great to see him as Kermit in a recent online video about the first day of summer. After hearing this news of Matt Vogel taking over, I wondered if maybe that was him and it went undetected by fans (though I've barely seen any online discussion of that online video). I wonder how long ago that was shot.
I hope Steve Whitmire will do an interview with one of the big Muppet fan sites or podcasts soon, though a more mainstream interview would be great as well. Although he's retired, I hope he will continue to be involved with non-fiction stuff about the Muppets, like interviews, exhibits, documentaries, audio commentaries (though I don't expect any new Muppet DVD or Blu-ray releases in the near future). I'd like to know how long he's been retired for.
One of my first thoughts was about how Vogel also performs Robin, and some people have been saying that Peter Linz will be taking over that role.
Beaker will likely be the easiest to recast, I'd like to think Rizzo will be recast, but then again, he has been underused in the past few years, outside of the 2015 series. And Dave Goelz revealed in 2014 that Steve had finally figured out who Lips is, so sad that he's retired so soon after that, though there has been plenty of opportunities where Lips could have spoken but didn't. I wonder if anybody will do fan art of The Newsman announcing his performers departure (which I have contemplated for The Muppet Mindset's "fan week", but am unsure. And no, I won't be mad if anybody else takes the idea after reading this).
It's interesting that Steve decided to retire so soon after The Muppets was canceled. I wonder if he would have held off on retiring if it had been renewed. At Tough Pigs, a few people have pointed out some parralells between Kermit's recasts. I saw one person point out that Jim and Frank were a team for 27 years before Jim died and now Stevehas performed Kermit for 27 years, and somebody else pointed out that Steve performed a frog with a voice similar to Kermit in 1984's The Muppets Take Manhattan and Matt performed Constantine in 2014's Muppets Most Wanted, but I've also thought of something similar: Jim Henson performed Kermit in two main Muppet shows and died a year after the second, Steve Whitmire performed Kermit in two main Muppet shows and retired a year after the second (or at least his retirement was announced a year later).
Recently, after thinking about how Steve had been absent from so many small productions and how Peter Linz performed Statler in a commercial, I decided to rewatch the opening for last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, where Kermit didn't really get any of his own dialogue. I wondered if he wasn't there, but then I noticed some of his characters were heard. Beaker could clearly be heard and I think another character (probably Rizzo) could be heard singing with the others, even if it's not a solo line. I wonder if Steve did those lines (whether live or just pre-recorded) or if somebody else did the voices (it'd be hard to notice with them singing with others).
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was pretty dead on there, but in Steve's most recent appearances as
