Update #4 on Sept. 15 at 12:00pm.

D23, Disney's answer to Comic Con for Mickey fanatics, was the big event over in California this weekend. Amidst all of the Pirates, Poohs, and Plutos, Disney found the time for some big Muppet announcements. The big one being: Disney has not forgotten that they own the Frog.

We had a few agents in the field at D23's Muppet panel, and we're proud to bring the latest news to you of what Walt has in store for all those dogs and bears and chickens and things.

First off, the Muppets appeared in Friday's big Disney presentation, which you can view a bit of in the video above. The Muppets sang to some prerecorded tunes, and they make a second appearance at the end of the video.
As we mentioned yesterday, The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made is being dusted off and handed to Jason Segel (of I Love You Man and How I Met Your Mother fame). We have no word on what will happen to his "The Greatest Muppet Movie Of All Time" script, but the promise of a theatrical Muppet movie (the first since Muppets in Space in 1999) has got us paying attention. Of course, the elephant in the room is Kermit's performer. Will Steve Whitmire be back for the Muppets' biggest break in years? That's a question for another blog. UPDATE: We've got a promotional picture! For realz.
Hey, remember those fantastic YouTube videos from last year? Well, so does Disney. They've announced that more of them are on their way, and this time they're branching out and recording non-Public Domain songs. "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Dust in the Wind", and "Stand By Me" will hopefully show up on your YouTube station soon (check local listings). UPDATE: We have more info on the upcoming viral videos! Dust in the Wind will be sung by Beaker, Bohemian Rhapsody by the Electric Mayhem and Gonzo, American Woman by Sam the Eagle, Popcorn by The Swedish Chef, as well as Carol of the Bells. Also, at least three Muppet Labs videos are coming, including "Carve-O-Matic", "Pumpkin Carving", and "Ghost Hunting". UPDATE #2: Stand By Me will be sung by Carl the Big Mean Bunny. No, really.
I am a bad Muppet fan, because I am one of the few who haven't been to a Disney theme park since Muppet*Vision 3D came out. Thankfully for me (and I guess you guys too), Disney will be releasing a "Remastered" version of the show into their parks. I don't know what that means, but it sure sounds exciting! Not to mention, maybe it'll still be there by the time I can afford a ticket to Orlando.
Also at the theme parks, the successful Muppet Whatnot Workshops will be opening new stores, causing exhausted parents to lug those giant bags around while their kids ride Space Mountain. The Workshops will also be carrying new puppet designs, accessories, and facial features, so now you have to buy at least three more! UPDATE: We have pictures of the new Whatnot accessories, plus monster fur!
More theme park stuff! Remember how we all marveled at the Muppet Mobile Labs, featuring an animatronic Bunsen and Beaker riding through the crowds, actually talking to and playing games with passers-by? Pretty soon, there will be another Mobile Muppet vehicle, and it'll be the Electric Mayhem bus! You'll be able to do the Hokey Pokey with Dr. Teeth, listen to Janice wax poetic about her trip to the beach, and watch Zoot take a nap! The possibilities are endless!
Rumors flew by a few months ago regarding a Muppet Halloween special, due out this Halloween season. And since we're already halfway through September, that rumor is decidedly bunk. Or, it was, until Disney announced that the Halloween special will be out next year. And while we wait for details about that, feel free to play through Muppet Monster Adventure for your PlayStation video gaming system and pretend it's a new TV special.
Got an iPhone? Muppet iPhone apps are coming! Personally, I have a phone shaped like a letter I, and the apps for it are terrible. Thanks for nothing, AT&T! UPDATE: We have images of two of the iPhone app ads! Soon you'll be able to carry Sexy Pepe around with you wherever you go.
Cat Cora, best known as one of the Iron Chefs on Iron Chef America, will be starring in an online cooking show with the Muppets. Will she be cooking bacon with Piggy? Bear claws with Fozzie? French Fried Frog Legs? Buns and Honeydew? Figs in Space? Yeah, I have no freaking idea. UPDATE: The show will be online this fall and will feature funny topics like "Food You Can Eat with Your Hands Night" and "Food That Gets Caught in Your Mustache Night".
More Steiff plush dolls are on their way, featuring Kermit and Piggy (UPDATE: A Fozzie Bear doll is also on its way!). We featured an article here on ToughPigs recently about the ridiculous price for the Kermit doll, so you'll excuse us if we don't foam at the mouth over more merchandise we can't afford. The good news is that there will be affordable merchandise. For example...
Pook-a-Looz! The name that means nothing! They're cuter than Ugly Dolls, and not even attempting the realism of, well, any other dolls you can think of. So far we've seen Kermit, Animal, Gonzo, and Fozzie, but I wouldn't be surprised if more were right around the corner. They'll be available in large and "keychain" sizes. I have already fallen in love with the Kermit doll, and the cuteness of Fozzie burying his face in his neckerchief has already got me emptying my wallet.
While we wait patiently with our hands folded on our laps for the Swedish Chef Christmas ornament coming out this holiday season, Disney is already jumping the gun on next year's design. Get ready for Animal at his drumset! Nothing says Christmas cheer like a furry beast chasing your wife and shouting "WOMAN! WOMAN!"
Disney is hoping that "Vinylmation" will be the next big fad for toy collectors. The toys are all shaped like Mickey (ears and all), but will have different paint jobs to resemble different characters. Some come out looking a little strange (like Kermit), and some are adorably ugly (like Sweetums). I think they'd all look less creepy if they didn't have Mickey's "nose", which would keep their faces from looking all wonky.
Statler and Waldorf will be breaking out their typewriters (which I'm sure they use to write many letters of complaint to various newspapers) and penning a book. I'm going to hazard a guess and say that the book will be in the same format as the awful "It's Hard Out Here for a Shrimp" and "The Diva Code". Look forward to our we-read-it-so-you-didn't-have-to review here on ToughPigs! UPDATE: We have a cover! Are you excited yet? How about now?
Weezer, who I'm still mad at for stealing my music video idea, will be recording a new version of "Rainbow Connection" for an upcoming CD due out next year called "Muppets Revisited". UPDATE: We have album art and more artist info! The Fray, Ami Lee, My Morning Jacket, and Andrew Bird will be singing Muppet covers too! I'm hoping for more songs, because that would make for one short album.
The Muppets will appear on David Foster's Christmas special this December with Andrea Bocelli. And since we don't have a picture of it yet, please enjoy this picture of Boccelli with Elmo and pretend it's, oh I dunno, Beaker. UPDATE: And now we have a picture! So that previous sentence makes absolutely no sense.
UPDATE: Muppet Halloween costumes! I'm thinking about having a kid just so I can dress him up as Fozzie Bear. Adowable!
UPDATE: Kermit will once again sing "I Believe" at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, this time with Tiffany Thornton. Are they trying to make this an annual thing? Because Thanksgiving already has that day saved every year. UPDATE #2: Kermit and Piggy will also be appearing in the Walt Disney World Christmas Parade Show, which will air on ABC on Christmas Day.
UPDATE: Lots more merchandise! Boy, that Kermit guy really likes being green, doesn't he?
UPDATE: We have images of two of the new parody posters that will be outside the revamped Muppet*Vision 3D show. Another one which we don't have an image of yet is Beaker as "BEAK-E". Hopefully Disney will turn these into a calendar or something so we can all enjoy them!
And lastly, here's the big news for most of you out there. Studio DC: Almost Live will be released next year! What's that? You thought Studio DC was unwatchable? Well then maybe you'd prefer The Muppet Show Season 4 DVDs! (That's what we call the ol' switcheroo.) Yes, finally we're taking the next step toward actually owning legitimate copies of The Muppet Show, and this one will feature Gonzo and his schnozz on the cover. UPDATE: We have DVD cover art! I'm happy to see it's an old Gonzo picture, and not, say, the "chili pepper shirt" Gonzo. Then again, I'd be happy if it had Don Rickles on the cover, just as long as we get these DVDs!

And that's the bulk of what we learned at D23! We'll update this page as necessary if more reports come in this week from other D23 attendees, so feel free to bookmark and revisit. And as always, we'll keep you in the know on a more instant basis via the ToughPigs forum and our Twitter feed.

Special thanks to Danny Horn, David Swain, and Greg James for all this amazing info! And thanks to Leighanne for those culinary puns!
Click here to discuss ALL of these Muppet news bits on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: disney, merchandise, Muppet movies, news

Last month, we had the unique opportunity to speak with Paul Morrissey at BOOM! Studios about the upcoming Muppet Show comic books. Seeing as the comic is still en route to your local Android's Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop, we decided to reach out to the man himself, Roger Langridge, to talk all things Muppet.

Roger is a London-based cartoonist, best known for his strip, "Fred the Clown." Feel free to peruse his wares at his website by clicking here. He was also responsible for the one-page Muppet comic from the last issue of Disney Adventures magazine.

Let's check in with Roger and see what he's got to say. Roger?

ToughPigs: What is your relationship with Muppets Studios (Disney) for the creation of the comic? Do they have to approve of all of the character designs? Plot elements?

Roger Langridge: I deal with Paul Morrissey at Boom Studios directly. Paul passes all plot outlines, finished scripts, pencils and presumably finished art on to Disney (I'm still inking issue #1 at this writing), who then send it back to Paul, who sends it back to me, and I make any changes that might be requested. I know my work is looked over by Jesse Post at Disney and Jim Lewis at Henson, and no doubt by others I'm not aware of. Mr Lewis, in particular, is very generous with notes, gags, character bits and so forth - many of the gags in issue #1 are his!

TP: What went into making the decision to make the Muppets more caricaturized, as opposed to something more photo-realistic?

