Wow - a lot has been going on in this thread since i last posted late last night...quite a bit of stuff coming out - but unfortunately not the stuff we really need to come out such as WHA HAPPEN?
Being that Artie used to post on the forum way back when i would really hope he would come back and do a post saying what happened as to why Steve wasn't able to perform the other night. Most likely it will put a lot of minds at rest ... and there's also a possibility it may not be an answer we want to hear. But right now people are going crazy - people are hurt, they're confused, and the worst part is because we still have no kind of official word as to the whole "why" aspect of what happened, we don't know exactly WHAT we should be feeling. I would have a hard time believing the guy isn't lurking since as mentioned he used to post here and probably would want to check in here to see what the reaction was to his performance (and i'm sure probably wasn't expecting it to be as big as it's become). So, Artie, this is an open invitation for you to come on, share with us what went on and while i can't promise that everyone will respond kindly and with respect (i think we all well know that there are some loose cannons here), i do feel it safe to say that at least 90% of us will be civil and will appreciate your being upfront, honest, forthright and candid. Lacking that, we really do need to hear something from someone soon...Steve, Eric, Lyelle, Mr. Poodlepants, just SOMEONE who knows what is truly going on and can provide answers.
I'm now going to throw out some random thoughts - they aren't all fitting together to make one big point, some of these might contradict the others so basically i'm just getting things off my chest and not really making some big advocacy towards something or the other.
When i last posted, my main observation (which hasn't changed) is that the reason why emotions are running high here is because deep down, whether it's said or not (or even if we realize it consciously or subconsciously) it triggers us to be confronting issues of Muppeteer mortality. That they are human, they age, they get sick, one day all of them will have to give up what they do and pass the torch to someone else. Steve's certainly not the spritely young spring chicken but he's not terribly old either - unless there' health issues we don't know about one would expect him to be doing this for another good 10-15 years.
We all know about recasts and how they're necessairy - most of the time the issue isn't that big of a deal to us..."Elmo" issues aside, i think much of us feel Big Bird is the Muppet symbol of Sesame Street just as Kermit is the Muppet symbol for the classic Muppet cast...yet hardly anyone here minds that Carroll now shares the character with Matt Vogel - it's not even really an "understudy" situation since when we see Big Bird these days, half the time it's Matt and half the time it's Carroll. Why does that not bother us so much but we flip out when the possibility of the same thing happening with Kermit comes up? Maybe because Steve's around 50 whereas Carroll's over 75 years old? Or does it go even deeper - we can live with an accept recast Big Bird, we can accept it when John Tartaglia plays Ernie for a season on Play With Me Sesame, we can handle Frank's characters essentially having been passed to Eric and David (except for the rare handful of times when Frank does a Sesame sketch or two here and there...but otherwise the torch has basically been passed), we can accept Jerry's characters being recast since we know it's specifically due to his age and his various health issues. But somehow because Kermit is not only the symbol of the Classic Muppets but really the symbol for the Muppets period - the iconic figure - the biggest of the big guns, we really get hair-trigger edgy when the subject comes up of him having a back-up.
There's been rough patches sure but overall since the team got over the one-two punch of losing Jim and Richard, they've really tended to deal with the issues of recasts well...having the current performers work directly with the people who they feel will take on the task of continuing the characters like a mentor/apprentice type relationship. Perhaps this is one reason why we accept Matt as Big Bird as well as we do...we know that this is what's going on - Matt has the official Carroll Wing of Approval so hence most of us fans extend it as well. Again here's where at least knowing what is and what isn't going on with the whole Kermit thing becomes kind of important. Let's say that whether Steve was sick or had some other big personal emergency or whether this was actually a planned thing that this would be a public test of a possible official understudy (and i'll get back on this subject in a moment), if we got some kind of word that in either case Artie had been working directly with Steve and had his approval to be the frog "if anything ever happened", i think we'd all at least ACCEPT it a little more even if we still didn't totally agree with it. Of course a lot has to do with exactly what has happened with Steve and all this was being doine without his knowledge, blessing, or approval...if it is a case of someone wanting to replace him - that is just flat out disrespect, an insult to the man's legacy and Muppet fans' worst fears about a Disney buyout coming true and we should raise bloody **** and protest loudly. Disney wanting to insure its property and the Muppet legacy is one thing - that's quite reasonable and out and out just smart and good planning. However, if it goes BEYOND mere tragedy-planning and prepardedness and becomes some kind of coup where a veteran Muppeteer is unceremoniously ousted and flat out disrespected, that's quite the other and we should be calling for Disney managements' heads on platters.
Back to the subject i said i'd get back to of an alternate performer's trial by fire testing. Let's be honest here. Eric Jacobson's debut as Piggy was exactly that. True, it was neither televised or in front of an audience of millions, but one could say it was even worse...they essentially secretly "market researched" him in front of an official gathering of the Muppets' biggest and most hard core fans at the one and only offical Muppet fan convention to date. I remember thinking it wasn't Frank but over 90% of the people there at the time refused to believe it wasn't him due to a mixture of (a) naturally expecting that Frank would have made his presence felt in some way and just seeming natural that a video greeting was his way to make up for not being there (b) Eric's just being THAT good (c) the projecter problems/technical difficulties they had getting the video to run...most people who thought it was a little off just chalked it up to it being the result of technical glitches. But the fact is they experimented and tested a new performer/substitute of one of the most major of the major characters with no forewarning before so this is not an unprecidented situation if that's what happened here. People say if that's what was going on, they shouldn't have done it on a nationally televised guest spot, but where else would you rather it be done...in a Muppet tv special or the big 2010 movie? Just throwing that out there.
