SO LONG, SESAME
BIG BIRD PUPPETEER RETIRING AFTER NEARLY 50 YEARS. AN APPRECIATION.
Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who created Big Bird and portrayed him from 1969 to 2015, is retiring from the cast of TV’s Sesame Street this week, according to the New York Times. Spinney, 84, has remained on duty as the voice of Big Bird since handing over the physical role to successor Matt Vogel. He is also relinquishing custody of his other great creation, Oscar the Grouch. Is there anyone out there who needs little explanatory tags for these characters? Do I have to throw in here that Big Bird is the giant yellow naïf who binds the little universe of Sesame Street, or that Oscar is a good-hearted troll figure who lives in a trash can and revels, not really very grouchily, in his outsider lifestyle? Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
Referring to Spinney as a “puppeteer” is unquestionably correct, but still slightly awkward: is Big Bird a costume or a puppet? The Sesame Street answer is that Big Bird is a living creature with a soul, and that is the answer all viewers of the program instinctively accept. This is probably the best possible summary of Spinney’s achievement as an artist. Whenever you grew old enough to begin thinking about the fellow inside the Big Bird outfit, you probably still did not give much thought to the details of his mechanical operation. Even if you take the step of ceasing to think of Big Bird as a bird, it is natural to think of him vaguely as being, perhaps, like one of those furry animal mascots at a hockey rink or a football stadium.
Except, of course, Big Bird has dialogue. In 2014 Spinney agreed to allow his performance technique and the mechanical details of Big Bird to be revealed in a documentary called I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story. This segment of the movie is a marvellous, rapid series of hammer-blows to the imagination.
You would probably assume, before you inquired into the matter, that the Big Bird outfit has some contrivance allowing Spinney (and now Vogel) to see out of the costume while shooting. The man inside the bird suit actually just has a TV monitor strapped to his chest: he “performs” seeing only an external camera’s view of the set. And meanwhile, again, he has dialogue to read, so his shooting script is chopped up and pasted inside the costume.
This is how all the Muppets work, but Big Bird is free-standing, and mostly interacts with human cast members. The Big Bird actor has to give a performance with every part of his body without having a view of the stage, doing it inside the thermal equivalent of a parka. And then you realize that Caroll Spinney isn’t eight feet tall. Inside Big Bird he has his right arm stretched upward about as far as it will go, inside Bird’s head: his little finger controls Bird’s eyelids while the rest of his hand operates the mouth (which adds up to a crippling counter-ergonomic horror).
The explanation of all this in the documentary concludes with pictures of Spinney/Big Bird doing stunts that you would have taken for granted seeing “Big Bird” do them — mounting a horse, jumping on a trampoline, riding a unicycle — but which are suddenly understandable as improbable, Olympic feats of physical grace.
One suspects, or actively prays, that the new Big Bird will take advantage of superior technological solutions to his puppetry challenges, beginning the moment Spinney is safely out of sight. Having the Big Bird vocals done separately, from outside the costume, probably made sense all along. But the mind recoils at the thought of, say, a computergenerated Big Bird. The essence of Big Bird seems to necessarily require human physical involvement: Big Bird as a CGI image or a programmed automaton would not have the soul that Big Bird patently possesses.
This gives us a hint about how to assess Caroll Spinney as an artist. He belongs, secretly, to the tradition of dance as well as puppetry. The controls Spinney operated inside the “costume” for all those decades turn out to be surprisingly crude. (Big Bird’s arms, for example, are not mechanically independent of one another.) But it would never occur to anyone to notice this in watching Big Bird bend down to talk to a child, or display excitement or disappointment or confusion, or simply waddle optimistically along Sesame Street. Big Bird is not only a clearly defined character; he is a self-evidently human one, despite his dimensions and appearance.
Incredibly, it seems to have been Spinney’s idea to make Big Bird the most consciously childlike of the Sesame Street Muppets — to put him at the centre of the show as the partner or the projection of the child viewer. This device seems so important to the Sesame Street dynamic that one would have assumed it was an original design feature, that the show was created around Big Bird in this way by the army of child psychologists and talented artists who formed the Children’s Television Workshop. Spinney says it is not so, that Big Bird was originally intended just to be a broad comic character in the Hee Haw vein — a big “country yokel” transplanted to the urban environment. It is difficult, even distasteful, to imagine the less ambitious, less enduring Sesame Street we might have had without Caroll Spinney.