RL: I should probably explain a little about where this particular incarnation of Muppet comics came from. A couple of years ago, I was approached by the now-defunct Disney Adventures Magazine to do a Muppet strip for them. They'd been running a version of Mickey Mouse and Goofy drawn in a completely off-model, undergroundish kind of style, and this had proven to be very popular, so they were looking to do more of the same with some other Disney properties. The staff at Disney Adventures knew my comics work and liked it, and I think were particularly taken with the vaudeville elements and oddball, Monty-Pythonesque humour I like to play around with in my own comics, so they thought I'd be a good fit for the Muppets. I was somewhat concerned to begin with, because I'm not that great at drawing on-model, but they mentioned the Mickey strips and said they wanted me to use my own stylistic approach on the Muppets material, so I thought I'd give it a try - not going completely underground-y, but leaning towards that aesthetic a little bit, which seemed to be what they wanted. As it turned out, of the fifteen or so pages I drew, only one was used before the magazine was cancelled (although a few more of them ended up in the San Diego Comic Con preview booklet eventually), so that was that... I thought! While I was resigning myself to never getting a chance to work with the Muppets, my work was being shown to people at Disney and Boom, and several months later things started rolling again. With the Boom incarnation, essentially my instructions have been to keep doing what I was doing on Disney Adventures... so there's your long, roundabout answer as to why the strip looks the way it does. I'm refining things as I go, though - fixing stuff that I felt looked wrong, making changes as requested by Disney and the aforementioned Mr Lewis, and generally trying to make it look as good as I can. I expect there'll be a settling-in period as I get the hang of it!

On a more general note, my feeling is that drawing all the characters precisely on-model would be to do them a disservice, as paradoxical as that sounds. On the screen, they have vibrant, eccentric, nuanced vocal characterizations to carry their personalities; on the printed page, the absence of those voices has to be compensated for visually. So my solution to that dilemma is to make the faces more expressive and more cartoony. I'm resigned to the fact that this will not please everybody, but my job is to make a good comic, and this is the approach that my instincts and experience point me towards in order to achieve that. It's a balancing act, to be sure; I'm walking a tightrope between authenticity and expressiveness, and no doubt I'll fall off occasionally. But I'll keep trying to get it right!
TP: I noticed some Easter eggs in the preview comic, like background characters that might or might not be Bert, Big Bird, Mildred, and Thog. Will you continue to throw a few bones to the fans like this? If so, can you give us an idea of what to expect?

RL: I'm sure there'll be things that pop up as we go along -- I'm not really thinking of them as Easter Eggs, more as part of the necessary texture required to evoke the Muppet Show we all remember. I don't really have a big list of obscure characters I'm trying to shoehorn in there, but I'm throwing things in as the opportunity arises... and as the whim takes me! Nothing planned enough to tell you what's coming up, I'm afraid. I'll be as surprised as you are.

TP: Given that this is a "Muppet Show" comic, will the characters be exclusively from The Muppet Show, or can we expect to see characters from The Jim Henson Hour and Muppets Tonight? Pepe, for example, is a much more recent character, and he appears on the cover to the preview comic.

RL: I didn't have anything to do with the cover of the preview comic, but my gut feeling is that I should stick with the old Muppet Show cast and format as much as possible, although that doesn't rule out cameo appearances, just for the fun of it. And Rizzo the Rat will pop up a bit - I think he's a later character, but there were a lot of anonymous rodents in the old show, so I sort of lump him in with them!
TP: Speaking of the covers, will you be providing the covers as well as the interior art? Or will we be seeing more photo covers? If so, will they be comprised of stock art or new photos? And is there any chance of guest artists providing covers to your work?

RL: At the moment, Boom have asked me to draw the covers. I don't know what their plans are down the line, but I for one would love to see some guest artists take a crack at it. Their standard approach at the moment seems to be multiple covers on everything, so there's plenty of room for other artists.

TP: As Paul Morissey mentioned in our previous interview, each issue of the first miniseries will focus on a different character. Will there be a continuing storyline going through the series, or will each stand alone as its own "episode"?

RL: When Boom first approached me, they asked me to pitch ideas for four-issue story arcs, which initially threw me somewhat - I had trouble imagining the comic working any other way apart from self-contained stories. I think I've found ways to make it work, with ongoing subplots tying largely stand-alone stories together. The first four issues - which I guess is now a miniseries (which nobody's mentioned to me!) - were added as an afterthought, at Disney's request; they're all completely self-contained, which is probably best as people get used to it. Then we'll jump into slightly longer stories, though each issue should work on its own as well.
TP: In the preview comic, we saw elements such as Pigs In Space and At The Dance. Will the first miniseries have more of this? Can we expect to see one-to-two page Veterinarian's Hospital or the Swedish Chef skits? How about the more obscure bits like the Talking Houses and Muppet
Sports?

RL: There will definitely be plenty of skits! My goal is to try to make each issue seem like an undiscovered episode of the Muppet Show, and the skits are an essential part of that. The first issue will feature the Swedish Chef, Pigs in Space and the Planet Koozebane for starters. Plenty more on the way! On the topic of Pigs in Space, I'm trying to get one of those into every issue. Whenever I mention that I'm working on a Muppet comic to my friends, they all say, "Pigs in Space! Lots of Pigs in Space!"

TP: What goes in to your research for writing the series? Did Disney provide him with complete series of The Muppet Show on DVD? Are you aware of the Muppet Wiki? If so, is it a part of your in-depth research?

RL: I don't have a complete set of DVDs by any means, though I'm gradually acquiring them when I can afford them. I have a "Best Of" set, a few books (including the excellent Muppet Show Book from 1978 or thereabouts, full of lavish colour illustrations), a ringbinder full of photo reference, character sheets, the "Muppet Bible" which Disney Adventures sent me way back when I did the strips for them, and images scavenged from the internet - including the Muppet Wiki. I'm adding to the pile all the time. And a lot of stuff is coming from my creaky old memory! That's usually where the initial spark comes from; then I'll research the things I recall and which I think would be fun to do, and sometimes that leads to other ideas as I stumble across other items or characters I'd forgotten. It's kind of an organic process in that way.
TP: Lastly, there's been some concern on our forum about the character designs for Gonzo and, to a lesser extent, Kermit. Were there any formal discussions about why you chose to go with those designs? Was there any concern from Disney or the fans? (On the other hand, most of the designs are spot-on, like Sweetums and Bunsen Honeydew)

RL: Well, as I've mentioned, the character designs in the preview are from the material produced for Disney Adventures, in which drawing the characters off-model was not only tolerated, but actively encouraged. The new comic is still being drawn in my own style, and I've been encouraged to stick with that approach to a large extent, but as I mentioned, there'll be tweaks and refinements. And no doubt I'll improve with practice! At the moment I'm in the deep end, really - trying to keep on schedule and learn all the characters' physical nuances at the same time. I hope it'll get easier! So far, the only art comment I've had from Disney is regarding Gonzo's nose, which I was basing on the version in the Muppet Show Book - pointier, more gnarled-looking than the current version - so I've had another look at Gonzo all round, and I hope the fans will be pleased with how he looks in the first issue. Beyond that, all I can say is I hope I improve with practice!
Special thanks to Roger Langridge for answering a few pressing questions for us!

The Muppet Show Comic Book will hit stores March 25, 2009!

Click here to talk about the specifics of a weirdo's nose on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: comics/magazines, disney, interview, the muppet show

While we eagerly await the release of the upcoming Muppet Show comic book, due out in 2009 from BOOM! Studios, I find myself chomping at the bit, wondering what this thing's gonna be like. And that's not easy. First I had to find a bit, which is only sold in Chinatown, and then take a bite. And those things taste like black licorice. Blecch.

I had a chance to ask a few questions to Paul Morrissey, BOOM! Studios' editor for the Disney-related comics. This interview took place before I had the preview comic in-hand (which includes all of the images used in this article), which explains why I didn't ask any questions about Gonzo's beak or other script-related issues.

But don't take my word for it, here's Paul Morrissey. And, um, me.
ToughPigs: In what aspect (besides Editor in Chief) is Mark Waid involved in the Muppet comic books? I heard a rumor that he was writing some of the content, but that sounded to me to be false.

Paul Morrissey: Unfortunately, that's just a rumor. One of our press releases announcing the books was reprinted wrong on a comic news site. Though I'm sure Mark would write a brilliant Muppet comic, he's a bit too busy scripting other projects--including BOOM!'s "Incredibles" comic book.
TP: Is Roger Langridge submitting short pieces for the comic (like his one-page Muppet comic in Disney Adventures), or will he be working on full 20-30 page scripts?

PM: Roger Langridge is a mad genius, so we didn't want to restrict him to just short pieces. We miraculously found a way to have Roger write and draw full 22-page scripts. They are classic Muppets. Each one is full of hilarious skits and gags and irreverence, but Roger's stories also manage to tug at the heartstrings, too.

TP: Will Roger be the sole writer and artist for the book, or will it be a compilation of different talents?

PM: Right now, Roger is the only writer/artist on "The Muppet Show" comic. However, down the road, we'll have some exciting announcements about other writers and artists contributing their own "The Muppet Show" arcs.
TP: Are the "sequel" books (like "Muppet Prince Charming" and "Muppet Sleeping Beauty") planned already, or is that conjecture on BOOM's part?

PM: BOOM! is very much committed to having the Muppets bring their chaos to classic fairy tales and legends. Expect to see "Muppets Robin Hood" (with Sweetums as Little John!), "Muppets Peter Pan" and "Muppets King Arthur" shortly after Roger's "The Muppet Show" comic book hits stands. We're finding the funniest writers to script these projects. The tone we're aiming for is an all-ages Monty Python. That's setting the bar pretty high!

TP: Regarding the teaser comic released at the San Diego Comic Con, will there be a way for Muppet fans to see the art?

