LOS ANGELES: It is not easy being green for Kermit the Frog.
But is it devastating for Steve Whitmire, who was let go after nearly three decades as the voice and puppeteer for The Muppet Show’s beloved green creature.
Whitmire, in a blog post, said he was “devastated to have failed” Muppets founder and mentor Jim Henson.
“For me the Muppets are not just a job, or a career, or even a passion. They are a calling, an urgent, undeniable, impossible to resist way of life,” Whitmire wrote in his blog, a day after his firing was announced. “This is my life’s work since I was 19 years old. I feel that I am at the top of my game, and I want all of you who love the Muppets to know that I would never consider abandoning Kermit.”
Kermit the Frog was Henson’s signature character and the centerpiece of the Muppets franchise from 1955 until Henson’s death in 1990, and Whitmire was chosen by Henson’s son to take over. He also provided the voice of Sesame Street favorite Ernie, of Bert and Ernie fame.
Whitmire wrote in his blog that The Muppets Studio’s executives informed him that Kermit would be recast, and he has “remained silent the last nine months in hopes that the Disney company might reverse their course”.
“I have experienced every possible emotion since October 2016, when I received a phone call from The Muppets Studio’s executives to say they were recasting.”
“Through a new business representative, I have offered multiple remedies to their two stated issues which had never been mentioned to me prior to that phone call. I wish that we could have sat down, looked each other in the eye, and discussed what was on their minds before they took such a drastic action.”
Matt Vogel, who voiced Kermit imitator Constantine in 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted, will first be heard as Kermit — the long-time love of Miss Piggy — in a Muppets Thought of the Week video next week.
Muppet’s Kermit the Frog to have a new voice
Muppet’s Kermit the Frog to have a new voice
Jailed French journalist files appeal in Algeria’s top court: lawyers
- Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 after traveling to Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region — home to the Amazigh Kabyle people — to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie
ALGIERS: French journalist Christophe Gleizes, sentenced to seven years behind bars in Algeria on terror-related charges, has filed an appeal seeking a new trial with the country’s highest court, his lawyers said Sunday.
“Christophe Gleizes registered an appeal at (the court of) Cassation” on Sunday, the deadline for filing, his French lawyer Emmanuel Daoud told AFP in a message, declining to comment further.
Gleizes’ Algerian lawyer Amirouche Bakouri made a similar announcement on Facebook.
Earlier this month, an Algerian appeals court upheld the seven-year prison term for the sportswriter, who was first convicted of “glorifying terrorism” in June.
Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 after traveling to Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region — home to the Amazigh Kabyle people — to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie.
In 2021, he had met in Paris with the head of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), a foreign-based group designated a terrorist organization by Algiers earlier that year.
At this month’s appeal hearing, Gleizes had said he did not know the MAK had been listed as a terrorist organization, and asked the court’s forgiveness for his “journalistic mistakes.”
The court’s decision to uphold his sentence was denounced by the rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), as well as the French government.
Gleizes’s jailing comes at a time of diplomatic friction between Paris and Algiers that began last year when France officially backed Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.
He is currently France’s only journalist imprisoned abroad, according to RSF, and French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to work toward his release.
Mother makes plea
The mother of the jailed journalist Christophe Gleizes wrote a letter to Algeria’s president requesting he pardon her son from his seven-year sentence on terror-related charges.
“I respectfully ask you to consider granting Christophe a pardon, so that he may regain his freedom and his family,” Sylvie Godard wrote in the letter, which was dated December 10 and seen by AFP on Monday.
“Nowhere in any of his writings will you find any trace of statements hostile to Algeria and its people,” she wrote in her letter to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
