A Response to Brandon in the Spirit of an Open Dialogue

Comment from Brandon: 

First off, props for posting my comment and not deleting it. I do regret the words I chose but I was infuriated when I first read this post in its entirety. For that, I apologize. 

This is your truth, and I get it- but it comes across to me as written by somebody who doesn’t fully recognize the changes they made to the character, nor does it go in to how much Kermit evolved under Jim. About 2 years ago, I started a “rewatch” of all the Muppet videos/episodes/movies that I could find. Kermit was not yet peak Kermit in Hey, Cinderella!, Season 1 of The Muppet Show Kermit was not the same as he was by the end of the show’s run. Jim himself navigated criticism, commercialization, and inconsistency during Kermit’s evolution, sometimes pulling back, sometimes pushing forward. Then Kermit had another voice for Muppet Babies, while Jim was still around… but Jim’s Kermit was not making nearly as many appearances as he once did. Then Jim was taken from us. I was a devastated 5 year old (I still remember it).

A little while later, Kermit was back (thanks to you). But it wasn’t the same Kermit. I didn’t care though. But we can’t sit here and say that Kermit didn’t drastically change. His voice was different, his expressions were different, his tone changed, his freak outs were minimized. He stopped being another misfit surrounded by other misfits and became a quiet, meek, even keeled rational being. I know without a doubt that you put your heart and soul into Kermit during your years at the helm. But oftentimes Kermit came across as tired, and over it. I don’t say that to criticize. Your Kermit was the only way that I got new appearances of him and I enjoyed every moment. It’s only when I watched the entire catalog in a short period of time that the changes became so noticeable. 

That is where I take issue with this post. Kermit has changed his entire life, there has never been an appearance where something wasn’t different from the last time. Whether it was down to who was puppeteering him, writing his scripts, giving him a body crafted from whatever the best fleece was at that moment in time. The current Kermit might not be the one you grew up with. He’s not the one I grew up with, and the one I grew up with isn’t the one my mom grew up with. But he still brings me SO MUCH joy when I see him in new appearances. He is still Kermit. Matt is my Kermit, You are my Kermit, Frank is my Kermit, Jim is my Kermit. Kermit lives. Tomorrow night, so many people will be able to enjoy what he has to bring once again. I hope that everyone can watch the special/pilot with an open heart and be full of hope again, like Jim always was, and accept people and creations as they are, as I believe he always did. 

Kermit survives because he absorbs change without losing kindness. If he stops doing that, that is when he dies.

Hi Brandon,

I want to say that your comments impress me as having a great deal of critical thought behind them, as much as any I have read. I appreciate that you’re thinking on these issues. 

You bring up “evolution” and suggest that I don’t go into it. Let me start by making clear that the evolution of Kermit is, in fact, the foundation of my entire post, as well as my overall approach to everything I feel about Jim’s influence within the characters and worlds he created with those of us he chose to work alongside him. It is the entire post that ‘goes into it’ in great depth. But, at the core of this is coming to terms with what evolution actually is and how it occurs. 

“Evolution” isn’t mere change.  When something ‘evolves’ it does so building upon how it began by moving through layers of development, one after the next. The best way I have heard it stated is that as a thing evolves it “transcends and includes” it’s previous developmental lines; ‘transcends’, or goes beyond what it was before, while “including” its original, foundational, components. 

If something simply is suddenly ‘changed’ and ‘different’, that’s not evolution, especially if the changes are just expressions of a new set of someone’s preferences.  Why? Because the core of the thing is lost and unknown, or has been removed, overlooked, or ignored, and is no longer its foundation. In other words, it is different, not evolved.

There is a consistent directionality to the evolutionary process no matter what it is that we are saying is ‘evolving’. Kermit did, indeed, evolve as Jim continued to add layers of development to him. He went from being an abstract “thing”, to being a specific thing, and that specific thing began to develop a personality that developed no differently than yours or mine has in our lifetimes. Those new elements that were included as an ongoing part of who Kermit became occurred mostly as a result of how he was used in new ways. That eventually led to his role as the leader at the center of the Muppet Show ensemble of characters. After that ensemble was established Kermit’s growth and evolution substantially plateaued, and he essentially remained at that particular level up until Jim’s death in 1990 with some continuing subtleties occurring to his overall organic movement. 