PM: BOOM! created a "Muppet Show" preview comic for San Diego Comic-Con that featured 9 pages of Roger's amazing art and hilarious gags. Most of this material is so exclusive, that it will not appear in Roger's first "The Muppet Show" arc. In fact, the preview comic has become a bit of a collector's item. I've seen them on eBay!
TP: How many issues will the first Muppet comic series run?

PM: Roger's first arc will be 4 issues. Issue #1 will focus on Kermit, issue # 2 will put Fozzie in the spotlight, Gonzo will headline issue #3, and Miss Piggy will ham it up in issue #4. Subsequent arcs, including the Muppet parody books, will also have four issue-arcs.

TP: Will there be any promotions attached to the Muppet series?

PM: Certainly! But nothing we can reveal at this point. As you may know, Disney is orchestrating the Muppets' return in a major way, and BOOM! is thrilled to a part of this new Muppet era!
Keep an eye on this space for Part 2 of our Q&A with Paul Morrissey!

Thanks to Paul for chatting with us, and special thanks to BOOM! Studios' Chip Mosher for setting the whole thing up!

Click here for an animated conversation on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: comics/magazines, disney, interview, the muppet show

The following article was written by Tough Pigs' close, personal friend Peter Papazoglou. Thanks for the review, Peter!


As a loyal and - let's face it - masochistic fan of the Muppets, you have no doubt had the pleasure of reading my girlfriend Leah's review of Studio DC: Almost Live. So it should come as a surprise of John-McCain-endorses-Barack-

Labels: disney, guest bloggers, Muppets on TV, review

Here we are, the final day of our week-long interview with Steve Whitmire, and boy are my arms tired! Be sure to clickity-click here to read parts one, two, three, and four!


ToughPigs: On Studio DC, the Ashley Tisdale segment, I thought that was one of the only redeeming segment of the whole special. The choreography that Kermit was doing: how did you do that?

Steve Whitmire: It was SO HARD. There were two of us, a guy named Bruce Lanoil and myself. I was in the head and he did both hands almost throughout. I was just so afraid of it because at that point, I wasn’t familiar with the number. We were trying to match the original. When I first heard the song, I thought it was out of character for Kermit, but in the context when we actually did it, it was totally fine. [Ashley] of course knows the number by heart, she’s done it a thousand times, and was perfect the first time, but I kept having to stop her. We had a great choreographer, Bonnie Story, who choreographed the original. We had to do it in slow motion, and I had to ask Ashley, “show me what you just did in slow motion,” and she would do the moves in slow motion and Bruce would do the arms, and then we’d try it with the music track and it was ten times faster than we remembered. It was really hard. And Bruce is considerably shorter than me, so I was just dragging the poor guy all over the sound stage. He was just floating above the ground trying to keep up. It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done from a manipulation standpoint. And it was saved by the edit, because we’d obviously stop-and-start. Very tough one, but also something to be proud of.

TP: So that was just a normal Kermit puppet with arm rods.

SW: Yep, normal Kermit puppet. And one of the things that Disney wants to do, and it’s very expensive, but they do it on virtually everything we do, is they digitally remove the rods. You see Piggy sitting in a chair on that special and motioning, and there’s no arm rods. It throws me sometimes, I expect to see the arm rods, but they removed every one from that piece, so Kermit’s just leaping through the air.

TP: Do you think that’s a good decision?

SW: I like it. Jim would have liked it too. Whatever new technology there was, he always wanted to jump right in the middle of it. He would have been fine with all that stuff. He was surprisingly not terribly precious about the characters, he was willing to just, you know, do things, just experiment. And in many ways, that’s the reason why he and Frank balanced each other so well. Because Frank is extremely intense and analytical about the characters, and Jim is much more whimsical and free-spirited. The balance of that is what defines the Muppets to me, and that’s what I always tried to learn in the early days when I showed up as this 18-year-old. I had the best teachers in the world, I had Jim and Frank and Jerry and Richard and Dave. Jim was the overseer, he could see the big picture. He would look at a frame and he was seeing the whole thing, almost squinting, and he’d say “We need a puppet up here.” He was never just watching Kermit or his character, he was looking at the whole thing all the time. Frank was very focused and analytical about character and comedy and what’s funny and precise. Dave was extremely precise as a manipulator. Every move was sharp and perfect. Like, if a puppet had to spin in place, obviously we have to run around in a circle, everything was precision and I love that. Jerry was this guy who had these incredible characters that just came out of nowhere. One thing I noticed about Jerry is that he wasn’t afraid to use just his own voice. He’d just do a little thing to it, it wasn’t some extreme character voice. Richard was a lot about justice. He was always about the underdog. He’d bring people in and help them and show them and give tours of the workshop. He was a great diplomat for the Muppets as much as anything. All of that together, and being able to take the best of the little pieces and integrate it into something was very important to me.

TP: Have you seen the Muppet parodies like Sad Kermit or BeakerRoll on the internet?

SW: Yes. It’s a little sad. I had people send me some of the pieces that have been edited for YouTube, and I don’t find any of that stuff really offensive, but I kind of understand it. We sort of live in this deconstructionist world these days where the best way to pay tribute to something is to take it and break it down into little pieces and put it back together the way they like it. And I also think part of that is because we’re not doing very much. If our stuff was out there, there wouldn’t be a void to have the Muppets. Again, I’m not offended by it, I’m not a puritan, it’s art. And some of them are done so well. The lip sync is perfect. So I kind of giggle at it and shake my head, there’s no point in being offended by it. At the same time, I don’t think Jim would have been offended by it either. As an aside, when we were doing Fraggle Rock, Jim was in Toronto, and I went out to lunch one day. I went across the street and someone had made these Muppet hot pads for your oven. And it was this knitted Ernie head. It was pretty terrible. And it was $10, so I bought it. I took it back and I said “I got you something over lunch,” and Jim smiled and I handed it over to him, and the look on his face… it was really devastating to him. And he said “Do I have to take that?” And he was serious, so I said, “No, of course not!” And I realized, he never had a problem, he almost let people rip him off if it was good. When people made things that he didn’t feel were up to par, then it upset him. I don’t think he took a lot of legal action against things like that, but he wanted it to be at least complimentary. So I can’t really say what he’d think about [the videos]. I don’t think anyone confuses that for us. Nobody’s going to think we’re going to do that. But again, the more we do, maybe the less room there will be for it.

TP: Right, as we’ve seen from the official viral videos.

SW: Yeah, and it’s interesting, another thing I noticed about that is we only did the four, and we haven’t had time to do any more, we’ve been busy with other things. But I’ve noticed, for a while there, you’d go to the main YouTube page and they were being recommended there for people to see. Now when you go there, occasionally you’ll see a Mahna Mahna or another Muppet video, and it’s like there’s a hunger for that. And we’re not filling that void, but we’d like to, and we will once we get back on track.

TP: I’ve noticed that there tends to be trends on blogs related to Muppet videos, where for a few weeks every blogger will be posting the Mahna Mahna video, and then a few weeks later it will be something else, like The Leprechaun Brothers. It’s exciting for us, because people other than us are talking about the Muppets.

SW: People want the Muppets out there. I know when Charles Schulz died, I was a huge Peanuts fan when I was a kid, before the Muppets, I think his family decided it wasn’t going to go on, nobody else was going to draw the strip. And it really upset me. It wasn’t because I would pick up the newspaper and read Peanuts every day, but I just sort of knew that they were there, and soon they weren’t going to be. I’d like to think that [the Muppets] are a part of our culture, and I think people think the same way. Yet, we go out there and we do a series, and it’s hard to keep it on the air. We have our fans, and I think Disney has strategies that will build us up. If we do another series, and I hope we will, by the time we get there, I hope we will have found our following again. To that end, I think the Disney Channel specials serve a really good purpose, just to draw that group in. We were kind of on the periphery of them in a way. They weren’t Muppet specials, it was just a lot of stuff with the stars that were already there. At least we got that audience, and apparently, that show rated extremely high for Disney Channel.

TP: So you think there would be a big marketing push behind a new series?

SW: Oh, I think there would be. Things move very slow in a company like Disney, but they move. And a lot of it has been about establishing the Muppets within Disney. We’re trying to reach the other departments in Disney and say, “Hey, we’re here, and this is what we can do.” It’s a lot of reproving who the Muppets are and now there’s a lot of interest because we’ve had some recent successes between the viral videos and the Disney Channel.

TP: I’d [Ryan] actually seen you once before, in Hondo, Texas, in Extreme Makeover. How involved were you in the making of that episode?

SW: As it turned out, pretty involved in the making of it. It was one of those Disney-ABC connections. At the time, the producer was a pretty big fan of the Muppets. It was great, I had such fun. I guess a lot of that show was ad-libbed anyway. We had a vague outline of what we were going to shoot, and I ad-libbed the whole thing. I had so much fun on that show. I love it when Kermit’s in unexpected places, like Hannity and Colmes. Nobody expected Kermit to be there, we did it a couple of times, it didn’t make any sense. Nightline’s a good example of that, and Extreme Makeover worked the same way. It was just great fun. Having him ride around in the John Deere vehicle, I have one of those at home, so it was perfect (laughs). One of the fun things was, I guess Ty [Pennington] always runs around with his own camera, and they built one for Kermit, and it was an actual camera! So I was really running the camera, and I could turn it around and have Kermit film himself. I had two monitors, one of the camera on me, the broadcast version, and one for Kermit’s camera.

TP: When you do a shoot like that, when it’s just Kermit, how much crew do you have with you? Is it just you and a puppet wrangler?

