The "hand-me-down" performers

[minor muppetz]

I thought I'd start a thread to discuss performers who seem to essentially be "hand me down" performers, who seem to have taken over more characters than they had originated.

The two most obvious are Eric Jacobson and Matt Vogel, as they are sort of understudies. Eric Jacobson performs most of Frank Oz's characters, and he has performed Guy Smiley a few times. I know he's had a few original characters, but I think most of them were one-shots. I wonder if he'll ever have an original recurring character. And of course Matt Vogel has been Caroll Spinney's understudy as Big Bird for over 10 years, occasionally performing the voice, and now he seems to be Jerry Nelson's understudy, performing the puppetry while Nelson continues to voice his Sesame Street Muppets, and performing voices as well as puppetry for most of Nelson's "Muppet Show" family of characters. And he also performed the voices of a few of Richard Hunt's characters in Muppet Race Mania. I think Vogel has performed more original characters than Jacobson has, with the announcer for "The Letter of the Day Games" being the closest he's had to an original recurring character.

But there are also classic performers who seemed to have taken over characters. Many of the characters Brian Meehl "originated" were originally performed by others in at least their first appearance, but I think Meehl was the first major recurring performer for them. Toby Towson performed Barkley for a year, Bob Payne performed Telly when he was in his original television-obsessed mode, and a number of different performers were Elmo.

Quite a few Kevin Clash characters had originally been performed by others. There's Elmo, of course, but he also took over Brian Meehl's roles as Dr. Nobel Price and Clementine, and somebody else performed Hoots in Follow That Bird. Ironically, Clash originally performed Buster, years before officially becoming a Muppet performer. But out of all these "hand-me-down" performers, he seems to have had the highest number of original characters. Of course he's also been a main performer for the "Muppet Show" family of characters for the longest period of time, having a few original characters there as well (Clash hasn't done much work with those characters in the past ten years, and Jacobson just might catch up, but at the same time Jacobson seems limited to Frank Oz's characters).

And finally there's Martin Robinson. Seems all of his major characters were originated by others: Buster by Clash (and others, back when Buster was just a generic horse), Snuffy by Jerry Nelson and Michael Earl, Slimey by Nelson and Earl as well, and Telly by Brian Meehl (not to mention Bob Payne). I don't know whether Robinson originated Fluffy or Irvine.

 

[aussiepuppeteer]

hey, i like your post! its an interesting situation. i suppose by continuing these characters, people like Matt Vogel and Eric Jacobson have received the best possible training from the best possible puppeteers (in this case Jerry Nelson and Frank Oz). so it would have boosted their skills in the work area, audience interaction and the actual puppeteering.

it would be cool for these puppeteers to take on completely new characters like Leslie Carrara with Abby Caddaby; there's a challenge of developing their (characters') emotions and personalities over the years to come. but then they are now so good at performing characters like Grover who have been around for so long, that there just wouldn't be time! lol

 

[dwmckim]

If you look beyond the Biggies of SST and Classic Muppets, Eric's best known original character would be Harry the Duck on BITBBH. (Now i'm missing Bear and all those great characters!)

I also had long noticed how Marty seems to be a big recast guy - but he's so good at it! It seems so odd considering how his voice has a distinct quality to it, but a lot of his recasts actually retained a lot of the voice and character of the originator (Telly and Snuffy being very impressive jobs) - at least at the beginning...over time they've become more of his own. He also took over the starring role of The Cat in the Hat from Bruce Lanoil during season two of Wubbulous World (the second season introduced Terrence Mcbird and i thought it was hilarious how often Cat referred to him as "Bird" the same way Snuffy would with Big Bird).