The New New Quote Thread

[D'Snowth]

DR. ZALOST: Now we can go back to bed and . . . hug.
RAT: (Loud scoff)

 

[fuzzygobo]

Humans are impossible to make happy. You give them gold, and they complain how heavy it is.

 

[CBPuppets]

EARL: You! You flirt with some masta-Don Juan, in the invertebrate aisle and now I'm gonna die!

FRAN: Earl, it wasn't like that.

EARL: Oh, yes it was. Ah, there you were, pushing your cart seductively down the aisle, swinging that tail for the whole world to see. "Excuse me, Mr. 90-foot husband killer, I can't reach the top shelf. But if you can just get that can of peas for me, you can have my whole family!"

FRAN: Earl, you're being ridiculous.

--Dinosaurs: High Noon--

 

[LittleJerry92]

Ralph: I sure hope Mr. Botch won’t be ******.

Botch: ******?! BOY AM I ******!!!!

 

[antsamthompson9]

Matt Vogel: Was there ever a time that you were doing Piggy or Fozzie in front of Frank? Because we talked how awkward that is.
Eric Jacobson: It is awkward. It's like "You're here, you should be doing this!"
Matt: "Why am I doing your thing for you?" Do you have something like that where that happened?
Eric: Yeah, I was at a read-through once back when Frank had a script he was hoping would be filmed as a movie with the Muppets.
Matt: The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made.
Eric: Yes. A project that had been started a long time ago by Jerry Juhl and I guess Frank, and Frank wanted to bring it back, and do some rewrites, so he did some heavy rewrites with Jim Lewis, and we did this read-through, and Frank and I had talked, and he talked about how he might wanna perform, and I said "That's fine with me, that'd be great! It'd be awesome to have you come back." I've always said and I said this to him that he's got a parking space reserved should he ever want to play.
Matt: So you had this read-through and Frank was there.
Eric: And Frank and I had spoken and I was kinda on the understanding that he was gonna come back to his characters for this one project, which would have been great, would've loved to see it happen, and I was looking forward to having this journey with Frank with these characters possibly assisting him and just having this real quality time with him on the same production with these characters. So we get to this read-through and he has me read all of his characters! (Eric and Matt laugh) And I obliged, I can't tell you it was the easiest thing for me to do, but I obliged. He wanted to hear it.
Matt: He was there as the writer and the director so he just wanted to hear what the words sounded like coming out.
Eric: Exactly. Then it was funny cause, we got about halfway through, and he came around to everybody and was giving us all notes on how to carry the material forward for the second half cause, he wanted it to sparkle as much as it possibly could. So he took me to the side and I thought he was gonna give me some pointers about Piggy, Fozzie, Sam, and Animal. And he starts talking to me about how all the rats should have Brooklyn accents. (Eric and Matt laugh)
Matt: That was it? He had no notes for you! Well unfortunately, that movie never came to fruition.
Eric: No, it didn't. I don't know what politics were at play, but we didn't wind up doing that movie.

 

[D'Snowth]

LISA: Why don't you volunteer at the library?
LOLA: LISA, YOU KNOW I CAN'T USE MY INSIDE VOICE FOR THAT LONG, AAAAUUUUGGH!!!

 

[D'Snowth]

CAT: Dog, honey doesn't grow on trees, you know!
DOG: Aww, honey doesn't grow on trees, money doesn't grow on trees, so what good are all these trees?

 

[D'Snowth]

BEAUREGARD: It takes a little while to get to know the town!
FOZZIE: Well, how long have you lived in London?
BEAUREGARD: All my life!
KERMIT: Then how come you don't have an English accent?
BEAUREGARD: Hey, I'm lucky to have a driver's license!

 

[D'Snowth]

D.W.: What did you draw?
ARTHUR: A dog, and he's bored. What did you draw?
D.W.: A stick.
ARTHUR: A stick?!
D.W.: A stick from the park where you PROMISED TO TAKE ME TODAY!!!

 

[antsamthompson9]