SW: Usually, somebody from our studio is there and somebody like [puppet designer] Jane Gootnik, Jane herself if possible, though she wasn’t on that shoot. Jane was hired a month after I did, so she’s got a 30-year history with the Muppets too. It’s especially important, especially if it’s on location like that, for someone to be able to just dive in and do something in a hurry, like a rigging thing, because there’s just no time. But in that case there was just four of us, including Carmen Osbahr who puppeteered Kermit’s right hand for us. And then I think Jim Lewis probably contributed ideas from Los Angeles for the writing. On that shoot, I was literally in the bus, and Kermit was driving it. And that was really scary, because no one could see. I just put the thing in drive, hit the gas, went fifty feet and hoped it stayed on the road. They said, “The only thing that could happen is you could run into the ditch,” and I said, “I know! I could run into the ditch!” (Laughs)

TP: How about when it’s a talk show appearance? Do you have stuff pre-written?

SW: Almost always. Usually we’ll have Jim Lewis write something, I always try to get Jim to write for Kermit if I can because he has such a great sensibility for Kermit, in the way that Jerry Juhl did for Kermit on The Muppet Show. I think Jerry wrote most of Kermit’s stuff on The Muppet Show. So, usually he’d write several pages of talking points, and I can rely on those. And it’s a mix, he gives me three choices for every answer, and sometimes it’s ad-libbed. Occasionally we’ll have an interview where they’ll go straight down the script and I’ll just read the answers while trying not to sound like I’m just reading them.

TP: I remember seeing Kermit and Fozzie being interviewed and hearing some funny responses when asked about the Jason Segel movie, like they hadn’t heard about the movie.

SW: Yeah, we had to come up with something to say, because we kept getting asked.

TP: Was that written by Jim Lewis?

SW: No, that was just Eric and me being silly. We did 100 interviews around then and we try to do something different for each one, even though it doesn’t really matter. And that was the first satellite media tour we did with just Kermit and Fozzie, with Eric and me. And it was great, the two of them haven’t been seen together all that much, so it was nice to have Kermit and Fozzie back together instead of it always being Kermit and Piggy. It gets a little old after a while. We’d always get the same three questions. “Are you married?” Oh no, we’re not married, or maybe we are. We’d really like to move beyond that, but we can’t because that’s what everyone wants to know. But it’s great to have that Kermit and Fozzie dynamic back. Two pals, two buddies. And in the same way, it’s great to have that little core group: Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, Scooter. To have those main Muppet Show characters back in a way is also nice.

TP: Do you feel like there’s a different dynamic there between you and Eric and you and Frank?

SW: A little. Eric’s just so darn close to Frank, it’s really incredible. His voice is so close, and obviously the other part of that is the character. And I would have to say that in the last few months, he has just gelled as Piggy. We did a satellite media tour not too long ago, and she was like she’d never been before. And the challenge for Eric has been that it’s so easy for her to always be angry. Because that’s sort of the default position: she gets mad, she hits somebody, she storms out. But to play her as anything other than angry, you really have to dig into the character. And he gets in there so well, and that takes a long time. If we can get through an interview without Piggy getting angry, then I think it’s a great thing (laughs). It’s different than Frank, but less different. It just takes a long time. Frank’s characters are so deep, there’s so much to them, it’s just a hard thing to do. Eric hasn’t really worked with Frank on the characters, so he’s just kind of taking the character from what he sees.

TP: When was the last time you worked with Frank Oz?

SW: The last time we worked together was… (thinks) a while ago. I’m not even sure I can remember. It’s been quite a while. Probably the last thing was Sesame Street. Every so often, he’ll come in and do Bert. And that’s a little weird for me, with them both doing the character, but it’s Frank. You can’t say no to Frank. If Frank said he wanted to come back and do Piggy for something, he should do it, and I think Eric would be totally fine with it. (Laughs) I don’t expect that to happen.

TP: I think that’s all we have. Thank you so much, Steve, for taking the time to talk with us.

SW: You’re so welcome. As you know, as we’ve said repeatedly and repeatedly, we love reading ToughPigs because you’re our best critics (laughs).

TP: Well, we’ll continue to criticize you as long as you continue to make stuff.

SW: Exactly, it’s a reciprocal arrangement. I said this back at MuppetFest, and I think the crowd got it, but it feels like we’re in this sort of partnership, we’re kind of in this together. Especially with the Muppets, and I don’t know if other actors feel this way, but with us doing these characters that are ongoing for years and years and years, the fans contribute nearly as much to this as we do in keeping it alive, especially during the slow times.Once again, super special thanks go out to Steve Whitmire for taking the time to chat with us, plus being an extra cool guy!

And thanks to all of our dedicated ToughPigs readers for sticking it out for this entire week. As Steve said, he can't do this without us, and we can't do this without you!

Click here to sing the praises of Steve on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: disney, interview, Muppet performers

Back for more of your daily Steve Whitmire interview? Don't forget to check back to parts one, two, and three!


ToughPigs: Feel free to not answer this question, but how does your relationship with Disney work, contract-wise? If they decide to make a Muppet production, are you contractually obligated to perform?

Steve Whitmire: No, we’re freelancers. We’re still freelancers, just as we were with Henson. And that’s nice. Jim was always about a handshake, and while things would certainly be more formal with a big corporation like Disney, but it’s very laid-back, very easy-going in that respect.

TP: And you have a similar relationship with Sesame Workshop?

SW: Yeah, we’ve always been freelancers.

TP: There’s one glaring omission from the recent Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock DVD sets that have been coming out over the last few years, and it’s that there’s no commentary. If they would have asked you, would you have contributed commentary to a few episodes?

SW: That would have been fun, yeah.

TP: Too bad they didn’t ask then.

SW: Treasure Island, we did one, I think. And Muppets From Space.

TP: When Elmo makes public appearances, he makes reference to the fact that he doesn’t know he’s on a TV show. Is that a Sesame Workshop decision?

SW: I think on Sesame Street, they try to play it off like it’s a real street, that that’s really real life for those guys. And I think for Sesame, it kind of makes sense. Because Elmo’s so young, he’s meant to be young, in our world he really is, but I mean he’s meant to be a little kid. So Kevin just tries to keep him like a little kid. But I’ve heard Kevin do interviews with more funny, adult things, not just adult humor but in adult interviews where Elmo breaks out of character a little bit, and it’s always funny.

TP: Yeah, we saw him at the Long Island Huntington event where Gonzo was flirting with Zoe, and Elmo was kind of in the middle of that. It was the kind of thing you’d never see on Sesame Street.

SW: (Laughs)

TP: I have a few questions from some of the ToughPig forum members that are not Muppet related. Anthony wants to know who your favorite superhero is.

SW: Oh my god. Probably Batman. And probably the original, the original being the Adam West show. By all means. And it’s really funny, we’ve had the opportunity to run into him a couple of times and Eric Jacobson and I are like drooling groupies. You know, we did the TV Land Awards a few years ago and Eric and I were like stalkers. There was an interview online with Adam West later where you see my hand reach out from behind and I snap a picture with my phone. Very nice guy, we met him and talked to him. And I started thinking about it, and you know, Batman, when I was 10 years old, he’s this guy who has this true identity, which is a little like us when you think about it. He puts on his mask, we put on these puppets and nobody knows who you are. Maybe that was part of the warped childhood I had that led me here (laughs).

TP: Carolyn from our forum wants to know, “How is your work with cats going?”

SW: That’s a good thing to mention, especially since we’re online. I’m on the board of this place called the Shambala Preserve, which is Tippi Hedren’s place. She’s a very dear friend, I’ve probably known her for 15 years now. I do a lot of video editing for them. In my spare time with her in LA, I go to the preserve and I shoot, which is fun for me, I shoot all this video and edit it into these little pieces they can use for fund raising. In fact, I’m in the middle of one that we’ll put on YouTube once we’re finished with it. So you ask me if I work outside of Muppets: Yes, I’ve got my volunteer work at Shambala. But that’s big cats. My wife Melissa and I did almost a year of intensive work at a local humane society outside of Atlanta in 1987. We had almost that whole year off from Muppet work. Really hands-on work, cleaning the cat cages and giving injections to the cats. At the end of that, we had 13 cats of our own. And at one point, we had 36 cats that we were fostering (laughs). We were crazy, we were insane.

TP: Did you name them all?

SW: They all had names, but they all had stupid names, because we knew people were going to adopt them. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but good for the cats. So I don’t do that stuff so much anymore, but I still do the Shambala stuff when I can.

TP: Speaking of your wife, Melissa, I noticed on the Muppet Wiki that she’s puppeteered a few times with the Muppets. I don’t know much about her; is she a professional puppeteer as well?

SW: I don’t think she’d think of herself as a professional. She’s not one of those people who decided she wanted to work with the Muppets when she was a kid like us. She basically decided to do it because she’d be sitting around on set in the early days, and it just sort of made sense. It’s something she kind of picked up, we needed extra people and she never had any aspirations to be a big Muppet star with a main character, so sometimes we’d need people to do background characters. She worked intensively on The Dark Crystal with Kathy Mullen. She was Kira’s right hand for the whole film. So any time you’d see Kira’s right hand, that was Melissa. And she worked on Muppets Take Manhattan as one of the background puppeteers. Kermit’s Swamp Years I think she puppeteered a little bit. And she worked on a few things where she didn’t get credit in the end.

TP: If you let us know what they were, we can make sure she gets credit for them on the Wiki.

SW: I’ll let you know, I can’t remember offhand (laughs).

TP: Kynan from our forum wanted to ask you about tractors. Care to explain?

SW: (Laughs) Kynan cruised through LA and we met, and we owed him a slight debt of gratitude [for the Save the Muppets campaign]. Tractors, yes. I have several. I’m a farm guy. Not a legitimate farm, but I do a lot of mowing when I’m not with the Muppets. I’m a bit of a homebody. I mow about six acres a week. So John Deere is very important to me. (Laughs) Hard to imagine, I guess, but that’s what I do when I’m not working. They’re green, the John Deere tractors.