When I became the character it was just after having spent a dozen years working alongside Jim in practically every situation in which he was performing Kermit. That period gave me the opportunity to fully experience from where Kermit arose within Jim right up and to his death, the parts of Jim that were also a part of Kermit, and the parts of Jim that we’re not. It was a significant time frame. 

Through intense and rigorous research, pondering meditation, and confirmation of ideas from various sources, all of that went into the continuation of the character moving forward. It would have been categorically impossible for any of that to survive Jim’s death if I had not been fully immersed in it firsthand working alongside Jim. And that is the point.

While Kermit evolved steadily and naturally during Jim‘s lifetime (as one would expect), when he died, circumstances presented themselves that could have easily seen all of Jim‘s influence permanently disappear from the character for good.  The process of Kermit’s evolution could have easily ceased with a recasting. But it didn’t because I had Jim as my guide. One day I want to get into more detail about my own process after Jim’s death, the steps I went through to keep Jim “alive” within Kermit. But for now, I’ll just say that (for good reason) not one factor in keeping Kermit faithful to what Jim created came from watching any video of any past performances. ALL of it came from my relationship with Jim, himself. 

We know that over the years Kermit ‘evolved’ physically, too, but what I am focusing on here isn’t about adding an additional pointy collar for a few years, or straightening out his gnarled fingers. I am talking about the evolution of his soul and the complimentary additions to his manipulation style that accompanied it. Having said that, his physical differences, as well, stem from his evolving psyche as he became regarded more and more an organic being rather than a cloth doll. 

The point is that as a persona, Kermit has not “changed” his entire life up until recently, he has grown. The differences in Kermit after Jim were not “drastic”.  They were carefully tempered and measured subject to his origins. The biggest difference in the beginning was the quality of his voice, but not the inflection because all of that arises out of the timings of his core motivations. Those remained Jim’s.

Neither did his established manipulation style change. That’s because the man I intimately knew was playing in my head in every moment. And within a year or so Kermit was fully back according to the vast majority of standards. It was not until after then that he began to once again evolve, but that evolution was solely based on direct knowledge Jim’s original. I specifically chose not to part from that exemplar.

To your comments on Kermit’s’ expressions’, ‘freak outs’, being ‘quiet’, ‘meek’, ‘tired, and over it’, all of those types of things are about how Kermit was required to exist within stories and projects. I didn’t own Kermit like Jim did. I didn’t have the luxury of script or story approval.  Ultimately, my performances were bound by whatever was put in front of me by executives and producers.  If any of Kermit’s story-related attributes lessened, that was due to story content, not my decisions in performing him faithfully.  Mine was a never-ending struggle to stay faithful to Jim while being forced to compromise in order to satisfy what was being required of me…why do you think I was cast out?

Also, this is not about my truth versus your truth versus anyone else’s ‘truth’. For an hypothesis to be determined to be factually accurate as “Truth”, it must go through a rigorous process of confirmation, and even falsification (as I touched upon in my original post). It’s a bit of a perversion of the meaning when we use the word “truth” in place of the word “opinion”.  What I am offering you here is tested.

At the end of the day,  Kermit is not just a character in movies. He is a real world personality as strong and valid, and with as much history, as Tom Cruise, or Robert Downey jr, or Timothée Chalamet. My post was written in order to offer an educated, but generally unavailable, perspective to the thousands of audience members who will benefit from knowing why what they are seeing isn’t recognizable as the frog they grew to love. The fact that the conversation has turned almost entirely to debating ‘versions’ substantiates, in and of itself, that there is no singular individual Kermit still in existence. 

I sincerely appreciate the sentiment of your closing remark, Brandon.  We should all work towards absorbing change without losing kindness. At the same time, Kermit’s kindness of which you speak is but one element of something much broader that has, indeed, determined life or death for him.  It is Kermit’s truth – not just his kindness, but the whole of his Truth as Jim created and as I nurtured – that gave him life – consistent, evolving life – and that has already perished not to be retrieved because there is no longer subjective reference for the retrieval within the mix. What is now in his place is something completely dissociated from that, and for someone as close to him as I am, could never be recognized as Jim evolved.