It ain’t easy being green
Puppeteer, Muppets Studio go to battle
With his enormous mouth, cheerful eyes and frantic way of talking, Kermit always seemed like a cheerful frog.
But Kermit’s personality appeared to change in recent years. At least that’s how Cheryl Henson, the daughter of Kermit’s creator Jim Henson, saw it.
So last October, Kermit’s longtime puppeteer, Steve Whitmire, was fired from Muppets Studio. After months of silence, last week he posted a blog item critical of the decision, calling it a “drastic action” that left him devastated.
In response, Cheryl Henson reportedly took to Facebook to criticize Whitmire’s version of the beloved frog. Whitmire, who took over the role when Jim Henson died in 1990, “performed Kermit as a bitter, angry, depressed victim,” she said.
“Steve’s performance of Kermit has strayed far away from my father’s good-hearted, compassionate leader of the Muppets,” Henson wrote. “Worst of all,” she added, in the past few years “he has not been funny or fun.”
Perhaps Kermit did seem a little dour lately, albeit all played for laughs. On a 2011 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, for example, Whitmire’s Kermit complained that he “is often mistaken for a green fire hydrant” and bemoaned his relationship with Miss Piggy. With his misery seeking company, he appealed the studio audience, “Maybe some of your audience has actually dated a pig.”
Finally, when DeGeneres kissed the little green Muppet on the lips, he excitedly asked if he had turned into a prince. Upon realizing he remained a frog, he sighed. “Oh, well.”
But it all simply seemed like part of the Kermit bit. The audience ate it up, laughing throughout the segment.
The 2015 ABC comedy The Muppets, meant to be a more adult portrayal of the fuzzy gang, was a different story. The show received a middling 62 out of 100 score on Metacritic, a website that aggregates television reviews. Many of the reviews pointed to an angry or depressed tone to the characters, specifically in Kermit and Miss Piggy, who break up in the first episode.
The show was cancelled after one season.
The termination of Whitmire had gone relatively unnoticed by the general public until last week when he published a blog post about his firing.
It came a few days after his replacement, Matt Vogel, was announced as the new voice of Kermit.
“I want all of you who love the Muppets to know that I would never consider abandoning Kermit or any of the others because to do so would be to forsake the assignment entrusted to me by Jim Henson, my friend and mentor, but even more, my hero,” Whitmire wrote, describing the Muppets as “a calling, an urgent, undeniable, impossible to resist way of life.”
Debbie McClellan, head of the Muppets Studio, a division of Disney, told the Times that Whitmire displayed “repeated unacceptable business conduct over a period of many years.”
The dispute over the recasting drew the attention of many commentators, including Howard Stern, who said Tuesday: “Anybody who wants to be a puppeteer for a living, the odds of you actually creating a money-generating career are next to nothing.”