TP: What other interests do you have besides puppetry?

SW: There’s an author named Ken Wilber who most people haven’t heard of, but he’s the most translated author in the world. He’s an amazing guy, he’s just a thinker. And for the last few years, he’s written on what he calls “integral theory.” It’s the idea that everyone is right on some level, whether it’s politics, math, science, the world at large, puppets, showbiz, being a lawyer, whatever. Everybody brings a piece of the puzzle that makes the world up to the same table. And it’s a matter of choosing those things and integrating all of that together, which is a huge part of what’s happened to Disney in the last five years. And I’ve been reading his stuff for maybe 8-10 years, and I met him a couple years ago, and he’s a terrific guy. And his stuff is extremely academic to wade through. But yet, it’s a pretty simple idea. It’s the idea that the more you can integrate things together in your life, the better chance you have at getting through your life. And he calls himself a mapmaker. And he literally has taken every discipline in the world, and I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but he’s brought all that into one place, and he’s integrated it together in his books. It’s not conservative, it’s not liberal, it’s every point of view. And it goes all the way from the lowest levels of everything up to these spiritual places. It fits the Muppets perfectly. And I can look at the characters that we’ve created, and that Jim created, and they all fall under these different levels of development. It’s not something any corporation will look at and say, “We should look at that map,” but for me, and from the Muppet point of view, I use it every day.

TP: So where do Kermit and Rizzo fall on that level of development?

SW: Well, now we’re really getting complicated. Rizzo is very egocentric, in that he is very much about himself. There’s all these levels of development: there’s egocentric, ethnocentric, world-centric. As people develop through their lives, they go from being totally focused on themselves to being focused on their immediate family or group to being focused on the entire world, where they slowly accept that we’re all a part of this big machine, and beyond, whatever that might be. So Kermit’s a little bit by the world-centric and above level, while Rizzo is much more egocentric. It’s a great dynamic to play for these two guys.

TP: It’s too bad you can’t have them interacting with each other very often.

SW: Exactly. I tried that yesterday, it’s impossible. We were just being silly, because we needed as many puppets on screen as possible, so I had one on each hand. I can’t even make them look in the right place when I do that. I was having them talk to Madison, this little girl on set, and I got confused, I got it backwards. (Laughs)We're almost at the end! I know, it's quite sad. Come back tomorrow for the final part of our interview with Steve where you'll see him talk about Kermit choreography, his fellow Muppeteers, and how to make a frog drive a truck.

Click here to talk tractors on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: disney, interview, jim henson company, Muppet performers

Are you ready for part 3 of our interview with Steve Whitmire? Feel free to refresh with part one and part two!

And special thanks to Rick Lyon for the use of the image at the top of this article!


ToughPigs: So, you recently took over performing Statler and, more recently, the Newsman. What is that like? And how did you prepare for those?

Steve Whitmire: For Statler, I was trying to decide if I should make it more like Jerry’s original, or do I make it like Richard’s, which everyone knows from The Muppet Show, or do I make it like Jerry’s since Richard’s. He’s just been passed around a lot. It’s always been a problem for me that the characters got passed around. I get very conservative about this idea of one person doing the characters, and we shouldn’t recast them so the character can grow and not be different every time we see them. So, I’ve tried to aim for more like what Richard did on The Muppet Show. And I know I don’t really sound like Richard, and I have so much fun doing the character. And they only do like three lines at a time, but when we ad lib with them between scenes, it’s so much fun. We have so much fun.

TP: And you work so well with Dave Goelz.

SW: Yeah, you guys know there’s all these Muppet duos. Jim and Frank did all these characters together like Ernie and Bert, and Fozzie and Piggy with Kermit. Jerry and Richard did a lot of characters together like the Two-Headed Monster, and Floyd and Janice. They always seemed to team up as a performing team, and Dave and I do that too. Dave was actually the person who suggested that I do Beaker when Richard died. So I had to learn to make that noise by sucking air in. So it wasn’t “Mee Mee Mee”, it was ((sucks air in)) “Mee Mee Mee.” You’re pulling air in the whole time, so if you’re doing a long thing, and you forget and take a deep breath, you’re doing the wrong thing. You have to exhale before you start. It’s bizarre, and Richard could do that. I had to learn to do that without choking. (Laughs) The truth of the matter is, it’s always hard… the more you know about the person who did these characters, the harder it is to take them over, because it’s something we never had to do when the person was alive or still doing the character, because we have a desire to be really faithful to what that person created.

TP: Do you think that’s easier with a character like Beaker where he never actually speaks?

SW: A little bit. And it helps that Dave is consistent with Bunsen. I can’t tell you exactly where that character came from, from within Richard, because I just don’t know. Whatever was going on in Richard’s head with what he did with that character, I don’t know what it was. I’m winging it in that respect, I’m taking it in a different direction. These days, after we did the viral stuff, I get the impression that Beaker is a guy who goes home at night, you know he’s pretty intelligent, he’s a smart guy, he works in a lab, and he probably doesn’t have much of a social life. He’s pretty introverted because he really can’t talk, so his only means of communication is the internet. I love the idea that he spends all of his time in front of a computer, which is perfect for the YouTube stuff. (Laughs)

TP: Can you describe for us what you’ll be doing in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year?

SW: Yeah, we’re on the Macy’s float, which is kind of a big deal to me. It’s the last float of the parade before Santa. So, I’m basically in a box, which is very much like a coffin, and I’m working lying on my back with my arm up for about three hours (laughs), at the end of which, I sing a song. So it’s going to be wild and crazy.

TP: Will you be singing live?

SW: Fortunately, the song’s probably going to be prerecorded. But the fun thing about things like that are that we’re fixing it so I’ve got a monitor with four images, one of which, the most important one probably, is from a camera mounted in the float shooting the back of Kermit’s head and a big wide shot of the audience, so I can see what Kermit is seeing. And we’ve got a PA system, and I also have the ability to hear the crowd, so Kermit can actually communicate with the crowd.

TP: So they’ll be able to hear you.

SW: Right, they can hear me and I can hear them. I can really talk to them, which to me is really important. I mean, to those people, they will know that it’s really Kermit. I think that’s great.

TP: So, you’ve seen the New York Times article [which explains Disney’s extended plans for the Muppets]. Have you been involved in any of the plans Disney is making, or is this all news to you?

SW: I know about most of what’s been mentioned, to the extent of what’s been mentioned there. I’m not hugely involved yet. At this stage, most of the plans are something that happens on a corporate level. They own the characters and that’s the way it works. That article was more from the executive side of things, it was really talking about Disney’s approach to the Muppets. When we talk, it’s more about the characters. It’s really nice to know, now that we’re with people at Disney who “get it,” it’s nice to know we have that behind us, because it’s very easy for the Muppets to just sort of disappear. To have somebody behind us who understands the characters, but has that machine that can get them out there. And as it gets more integrated, this corporate side with this little family business thing, I think it’s starting to work. Someone told us once that we’d never be able to have our own creative little bubble within Disney, but it’s really starting to feel that way. That’s what we need.

TP: Do you see things getting better and better from here on?

SW: It feels like it, and Letters to Santa is a real good example of that. I feel really positive about it. We keep saying, and I’ll probably say this and it’ll be a big flop, but it feel like it’ll be one of those perennial shows and it’ll really catch on. It’s just so true to the characters. A lot of that happened when we started having script meetings with the writers and they had a great face and we added little character bits, and then we’re running as we go.

TP: Is there a lot of ad-libbing?

SW: Some. We’re always free to try. We have to be careful when we’re shooting out of order, that you don’t do an ad-lib where you realize that what you said doesn’t work in the story anymore. (Laughs) It’s really coming together well. We’ve got a really short time frame to shoot a pretty complicated show. It’s really just beautiful. Perfect Muppet stuff.

TP: One thing they mentioned in the New York Times article is that there’s going to be a “Desperate Housepigs” sketch on the Desperate Housewives DVD set.

SW: Oh, I heard something about that. I don’t think that’s definite though.

TP: So that hasn’t even been shot?

SW: No, we haven’t shot it yet. There’s been talks about doing some things with other shows that have something to do with Disney. I don’t know much; I can’t give you any info on that.

TP: Likewise, the Muppets appearing on Nightline? Do you know anything about that?

SW: There’s been talk about doing something related to the piece they did years ago. Again, it’s just out there, there’s no plans to actually do that yet. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, but years ago Jim and Frank went on Nightline to explain the bull and bear market.

TP: Right, there was some great stuff with Rowlf and Sam.

SW: Yeah, they loved that, and they want to go back to it. And there’s the obvious relationship there with ABC because of Disney. And Letters to Santa is NBC, which is great.

TP: That’s a good point, I’m glad Disney has allowed you guys to do that. I remember when you were on Saturday Night Live a few years ago, that was terrific. We didn’t expect you guys to even be on NBC, let alone the surprise of being on Saturday Night Live.

SW: Yeah, it was a surprise to us too. To my knowledge, aside from the characters that Jim built for Saturday Night Live, the Muppets have never been on the show before. It was the first time. Only parodies, no real Muppets. By the way, you’ve seen the one where they knock over the puppet stage and they get into a wrestling match? I got so many calls the next day from people who know me saying “Was that you guys? Did you do that?” No, we’d never do that. (Laughs) I laughed at it, but I started getting calls from people thinking it was me. I don’t even look like that! (Laughs)

TP: On that note, do you ever overhear people in public talking about the Muppets, and you want to stand up and say something?

SW: Not too much. I can say, I won’t say anything specific, but I’ve seen things on Muppet Central and ToughPigs, and I’m just dying to get in on the conversation, but I really shouldn’t comment. You know, people saying, “You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, it’s this way!” You know how it is, whatever it might be. I’m dying to do it, but I kind of have to lay low. (Laughs)Y'all come back now, you hear? Tomorrow, I mean. It's the only place you'll see Steve talk about where Kermit and Rizzo fall into different levels of spiritual and psychological development. No, really.

