Save the Muppets
From Muppet Wiki
Save the Muppets is an effort to bring attention to a move being made by the Walt Disney Company which called for the recasting of multiple performers for the core Muppet characters.
In the fall of 2005, the Muppets Holding Company held open auditions for puppeteers, casting alternate performers for the main Muppet characters. In October, Muppeteers Dave Goelz and Steve Whitmire were replaced on the Movies.com webshow "Statler and Waldorf: From the Balcony," with different puppeteers taking over the roles of Statler and Waldorf. Fearing that the core Muppeteers would be replaced by a team of alternates, a group of Muppet fans started a fan campaign, Save the Muppets. The group is gathered signatures on an online petition, and hoped to reverse Disney's plans to cast alternate performers.
As of January 2008 the campaign web site is no longer on-line and only one new signature has been added to the petition since May 2007.
Media coverage
The campaign was referred to in a March 2006 article in an Australian newspaper, The Courier-Mail about the Sesame Street "Healthy Habits for Life" season:
| Another lure for parents is tradition. Sesame Street’s Muppets are still operated by the same performers after 36 years, rather than a rotating cast. It's a subtle but important difference. Disney's decision to allow characters to be performed by "just anyone" led to fan backlash and critical drubbings.
"One performer, one Muppet," Carol-Lynn Parente, who has been with the show since the 1960s, says proudly. "Performers bring the characters to life, and they must be respected." | 
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In an interview for the TV Land Awards, Steve Whitmire and Eric Jacobson speak in detail about the importance of an individual to the performance of a Muppet character.
- Steve Whitmire: I'm Steve Whitmire, I'm the performer who does Kermit the Frog.
- Eric Jacobson: Yeah, and I'm Eric Jacobson, and I perform Miss Piggy.
- Steve Whitmire: Each character is performed by a particular person. Jim Henson performed Kermit for thirty-five years before he passed away in 1990. I've been consistently the only Kermit since that time, and Eric --
- Eric Jacobson: Yeah, and with Frank Oz's characters, I've been performing them since he's gone off to directing movies and such.
- Steve Whitmire: If you play my voice next to Jim's voice, they're not the same. They're very close, and the attitude is very close. And because I had the experience of working with Jim very closely, and knowing him, I think I gained some insight into where this character came from, from within Jim. So the number one goal in trying to continue a character like Kermit was making sure the character was the same and consistent, but didn't become stale and just a copy. We wanted him to continue to be able to grow a bit, but also have this foundation of where Jim started...We've always been dubbed the 'Muppet performers,' and it involves acting and it involves the puppetry, and all those skills combined.
- Eric Jacobson: It's not like animation where the voice is something separate from the animators who animate the character... I grew up watching the Muppets and was a rabid fan myself, and to carry on this legacy is really important to us.
See also
- New York Fashion Week -- Kevin Clash performs Miss Piggy
External links
- Save the Muppets (via archive.org)
- The Petition Site - online petition
- The Courier-Mail - "Me no eat cookies"
