Save the Muppets



Save the Muppets was an effort made by Muppet fans to bring attention to a move being made by the Walt Disney Company in 2005 which called for the casting of multiple performers for the core Muppet characters.

Background
In the fall of 2005, the Muppets Holding Company held open auditions for puppeteers, casting alternate performers for the main Muppet characters. In October, regular Muppeteers Dave Goelz and Steve Whitmire were replaced on the Movies.com webseries "Statler and Waldorf: From the Balcony," with alternate puppeteers taking over the roles of Statler and Waldorf.

Muppets Ahoy!, a live shipboard stage show incorporating, debuted on the Disney Cruise Lines in 2006 and featured alternate puppeteers performers for the main Muppet characters, including John Kennedy, Victor Yerrid, Drew Massey, and Brett O'Quinn.

In 2009, Kermit the Frog was performed by Artie Esposito during an appearance on America's Got Talent, the MTV Video Music Awards and the first day of the D23 Expo singing "The Rainbow Connection." Steve Whitmire commented on the alternate recasting in an interview on ''The MuppetCast.

Fan campaign
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 campaign was organized by Kynan Barker starting in August 2005, and used the slogan "one Muppet, one voice" in its opposition t othe idea of multiple performers for the characters. Aside from building awareness to the issue, they campaign organizing letter-writing efforts and gathered signatures on an online petition in hopes of reversing Disney's plans to cast alternate performers. Over 3,600 signatures were collected on the petition.

As of January 2008 the campaign web site is no longer on-line.

Responses
thumb|300px|right The campaign was alluded 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.""

In an 2006 interview at the TV Land Awards, Steve Whitmire and Eric Jacobson spoke 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.

Current position
In an interview for Tough Pigs, Steve Whitmire explained that the situation resolved itself, stating: "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."

Whitmire also reiterated that Disney's desire of using multiple performers for the Muppet characters was a thing of the past in an interview with The MuppetCast.