Click here to try out your Beaker impression on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: disney, interview, Muppet performers

Click here to read part one of our week-long chat with Steve Whitmire!


ToughPigs: There’s been thousands of Muppet characters. Do you have any favorite obscure characters that haven’t shown up in recent years?

Steve Whitmire: I love, and this just happens to be someone I did at the time, there was a character named something like Eugene. He was a little weasel character who was alongside the director on Muppets Tonight. A little fuzzy thing. I always liked doing those kinds of characters. Rizzo started out that way, as a character who didn’t speak. Just a little character who was always there and always, you know, upstaging. And recently, on XD, when we see inside of Animal’s room, he has a little white bunny rabbit with him, and I did the rabbit. I just love the characters who are just there. They don’t have any lines, they just contribute to the atmosphere. And they’re all rodents for some reason. (Laughs)

TP: Are there any previous characters that you would want to bring back?

SW: It seems really important that we get back to some of the Muppet Show characters that have been missing for a while. But those are kind of coming back. What I’d like to see, if we ever get back into doing another series, is the opportunity to bring in new characters. And I think it’s really time we get into some new characters too. Just to grow the group a little bit. We’ve got the core here, and it’s working pretty well at this stage, between Eric and Dave obviously, and Bill is so great. But I’d like some new characters, and that might mean finding some new performers. When I came along, it was a great time because Jim was actively looking for a handful of new people, and the Muppets were on their way up. And I get letters from a lot of people who say they’d really like to puppeteer with the Muppets, and some of them have some real experience, and it’s just a really tough time for people to break into it with us. I always encourage people to do it anyway, don’t get stuck on the idea to work with the Muppets, just do it if you enjoy it. But it’s hard, right now it’s more about the Muppets getting more known again as a group.

TP: Do you think a new series would help with that?

SW: It has always proven to be the best time for new characters to develop because the writers may have an idea, and they build a puppet, and it’s in for a week. And then if it works, it has a chance to grow. And it seems that our characters always have a chance to grow and evolve over time. The first season of Fraggle Rock is nothing to write home about. And by the second season, we were starting to figure out who they were, and thankfully it was at a time in the world of television where they could afford to give us some time to develop this without just saying “Well, that didn’t work!” and pull it off the air, which is what they do now. (Laughs)

TP: Hugh Fink, Andrew Samson, and Scott Ganz have just been hired by Disney to write for the Muppets. From what they’ve told me, they’ve been hired to give the Muppets a more “prime time” feel and language. How do you feel about their involvement and this new direction Disney wants to take the Muppets?

SW: It seems okay. Two things always sound scary: when someone says they want to give the Muppets a “new feel,” because you never know what that’s going to mean until it’s done, and you can look back at it and say, “Oh, so that’s what they meant.” The other thing that’s always difficult to hear is when people say they’re the biggest Muppet fans and they want to write for the Muppets. Often times, they’re seeing the characters from the outside, and they really don’t know what they feel like on the inside, so it doesn’t work. But once we started working with these guys, they’ve really risen to the occasion. It was a good choice, it turned out to be a great choice, and that hasn’t always been the case with outside writers when they come in.

TP: So, what’s your take on the Jason Segel script?

SW: I haven’t met them, I keep hearing about it. I don’t know what they’re writing, we’re outside of it at the moment. I’ve heard that it’s happening, but I haven’t had any discussions about it. If they’re writing it, then once they’re finished I’ll see it and then I can probably comment about it. And in a way, that’s not bad. Jim was always very collaborative with us on everything we did, but it wasn’t like we all sat down in a room and conceived of the “first idea.” Jim was always very selective about the first three or four people he brought in on a project. He would often have an idea, and then he’d step back and let those people develop it into something. So there was always a bit that would go on before the next round when he’d bring in the puppeteers, or a broader group of puppeteers. It’s easy to get into what I call “endless meeting syndrome” where you’d get twelve people around a table, and everyone’s got ideas, and none of them really get used because the last thing that was said usually gets done. So it’s nice to have a core that expands into a bigger group, I think. That’s the good thing, that’s the smart way to really do it. And in addition to that, the more they bring us in near the early stages, the more we can give them about character, especially if it’s writers who know the Muppets but don’t know them from the inside. We can easily supply some of that. And that’s happening, so that’s a good thing.

TP: I have a question here from ToughPigs forum member and Muppet Wiki moderator Scott Hanson. There’s something they’ve been stumped on at the Wiki, and hopefully you can remember.

SW: I’ll try. You guys usually know more than I know.

TP: In the Dizzy Gillespie episode of The Muppet Show, they don’t know who performed Astoria, Waldorf’s wife, and the rumors say that it was you.

SW: Wow. And I ought to know that. But frankly, I don’t remember.

TP: Yeah, I wouldn’t expect you to…

SW: That’s interesting, because it wasn’t that long ago when we were talking about what were the names of their wives, and I think it was only the one, I don’t think Statler had one. It could have been me. I can’t answer, I don’t know!

TP: I promise I don’t have any more questions like that.

SW: (Laughs) That’s okay, I wish I could remember that.

TP: I don’t know if you heard, The Christmas Toy is coming out on DVD next month.

SW: No! That’s great! Is that Henson or Disney?

TP: That’d be Henson. Well, I was going to ask you if you contributed anything to the special features, but you obviously haven’t if you haven’t heard about it.

SW: Nope, I haven’t been involved in special features. I loved working on that show. That was just one of those Toronto productions during Fraggle time. It was a great break from Fraggles, because it was such an intense shoot. We had great fun on Fraggle Rock, but it was intense. And we went off to do this other silly thing, and the hardest thing for me was that Jim wanted me to do this little mouse. And to come up with a voice for this little mouse that wasn’t Wembley or Rizzo (Laughs), it’s like what am I going to do now? It was Rizzo in falsetto, is what it ended up being. I probably couldn’t even do the voice now. My voice has changed, and I know they sometimes change over the years, but my voice has changed and it makes it hard sometimes to do some of those older voices.

TP: Do you ever go back and watch some of the old stuff like that?

SW: I do, and I don’t think I even have a VHS of [The Christmas Toy], I’d love for that to be on DVD.

TP: Yeah, we’re very much hoping it’s going to be unedited.

SW: Yeah, me too.

TP: It’s got Kermit the Frog bookending the film, which is why the Emmet Otter DVDs have been edited versions.

SW: Yeah, I heard about that.

TP: Have you heard much about the Emmet Otter musical that’s premiering in Connecticut this December?

SW: I heard about it, but I’m not involved with it. And I wasn’t involved with the original. What have I heard? Tyler Bunch is involved, it’s half puppets and half sort of costumes suggesting puppets.

TP: Are you planning on seeing it?

SW: I probably won’t end up seeing it. I probably wouldn’t come to Connecticut just to see it. [ed. – On a side note, Dave Goelz mentioned in an earlier conversation that he probably won’t see it either, as he wouldn’t want to leave his family in LA just to fly across the country for a play. It’s too bad he won’t be able to critique the performances of Wendell Porcupine and Pop-eyed Catfish.] I’d love to see it just to see what they’ll do with it.Come back tomorrow for part 3 of our chat with Steve Whitmire where you'll read all about his performing new characters, his buddy movie life with Dave Goelz, and Disney's future for the Muppets!

Click here to take credit for performing Astoria on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: disney, interview, jim henson company, Muppet performers

Recently, the one and only (as far as I know) Steve Whitmire agreed to sit down with us for an informal chat. And true to the teachings of Richard Nixon, we taped the whole dang thing.

Over the following week, I'll be posting segments from the interview, so keep on coming back here to ToughPigs to read what the voice of Kermit has to say.

Special (and obvious) thanks to Steve Whitmire for helping to make all of this happen!

ToughPigs: First off, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with us. So, I want to ask you about the viral Muppet videos that have shown up on YouTube. A source tells me that you were kind of the moving force behind those. Is that true?

Steve Whitmire: The idea for that came from the whole department at Disney. Actually it was Dave Cook who decided we should originally be involved in that. So kudos to the executive force, you know? I had a lot to do with putting it together, making it work, along with the guys from a company called Soap Box, which I think is an outside production company that was brought in to produce the pieces. Great group of guys. They hadn’t worked with the Muppet before, but they’re very big fans and eager to learn about the characters. I helped in that respect, just in terms of “We should get a music director for this,” “This is hard to do, we should prerecord these.” We went the route of, when we were in the studio, we had each separate character pumped into the ear of the performer so we could hear what we were doing. In other words, we were doing it to a mass playback. Really important in something like that to be able to distinguish what we were doing. And then we worked with a guy named Ed Mitchell who was the music director, who we had worked with in the past on Sesame Street, and he won the Grammy for directing the Red and Green Christmas album. But Ed is terrific, and he really understands the Muppets and their sensibility, and what we need with our limited abilities to get through it. So he was instrumental in pulling that together. We recorded that Stars and Stripes thing, we all did our own little pieces, and thought it was going to sound great. We went into the control room to hear the playback and it was just a mess. It sounded like a zoo, you know, with all the noise. Ed’s the one who got us adjusted, got everything back on the right mark to make it sound good.

TP: Yeah, that’s a great piece. They all are.

SW: Well, I loved working on those. To me, it really felt like a real return back to the old Muppet stuff. That’s something I’ve always pushed for and fortunately there’s a group at Disney now who really understands that. And what they don’t understand, they listen to. It’s really nice.

TP: Who directed those?