Joe Hennes: So Kynan, what was Save the Muppets?
Kynan Barker: It was a massive overreaction to Disney wanting to cast extra performers. When I say overreaction, I'm still against that idea, the idea of multiple Kermits, a cruseship Kermit, a shopping mall Kermit and a movie Kermit. But the overreaction was the fact that I made it about saving the Muppets. The idea was Disney had finally bought the Muppets for a billion dollars, and they realized that there are 5 guys who are the Muppets, and if they want to do Muppet content, they need to use those 5 guys. And the best way to monetize the Muppets is to have Muppets everywhere, and for Muppets to be everywhere, you need more than 5 guys. So from a business point of view, you can absolutely see where they're going. They wanna have a theme park Kermit, a Kermit who at the drop of a hat can show up on the Today Show, but also be available to do Leno on the other coast. I heard about this and went "That's gonna significantly water the characters down, it's gonna create all kinds of weird conflicts." Not because anybody else doing Kermit would be wrong, it's just gonna be their interpretation of the character.
Joe: It does water down the characters. We don't have 19 Mickey Mouses, we have 2 Mickey Mouses, and that's more than any other franchise.
Kynan: Even that is a real departure. A bunch of fans and I decided we would protest this, it would be a letter-writing campaign, I did a couple radio interviews, just to tell Disney, this isn't gonna work and here's why. And then Disney made this announcement which was effectively "If you ever wanted to be a Muppet, now you can be a Muppet". They were doing coast-to-coast auditions. And a lot of the fan momentum on the Save the Muppets side suddenly evaporated, which was genus on Disney's part, not that they were trying to combat me, but the genus was not "Hey, we need extra Kermits." It was "You can be a Kermit". We did a bunch of letters, website updates, "Here's the address of the person you wanna contact", blah, blah. And that's when Henson and Disney went through this whole recasting process, and found a few alternate performers. In the end they ended up doing 2 cruseship performances with an alternate cast, and they found Artie Esposito who briefly became an understudy Kermit who showed up a couple times. I have no idea whether my campaign made any difference at all. Like me vs. Disney. When was this, 2006?
Joe: That sounds right.
Kynan: Back then Disney was huge, the biggest company in the world. Now it's astonishing to think how much bigger Disney is. You wouldn't even dream of doing this for Captain America. Muppet Babies don't have to sound like the Muppets, there are so many ways of approaching that kinda issue without causing major uncanny valley. But that's not the approach Disney took. It just kinda went away. In my headcanon, Save the Muppets saved the Muppets. In real life, Save the Muppets was a 10th of a drop in a huge ocean if anything. I'd be surprised if anyone involved in Muppets these days would have the faintest idea it even existed, it would be a moderate blip on the radar. But at the time, it felt kinda satisfying that this big thing Disney was trying to do ended up not happening, with no acknowledgement from Disney that it was even going away, it just sorta petered out.
Joe: So I looked up Save the Muppets on Muppet Wiki, the campaign ran from 2005 to 2007, the website closed in 2008, you received over 3,600 signatures on your petition, we don't know how many people wrote letters in. There were comments from Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson and Carol-Lynn Parente in support of this campaign. But besides the cruseship performances, there was also the Movies.com webseries with Statler and Waldorf, where they had alternate performers who were not Steve Whitmire and Dave Golez playing Statler and Waldorf, and other characters like Dr. Teeth, Sam Eagle, Sweetums, and Animal appeared in it and were not played by their regular performers. And I remember the fans hated it!
Kynan: I think I must have repressed that, cause that was just slightly wrong Muppets, off-brand Muppets. Those guys are very talented and still working for the Muppets, they're great puppeteers, they weren't bad impressions, but they were impressions and it felt wrong. So the natural extrapolation from that is "If this goes ahead, then we have 2 Muppet films being made in opposite sides of the country with competing casts, and none of it really feels like Muppets again." So much about the Muppets is about the chemistry between those 5 core performers and the characters between them. It was interesting because none of the Muppet people were involved or even really commenting. You mentioned Steve and Eric, I think they did an interview where they kinda referred to it.
Joe: Yeah, they didn't mention the name.
Kynan: I think Carol-Lynn was the only one who said anything on the record, only cause someone asked her directly.
Joe: She also butchered it a little bit, she said "One performer, one Muppet."
Kynan: That's not even technically true at the time because, Matt was doing Big Bird and Caroll was doing Big Bird at the same time. But that's exactly the point we were trying to make. But most of the arguments I was having were with fans on the ToughPigs forum. It kinda sharpened my toolbox in terms of responding to Disney or media comments, but people were like "When Eric Jacobson shows up out of the blue, and can do all of Frank's Muppets flawlessly, how can you say you can't have another so-and-so?" I'd hash these arguments out with fans and develop what I thought was the best version of it and that'd be the one I'd bring to the radio interview. They were legitimate arguments, it's not an open and shut case. It seems to me to be, but it's a thing that needs to be explained to people. Because Disney's huge and had they just gone ahead and done it, it would have been a lost cause. They have the power to do it, I don't think there's a piece of paper that ties Gonzo to Dave.
Joe: No, they're all work-for-hire, project-to-project performers.
Kynan: So the fact that they stopped doing that is testament to not my argument but, the power of the characters and the fact that the performers are inseparable, as long as it's just one at a time. Since then Steve has left and we've seen Matt take on Kermit, and it's kinda proved the point and not proved the point at the same time. It's that Matt is a different Kermit, and if they both had been doing it at the same time, people would comment on it. It would be like "Kermit was on American Idol last night. Which Kermit was it? Was it this one or this one?" But now that it's just Matt's Kermit, it's just Kermit. That's how that works, and we've seen lots of recasts when Jerry left and Matt took on a lot of those characters, when Matt became Kermit and then suddenly Peter took on some of Steve's characters as well. They've always went back and forth per the needs of the production, but they've only ever been one at a time. And you can see how the other performers and characters adjust their approaches to that, and how that affects the chemistry of the group. But as long as it's only happening one at a time.
Joe: Cause when it's one at a time, you're just passing the baton. We're keeping the character alive from one performer to another, just like you would in animation. If they said Mickey can only be voiced by Walt Disney, we would have had a silent Mickey for the last 80 years.
Kynan: Sesame has been very good at that, when Kevin left, Ryan took on Elmo, and honestly I can't tell the difference and I'm a huge voice guy. But at the time, it was news that there's a new kid playing Elmo, but he's the only Elmo, everyone else treats him like Elmo, and he's not trying to prove he's the best Elmo, he's just Elmo. And now Peter is Ernie, Matt is Big Bird, Eric is Oscar, and he's just Oscar. He's not trying to prove he's a better Oscar than anyone else out there, he's just Oscar, and that's exactly how it should be.
Joe: And I think a big part of it too is we Muppet fanatics think about this kinda thing a lot, we know all the players and we think about what's happening behind the scenes and below the frame. But we don't want normal people to have to think about those things.
Kynan: And if you are thinking about it, that's ruining the magic. If you're thinking about the puppeteer at all, that ruins the magic. They've been so good forever at hiding all that stuff, just at the performance level, you don't see the strings or the rods anymore. Any kinda friction that stops that can ruin the magic, to use Disney's term, you don't spoil the magic. So it's a point of personal pride that I stood up to that, but I can't take any credit for wining at all.
Joe: You say that but, I do believe the fan voice was important in that campaign and it really shows the power of fandom, even if the power is just a smidge, maybe that's the smidge that toppled the tower, maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back.