I'm now going to play devil's advocate and throw out something - i'm not saying i agree or disagree with how it affects the handling of Kermit in 2009, but just some food for thought that any discussion of the topic would be amiss if it wasn't brought up by somebody at some point...here is a quote from Steve Whitmire talking about the decision for him to become Kermit being bandied about before Jim's death...
"I have been told that Jim had said something about it to Frank. Not that I would perform Kermit when he died, but that he would need somebody else to do Kermit some of the time because he was so busy. He never said that to me, but I heard that through somebody that it had been talked about. Just that the two of them were so busy, that they may need to have to find stand-ins for their characters, so I guess it had been mentioned, but the actual time I was asked was by Brian. We were in Disney World for something. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but I think it was the big tribute they did for Jim, and we went down for that. While we were there, one night I went over and met with Jane Henson, Brian, and Frank, and Brian mentioned me doing it."
So the idea at least of publicly debuting an understudy even before it became a "current performer can no longer do it anymore" thing had been out there back when Jim was still with us and before Steve became the frog himself.
I mentioned earlier that barring any health issues we don't know about, Steve should have a good 10-15 years of being able to perform Kermit ahead of him...but what if the concept of getting fans used to the idea of replacing major characters is a way of preparing us for a far more realistic situation that's in all honesty bound to come up sooner than we'd like to think or admit...the recasting of Gonzo. We've lived through a Kermit recast...it's hard for us to deal with and accept but we've done it before and we've seen it is possible for the character to successfully live on. But Dave Goelz has always been Gonzo - he's the last of the main Muppet Show Five that still performs full time and in the big productions, he's the only one that still performs all his original characters. Kermit's often been called the heart of the Muppets but in some ways Gonzo is the soul. Gonzo seems like he'd be the hardest to recast and for fans to accept - but sooner or later it will happen and as much as we don't want to think about it, it may be "sooner" - Dave's in his 60's, he's the one that's held out the longest of the TMS Five, and all the cartilage in either his arm or shoulder (don't remember which) is gone as he's admitted when he was doing presentations as part of the last touring Jim Henson Legacy exhibition. Muppets outlivethe humans who bring them to life. It's painful to confront but we have to...the same way all of us have to confront the mortality of our parents and all the other loved ones in our lives who are older than us. It hurts us in a very primal way but it's part of life.
The final thought on this subject that i wanted to get off my chest is that i think another reason some of us are really hurt by this is because of our perception of the status of the recast performer. I don't know if there's an offical hierarchy behind the scenes, but in my own mind, it's seems like there's about four "tier levels" of Muppet Performers:
1st Tier: These are the big stars - the ones we expect to see performing in all the big projects...people like Dave, Steve, Bill, Kevin - s you can see, they're such Big Guns that we don't even need to use last names when we refer to them!
2nd Tier: Up and comers - they have a lot of minor characters, they get quite a good amount of work - we generally have learned to recognize their voices - but they may or may not be part of a given project - these are people like Camille Bonora, Joey Mazzarino, Stephanie D'Arbruzzo, and up until very recently David Rudman (i personally think he's recently finally made it to first tier status...these tiers are flexible and people can move up or fall back a tier)
3rd tier would be more recent additions - we may not know them as well by voice or characters, but we see their names often enough. They work as support, right hands, background characters...but still haven't quite made it up to 2nd tier status - this would be an Allen Troutman or a Victor Yerrid (important to note: tier levels have nothing to do with talent levels as people on the third tier can be pretty much as talented/experienced puppetry-wise as people on the two tiers above them - in fact some of them are so good that they work at training other up and coming Muppeteers. These tiers are just solely based on how much they work/experience levels and how much of an impact they've made on the casts of characters)
Then finally there's the 4th tier - these are the "fresh meat" - the "newbies" - they're mostly just doing right hands and extras - they're the new names that pop up in the credits on the latest season of Sesame Street - we may not really recognize their names as a Muppet performer unless we view their Muppet Wiki entry. They may get lines on rare occasion if at all.
I think we're a bit sore right now because we're seeing a fourth tier Muppeteer taking on a first tier's recast. And a lot of us see it in the puppetry before we knew who exactly was subbing for Steve. Again - tier level isn't totally indicative of talent - the Kermit performance was NOT bad Muppetry. But it was lacking compared to Steve's work and we instinctively recognized it (when Steve was an up and comer himself, one of his biggest strengths was the physical manipulation/movements...so to be "Steve-level" is a high standard! Part of the pain and confusion people feel is not only because a Kermit recast happened and caught us by surprise but people are really confused because the role didn't go to someone on the first three tiers - we would expect a recast to come from tier one or two...maybe three if it was the right person. But deep inside people are feeling that a fourth tier Muppeteer doing that important a recast is maybe a little bit of an insult to Steve. (But that then begs the question, what tiers were Matt and Eric at respectively when they first started their official sub duties?)
Again, these are all thoughts/feelings/observations...i'm not suggesting to be proposing any kind of answers...those are best left coming from a legitimate on-the-record, known identity insider.
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