Everything you loved as a kid… was RESEARCH!
What a Muppet panel at D23 accidentally explained about my entire career
I was not at D23 this year. I watched The Muppets: A Musical History on YouTube, at my desk, like a gentleman.
Paul Williams. Seth MacFarlane. Leonard and Jessie Maltin. A little over an hour on the Muppet songbook.
Somewhere around the ten minute mark I realized I was not watching a nostalgia panel. I was watching four people accidentally explain my entire career to me.
Let me back up.
The cassette tapes
Seth MacFarlane mentioned, almost in passing, that Quagmire started as an impression of old radio commercial announcers.
Not the characters. Not the heroes. The AD GUYS.
He explained it: as a kid, the bookstore in his hometown sold cassettes of the old radio shows. The Shadow. Suspense. The Lone Ranger. Abbott and Costello. He bought them, took them home, wore them out... and the original commercials were still on the tapes. The cigarette spots. The spark plug spots. That big, round, Mid-Atlantic delivery that has not existed in the wild since roughly 1958.
"Most of what I do is just kind of bastardized from forgotten media," he said.
I sat straight up in my chair.
BECAUSE I DID THAT TOO.
Same tapes. Same weird kid. Same fixation on the guys reading the copy rather than the guys in the drama. (I literally have a 1940s Radio Announcer warm-up that is my daily in the booth! - You can have it too for FREE, here!) And anyone who has known me since I was small knows the other half of that story too... the standards. Sinatra, Bing, Sammy, Dino, Bobby Darin, the American Songbook, the musicals. There is an album that exists, circa 2000, of me singing standards and show tunes. It lives in a cabinet at my family's house. It is not on streaming. It will not be on streaming. (Do not ask. Ask my publicist. I don’t have one, but I say that with confidence.)
None of that was a plan. It was just the stuff I liked.
Turns out it was research.
Ask me how I know
Let me tell you about the single best example I have.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 was CANCELLED and dead by the time I was in high school. Gone. Over. A show I loved with my entire chest that had already finished existing.
And it was still a load bearing wall of my identity. Because MST3K was every single thing I already loved, welded into one object: puppetry, comedy, movies, characters, riffing, timing, the whole beautiful mess. I did not study it. I ABSORBED it. It was just what was on, constantly, in my house and in my head.
Then, decades later, the impossible sequence of events. The show comes back. It goes on the road. And they are casting performers for the live stage version... performers who need to run the puppet, and act, and voice match, and improvise, and land jokes eight hundred people deep into a theater, all at once.
They needed someone who could DO ALL OF THE THINGS.
It was simultaneously the hardest, most intense, most terrifying audition I have ever done... and the easiest one of my life.
Because unbeknownst to me, I had been preparing for THAT role, in THAT show, for THAT opportunity, since I was a kid who did not know any of it would ever exist again.
I got to be Crow T. Robot. My guy.
Nobody handed me that because I was a fan. Twenty five years of puppetry, voice work, stage time and character craft is what made me castable. But the fandom is what made me READY, and it had been quietly doing that job the entire time, without asking my permission or telling me the plan.
That is the thing nobody tells you when you are twelve and obsessed with something nobody else your age cares about. The weird, specific, unfashionable stuff you loved is not a detour from the career. Very often it IS the career, sitting there patiently, waiting about twenty years for you to catch up to it.
Seth MacFarlane is a MAKE THE THING receipt
I write a lot about creating your own work instead of waiting for permission. Here is another receipt, and it is a big one.
In 1995, Seth MacFarlane made a thesis film at the Rhode Island School of Design called The Life of Larry. He made it essentially by himself. A professor sent it to Hanna-Barbera, and they hired him... reportedly on the strength of the WRITING, not the drawing. He knocked around on Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Laboratory and Cow and Chicken. He made a follow up short, Larry & Steve, which aired on Cartoon Network in 1997. Fox saw the shorts, handed him a modest pilot budget, and Family Guy premiered in January 1999.
He voices Peter. And Brian. And Stewie. And Quagmire. And half the town.
Read that path again, because the shape of it matters more than the fame at the end of it: HE MADE A THING. Nobody commissioned it. Nobody green lit it. It was a student film built out of the stuff he thought was funny... which was, by his own admission, mostly old media that his classmates had never heard of.
The thing got made. THEN the career showed up.
Thirty years later he is standing on a Disney stage next to Paul Williams talking about an album he also decided to make.
What Paul Williams says about working with Jim Henson
This is the part I would put on a plaque.
Paul described himself as a construction brat who moved constantly as a kid. Never had his own gang. Never had a treehouse. Then he walked onto the set of The Muppet Show, and for the first time in his life he felt like he had both. A gang and a treehouse. Loving, silly, insulting, short jokes flying in every direction. He said he was HOME.
