For years, fans of the Muppets (or “Los Muppets”) in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries have known the amphibious central character of the franchise as “La Rana René.” A few days ago, Los Muppets rocked those fans’ world with Rene’s video announcement that from now on, he will known as “Kermit.” Here’s the video. (It’s in Spanish!)
I don’t remember much from Spanish class in high school, but Tough Pigs reader Jamie has provided us with the following translation:
Kermit starts by saying hello to Latin America, says that he knows that they know him as Rene, but voila, his name is Kermit. He goes on to say that what happened was that when he first visited Mexico, they introduced him as “Rene”, and he didn’t want to be impolite, so he just went with it.Then Piggy’s all “That’s not what they told me!” aaand something something something, you actually just went there under a different name to… something something.
And there you have it!
And there you have it. Presumably this has something to do with standardizing the name of the character for different markets, which makes sense from Disney’s point of view. As far as they’re concerned, they’re “fixing” an inconsistency. But as you might expect, the folks who carried Rana René dolls around when they were niños are not quite ready to accept the new name. As of this writing, the video has 108 “dislikes” and only 82 “likes.” Here are a few of the comments from this video’s YouTube page… I clicked the button in Google Chrome to translate the text to English, so it may not precise, but I think you get the idea:
-“For me it will always be Rene, like Tinkerbell bell will always be! We all grew up with Rene!” (coolboy198585)
-“Whether its original name Kermit is this character owes years of fame and acceptance in Latin America the name of Kermit and not fair that after that we would want to drive as a ‘mistake’ that we Latinos eat this in my view is a lack of respect for the Latin American audience.” (combifan11)
-“thanks, have ruined much of my childhood, for me will remain René” (HeadBlasted)
-“Disney, always ruined everything” (cerote4000)
Not since Nintendo changed Princess Toadstool’s name to Peach worldwide has their been such passionate backlash over a fictional character’s name change. As you can see on the Muppet Wiki’s International Kermit the Frog page, Kermit has even more alternate names in other countries around the world, so this story may not be over yet. We’ll be sure to bring you more on this international crisis as it develops.
Thanks to Tough Pigs’ own Jogchem Jalink for alerting us to this story! Click here to habla español on the Tough Pigs forum!
by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