SW: In the end, Kirk Thatcher directed them. But that was a last minute thing. It was originally going to be directed by one of the guys from Soap Box. And I did a lot of the prep on it, but I really wasn’t looking to direct them. And at the last minute, we had just come off of the Studio DC: Almost Live the day before, so Kirk came into the studio the next day and oversaw it as the director. It would have been fun to direct, since I did so much prep on them, but it was easier not to do that. It was easier just to concentrate on the performers’ part.

TP: Actually, we were trying to figure out: were you Beaker?

SW: Yeah, I was Beaker in all of that. And Kermit. Oh wait, Kermit wasn’t in those, was he? What am I thinking? It was Beaker and Gonzo. I actually puppeteered Gonzo for that, because Dave was having surgery at the time. And then he dubbed it. But musically, I love the music of the Muppets so much. And we’re getting back and doing more of it, but it’s been missing for a lot of years. So we did four strong pieces that were all about music, and just sent them out there and see what they did. And they did very well. I’m just thrilled that they did well with not just our fans on the internet, but everybody who saw them. I hope we do more of those. And if not those kinds of pieces, at least more viral videos. I think we have to top what we did last time somehow. (Laughs)

TP: The Muppets.com sketches have been pretty great too.

SW: Oh yeah, I love that stuff. That was kind of the first indication to me that we were in a good place with Disney. All of the sudden, we were doing that kind of stuff, those short little bits. It’s a great way to reintroduce the Muppets to people who don’t know them.

TP: Were the viral videos the first time you were involved in the concept stage of a Muppet production?

SW: I guess we kind of always took them. We definitely did more in-depth work on that than a lot of the other things we do. We always collaborate and have input on nearly everything. I was kind of sitting at home, plucking out notes on the piano, trying to think of what character should sing what. So, that kind of stuff on those things. I love doing that.

TP: I know Bill Baretta has kind of been transitioning into directing more. Have you thought about doing the same?

SW: Not really. I never had a great desire to direct anything big like Kirk does. I would like to do some of the little things, where you work hard and it really pays off and all of the details on the viral pieces. That would really be fun to do, but to do films and specials, I’m not really interested in it. It takes so much personal time, and I’d just as soon have my time for me. When I’m not working, I want to go home. (Laughs) I’m a real homebody. I’m very domestic. (Laughs)

TP: You are one of, or the only, main Muppeteer to not work outside of the Muppets. Frank Oz has directed, Jerry Nelson has his work with music, Dave Goelz did some work with Walt Disney World. Was that a conscious choice, or did the opportunity just never come up?

SW: A little bit of both. The way my whole time with the Muppets timed out, with Jim’s death and doing Kermit, it was at a point where… my whole life changed overnight in terms of the amount of time I spent working. I went from doing Rizzo and I’d walk in and hang out at the crafts services table, or I’d do a couple of lines and I’d do a background puppet, and suddenly I was doing this big thing. It takes so much time, and there’s so much demand for Kermit, with all of the appearances that we do, and I love it. But I’d just as soon get away from it when I’m not doing it. I’ve been fortunate in that I haven’t needed to do that, I’ve had a decent career and I make a decent living, and I’d also just rather have the free time in between.

TP: Have you ever been asked to do any of the Henson company stuff like Puppet Up?

SW: No, we haven’t been involved with that. I think Brian found a team of folks to do that, and they were available. If they asked us, they have to work around [our schedules] all of the time. So, not a lot of contact since the sale. Which is fine, they kind of do their thing and we do ours.

TP: There was the issue a few years ago about the Muppet recasting. Has that situation resolved itself?

SW: It has. It was a real tough patch. I always try to see it from both sides of the issue. It was necessary to get these characters back out into the world. It seemed like the way to do it, I guess, from a certain point of view to have a bunch of people doing them everywhere. But actually, as soon as the Muppets moved under [Muppet Studios], they just didn’t see the need, and there really wasn’t a need for it as it turned out. The idea was that we were going to be this gigantic worldwide thing and they were going to need that. But I think they understand now why it’s important, to keep them individual. And to be frank on that issue, I kind of look back on that whole episode and I’m kind of happy for it. Because it certainly gave me the responsibility to do some deep thought on what it is we do, and how it works, and why it’s important. And I’m not sure if Jim was actually conscious of why it’s important. He just instinctively knew that you cast someone and they stay that character. But it gave us the chance to analyze it a little bit, we sort of had to, and I’m glad for that now. I could give a lecture series on the individuality of the Muppets, the integrity of the Muppets (laughs).

TP: Had they ever asked you to be involved in something like the Muppet cruise?

SW: I did one, really in order to just make sure that Kermit stayed Kermit. It was just a weird time. Nobody knew exactly what was going on, why it was happening. Especially the people who were being asked to duplicate the characters. I don’t think they knew what was going on exactly. It was just a rough patch. And we got over it, and I’m glad it’s behind us. And it feels like it really is behind us. There’s been no indication [of more recasting], and that’s just not something they’re interested in doing.

Come on back here tomorrow to read what Steve has to say about obscure characters, Disney's new direction for the Muppets, and The Christmas Toy!

Click here to discuss this discussion on the ToughPigs forum!

joe.toughpigs@gmail.com

Labels: disney, interview, Muppet performers

Today's article was written by ToughPigs' own Leah Hooper. Special thanks to Leah for all her hard work!

Last night I sat down to watch a television special that recently aired on the Disney Channel. Entitled Studio DC: Almost Live!, the show purported to feature the Muppets, which is how I came to be watching the program to begin with.

First, some background: I'm a fan of the Muppets, but not a Fan. My boyfriend, Peter, is the Fan in our house. He knows which episode of The Muppet Show featured Clive Cahuenga; I can't tell the difference between Clifford and Jar Jar Binks. But I watched Sesame Street and The Muppet Show as a kid—the latter with my parents, who would laugh at mysterious jokes that eluded me and suggested that the comely, curious puppets on screen were more than just kids' stuff. So I've always had an affection for—if not an encyclopedic knowledge of—Hensonia and its inhabitants. Which brings us to Studio DC.

Joining us for the viewing were two other Muppet Fans who, like Peter, were anxious if unoptimistic about possibilities of Studio DC: Almost Live!. Watching these fans await the premiere of this new Muppet endeavor was a little like watching the law of entropy in action: no matter how excited you want to be or how well you want it to end, you know the chaotic tragedy is predestined. Outside Sesame Street, which continues ("Elmo's World" notwithstanding—just ask a baby) to live up to its legacy as outstanding programming, it seems that many recent Muppet offerings continue not just to disappoint but to be lost in a frenetic, Disney-crafted phantasmagoria of cross-marketed incoherence. It was in this tradition, and not in the beauty of "Turn the World Around" or the sanguine whimsy of Gilda Radner and the Seven-Foot-Tall Talking Carrot, that Studio DC continued.

The show begins with an announcer oozing Cool™ over a pre-fabricated bass beat that I can only assume was meant to indicate to the pre-teen audience that this is not your older cousin's (no, not that one; the one who just started at Arizona State—yeah, that one) Disney Channel. You know, the Disney Channel that actually showed Disney cartoons and had no commercials. But whatever.

Then the hosts come out, Cole and Dylan Sprouts, or something like that. They're starring in a show on the Disney Channel that I think is supposed to be, like, if Eloise had a sex change and instead of running around the Plaza bossed around her single mom and a black guy. As the hosts arrive on screen, I realize that I saw them in Big Daddy. I don't know who the other kid is, but I swear the one of the left is Adam Sandler. Only he got fat. Pepe and Rizzo show up and tell a joke that could have been written by a baby seal, post-clubbing.

Next, Billy Ray Cyrus sings part of a song. Where's the rest of the song? Maybe he's hiding it in his soul patch for later. Then Billy Ray's daughter, Rhoda Minnesota or something, sings her hit song called "G.N.U.," a ballad about a party-loving equine mammal. Her back-up band was the Electric Mayhem, but they seemed a little more like the Battery-Powered Tameness. At least Animal got a chance to cop a feel on Billy Ray's daughter. I wish Annie Leibovitz had gotten a photo of that.

I started to suspect that things were going downhill when I could actually understand something the Swedish Chef said. And the situation only got worse. Have you noticed that I've not mentioned the Muppets much? That's because Studio DC didn't either. Zac Efron got more play, and he wasn't even there.

A plot rubbed its sleepy eyes, looked around, tried to muster the strength to get up and start the day but ultimately decided to hit the snooze and stay in bed for the rest of the show. So much the better; I wouldn't want the product placement to get obstructed.

Then an Olympics-themed commercial aired for the Disney Games, featuring the Cheetah Girls. Are they the ones who sing "Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Legal Like Me?" In any case, I'm glad to see the Disney Channel is building a cavalcade of players that I'm sure will rival "Your Show of Shows" in the glory days. With more lip-synching, of course.

Studio DC recommences, and I'm starting to feel like I need something to restore my faith in mankind and my optimism about the future. Say, a mushroom cloud? A speech from Dubya? A Seth Green movie?

Now Ashley Tisdale shows up and asks Kermit, "Where's Miss Piggy?" My thoughts exactly. Presently Titsdale shimmies around speaking white-lady-talking-to-gardener Spanish and THEN THERE IS AN AMAZING PIECE OF PUPPETEERING WHEN STEVE WHITMIRE MAKES KERMIT DO A KICK. Mucho gusto, indeed.

A few minutes later, Miss Piggy joins the Jonas Brothers for a song. The Jonas Brothers, as you may know, made a fortune last year in cloning and then spent it all in waxing services and Hot Topic merchandise. And I notice that Piggy, unlike the Jonases, isn't wearing a promise ring. The whore.

And then Adam Sandler and his co-host show up and I think the show ended. At least that's when credits came up and Statler and Waldorf started cracking jokes. This was the part that hurt the most, because it made the distance between Studio DC and The Muppet Show all the more glaring, since The Muppet Show is where Statler and Waldorf's choleric heckling began and ripened to full vaudevillian juiciness. Maybe it's because Peter and I have been watching so many episodes of The Muppet Show, which represent, to my inexpert audience mind, a television Camelot of Muppetdom, full of artistic and comical beauty so great that it imbued even a bulbous nine-foot blue monster with a kind of knightly comeliness. Whatever the reason, watching Studio DC: Almost Live felt like seeing Jackie Kennedy trawling the Port Authority area, with one tooth, offering to do the no-pants dance with you for a pack of Newports. You keep trying to reconcile this image with the older one, the better one, and they simply don't match up.

But like I said, I'm not a Muppet Fan, I'm a fan. That's why I don't jump at any chance to see the puppets doing, say, an appearance on The View or selling Ginsu knives on QVC. I want the Muppets, and they were nowhere to be seen in Studio DC: Almost Live. And, no, it doesn't deserve the exclamation point. Period.
Click here to discuss selling out on the ToughPigs forum!

Labels: disney, guest bloggers, Muppets on TV, review

It’s no secret that kids no longer care about Muppets. To gather proof of that, I called my cousin Ryan, age ten. This is not a boy who hasn’t been exposed to the Muppets. He has seen The Muppet Show before, and he admits to having had a good time watching it. But he doesn’t think about them when they aren’t around. Our conversation went like this:

Me: Can you name three Muppets? Any three, off the top of your head.

Ryan: Okay. Kermit . . . um, Miss Piggy. Umm . . . . actually, I can only name two.

Now, my cousin Ryan doesn’t represent all American children, but he is pretty typical. Kids are aware that the Muppets exist, but it doesn’t matter to them. With DVDs of The Muppet Show readily available, there should be a new generation of Muppet fans springing up, but it isn’t happening. The Muppets are at best something weird that their parents or older siblings like, or at worst this one thing that looks kind of like Sesame Street, that baby show they used to watch. Whatever the reason, kids just don't have any interest in the Muppets.

So far, Disney’s response to this problem has been to stuff the Muppets in a drawer and forget about them, focusing all of their energy and money instead on Disney Channel properties like The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and High School Musical. Recently, though, someone got the bright idea to toss the Muppets in with those things, and we got last night’s half-hour TV special Studio DC: Almost Live.

I’m not going to dwell on the quality of the special – it was probably enjoyable enough for the target crowd, but I personally found it soul-crushingly awful. No, what I want to talk about today was the wise decision to use the special to actually introduce The Muppets to a tween-age crowd, using the Disney Channel stars as surrogates for the audience.

In the opening number, “Some Song About Being a Girl and Having Fun,” Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus is repulsed to learn that Muppets exist. Her face shows complete horror when Pepe and Rizzo start talking at her. She’s baffled that her dad wants her to play with the Electric Mayhem, even after the oddly-accented little talking dolls tell her that they’ve played with “Garth Brooks, Elton John and Prince”. She seems to be thinking “Old people like the weirdest things.” In the end, though, she reluctantly does the song. By the end she’s in love with them. “The Electric Mayhem are great,” she screams. “Especially Animal!”

“Look, kids!” the special is saying. “These creatures might look weird and old and outdated, but they’re awfully wacky and fun!”

The second sketch involves Kermit, Piggy, and Gonzo guest-starring on The Suite Life. Fifteen-year-old twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse, as Zack and Cody, clearly have no idea who Kermit and Gonzo are as the sketch opens. In fact, they have to be introduced to both characters by their tormented father figure, Mr. Moseby. Once they are, though, typical Suite Life nonsense ensues, with Kermit rushing around to please his guests and Gonzo dismantling an air conditioner for some reason.

“You know you like The Suite Life,” Disney is telling the children. “These characters also engage in nonsensical hijinx. Wouldn’t you like to see more of that?”

As the third segment opens, we find High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale telling Kermit that she loves The Muppets and always had a crush on Fozzie Bear. She then enthusiastically does a song number with Kermit. What’s that, you ask, a child who’s familiar with The Muppets? Unfortunately, no. At 23, Tisdale might firmly be in the Muppet Babies generation, but she’s certainly old enough to remember when the Muppets were still popular.

“Ashley Tisdale grew up with these guys!” the Disney Channel is shouting. “And you love her! Why don’t you love them too?!”

Finally, fabricated pop sensations The Jonas Brothers (the oldest of whom is 20) sing a song with Miss Piggy. Surprisingly, they address her by name before she has to be introduced. By now, the young audience should be familiar enough with The Muppets (Piggy has appeared in the last two sketches before this one) that no introductions are required. There just be hope yet for the younger generation.

“See how quickly the Jonas Brothers became Miss Piggy fans?!” Mickey Mouse is pleading. “Won’t you do the same? Please, for me?!

We'll have to wait and see if it works.

Click here to be surprised that Muppets still exist on the Tough Pigs Forum.

Labels: disney, Muppets on TV

This just in, Disney Adventures magazine will soon be printing brand new Muppet comic strips! The series will be drawn by comic book artist Roger Langridge. On Langridge’s blog, he wrote:

“Curtrently working on: The Muppets! Disney Adventures Magazine are about to start a regular Muppets comic strip, written and drawn by Yours Truly. I have to admit this is a bit of a thrill - I realised only a few years ago how much of an influence the original, 1970s Muppet Show was on my comics work. So to be actually doing it is quite a weird feeling.” (sp)

Of course, this is not the first time the Muppets have appeared in comic strip-form. “The Muppets” was written and drawn by Guy and Brad Gilchrist from 1981 to 1986.

I should also add that I used to have a subscription to Disney Adventures, which I collected for the Bone comic features, by Jeff Smith. It made me into a lifetime Bone fan, so who knows? Maybe Disney is actually taking steps toward getting new fans as obsessed as us!

In any case, I’m sure we can all agree that new Muppet stuffs is good newses.

See below for a sample of Roger Langridge's art.
Click here to discuss this article on the ToughPigs forum! Biff! Bam! Pow!

Labels: comics/magazines, disney

What do you do when you’re a Muppet fan with an extra $950 burning a hole in your proverbial pocket? Might I suggest spending it on some mediocre art?

While Disney continues to try and figure out just who is left to run things in the Muppets Holding Company, merchandise continues to trickle out. And I do mean trickle. Without a production to promote, Disney’s plan to keep the hopefully-temporarily-inert property alive in our hearts and wallets is to put out stuff that we can see on their website, yet can’t buy. The latest in this endeavor is a small series of limited-edition Giclée paintings. More on that strange word in a minute.

A total of six paintings are available on DisneyShopping.com. Sadly, when you do a search for “Muppet” on the site, you come up with only one of the pictures, a t-shirt, a watch, a small collection of CDs and DVDs, and a set of (again, overpriced) pins. If you take away the stuff you can purchase at the local Wal-Mart, the selection of what you can buy from the company that owns the Frog and his pals is bleaker than anything I’ve ever seen. So when I heard that you can buy paintings on their site, imagine my glee at the prospect of new stuff to throw my money at!

Let’s backtrack for a moment to a couple paragraphs ago when I introduced a new vocabulary word: Giclée. According to Wikipedia, Giclée (pronounced “zhee-CLAY”) is a process to reproduce fine art from a digital source using ink-jet printing. So, essentially, these pictures are prints made from the Hewlett Packard printer next to my desk.

The first four pictures are pop-art portraits of Kermit, Piggy, Gonzo and Animal. As you can see, there’s just a little bit too much detail in the images, which makes the pictures walk that line between photo-realistic and illustration a little bit too uncomfortably. If you want a photo, go with a photo; if you want to capture the essence of the character, go with something cartoonier. My first reactions were that Kermit looks old and tired, Gonzo should not be photographed from straight ahead, and Animal has no neck. I actually kinda like the Miss Piggy, though I’d sooner cut her picture out of a magazine and slap it in a frame (assuming she shows up in magazines any time soon). I might not want to put these over my headboard, but I would definitely consider buying them as pins or stickers. These babies are 14”X14” and go for $295 each.

Next up is a 20”X27” picture of the Electric Mayhem. My gut reaction was that it looked like a color-by-number watercolor. I have been told that it is a parody of the style of some psychedelic rock band posters from the 60s and 70s, so if that’s true, then props to Disney. Though as I’m trying to critique the painting, I find that I can’t stare at it too long or I start to freak out about either going blind or accidentally inhaling the fumes. The one big drawback to my appreciating this one is the terrible caricature of Animal who looks more like Rip Taylor than a Muppet. Though Rip Taylor does lend himself to Muppet-impersonation more than most. I must say, I’m curious as to what this picture looks like with a black light. And what it looks like while I’m stoned out of my gourd. You can make this one yours for a whopping $595.

Last but far from least is a recreation of the scene everyone mistakes for the opening scene of The Muppet Movie. Kermit’s in the swamp, strumming on the old banjo, southpaw-style. At a first glance, you can tell that Disney staff artist James Coleman has a lot of talent in painting scenery. The swamp, the trees, the sunset, the perspective, it’s all spot-on. Even his Kermit, when viewed as a thumbnail, looks like he’s actually singing a song as solemn as “Rainbow Connection,” looking up to the Georgia sky with hope in his eyes. And then you zoom in. This has got to be one of the worst images of Kermit I have ever seen. To Disney, I say shame on you for allowing this to even come close to the public. He looks like a cheap reproduction puppet made for a 5-minute parody on MadTV. When you only make 2 or 3 new products a year for the entire brand, you’d better be damn sure they’re picture perfect. Or else you end up with quite the opposite type of picture. This 20”X20” picture will put you in the poor house with a devastating pricetag of $925.

Add $25 for shipping and handling and please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery. Oh, and start saving for that $1,100 painting of Mr. Poodlepants coming out in May.

Labels: disney, merchandise