Then he told the story that made the whole room go quiet.
He and Kenny Ascher wrote "I'm Going To Go Back There Someday" for Gonzo. They played it for Jim. Jim loved it. Jim complimented it warmly... and kept walking. Paul turned to Kenny and said it was the most beautiful rejection he had ever gotten. The song was gorgeous. It did not fit the movie. That was Jim's way of saying so without ever saying so.
Two or three days later, Jim came back and started talking in the middle of a thought, the way he did. What if, at the county fair, Gonzo buys too many balloons for Camilla... and gets lifted off the ground... and it does not frighten him... and he experiences flight as joy, as going home?
He did not cut the song.
HE BUILT A SCENE UNDER IT.
"That's the essence of Jim Henson," Paul said. And then the line that I think is the actual leadership lesson: Jim trusted that he had the right person doing the job, and let them do their art while he did his.
That is the whole job of a director. That is the whole job of a producer. That is, frankly, the whole job of a coach. Cast it right, then GET OUT OF THE WAY... and when something great does not fit, ask whether the container is wrong before you throw out the thing.
Paul also said, and I want this understood by every performer reading this: being a Muppet performer is one of the most physically demanding gigs on earth. Contortionists, arms overhead, watching a monitor, holding character, singing on pitch, hitting marks they cannot see. They, along with voice actors, are the greatest ACTORS and performers you’ll come across. A Puppeteer’s life is not a comfortable life. The best do it… because they LOVE it.
"There were five of us in that conversation"
The best thirty seconds of the panel, for my money.
Paul described being in a room talking with Jim and Frank Oz, with Kermit and Piggy up. His point: there were FIVE people in that conversation. Frank is a sweet, gentle, generous man. Piggy is TERRIFYING. Both were fully present. Both were talking to you.
Seth and Paul then landed on something the industry still undersells: Henson and Oz and that whole company were not "puppeteers who did voices." They were GREAT ACTORS. And great singers.
Seth's example was perfect. Sam the Eagle singing "Tit Willow" with Rowlf, where the entire comedic engine is Sam's acting... the clear, unspoken conceit that Sam was asked to do this, does not want to be doing this, and somebody backstage is going to hear about it later. That is not puppetry. That is subtext. That is a performer playing an objective against an obstacle, with foam and fleece (and feathers).
Puppetry: seeing is believing. Voice acting: hearing is believing. Same DNA. Hi, that’s me, broken record.
"Youth is a quality"
Leonard Maltin pulled out a Frank Lloyd Wright line about age being a chronological bookkeeping method, while "youth is a quality and it need never die." He said that is exactly what he sees in people who work in this world.
Paul followed it with his intention to remain the alpha infant in his house until the day he grabs his chest, and then handed Seth a bit of Rumi: sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment. Do not get lost in the knots in your shoelaces. Go look at a tree and be amazed by it.
Everyone who works with me knows I am a 45 year old kid and I intend to stay that way. I say it constantly: I stay young because I PLAY WITH PUPPETS AND TALK FUNNY FOR MONEY.
But "purchase bewilderment" might be the better version. Cleverness is cheap and everybody has it. Wonder is the rare currency, and it is the one that actually shows up in the microphone.Or as the infamous Mel Brooks once said directly to one of my heroes and mentors, the incredible Rob Paulsen (if you don’t know that name, 1st - how dare you, and 2nd- just look him up. I’ll wait… uh-huh there you go, NOW you know!) when he was working on Spaceballs. He tossed out an idea “writers room style” about naming the “Dinks” in the film (which he voices one or a few of them, but also Rob is one of the guys “combing the desert" haha), and Rob thinking he was being clever and would impress Mel. Mel looks him in the eye and said:“Wit is shit. Funny is money!”
The one that got away
Confession time.
On my old puppetry podcast, we ALMOST had Paul Williams on. He said yes. He was gracious and game and we had several genuinely lovely conversations leading up to it... and then scheduling swallowed the whole thing and it never happened. One of my great professional womp-womps.
So I am going to ask him again.
Because I have a new show. The Poster Says... premieres August 27th, and it is about the invisible people who write movie taglines. Paul Williams has spent fifty years writing the line that makes you feel something in under fifteen words. If that is not the exact right guest, I do not know who is.
Paul, if this ever finds you: the door is open, the mic is warm, and I promise to only cry a little.
While we are here, a crime
Seth MacFarlane has never performed alongside a Muppet.
Jessie Maltin asked. He confirmed. He has not.
The man is a world class voice actor, a legitimate crooner, a comedy writer raised on Henson, and he has just recorded fourteen of their songs with a full orchestra... and nobody has put him in a scene with Kermit.
FIX THIS. I am available to consult. I am available to hold things. I am available.
Why the album exists (and why I preordered it)
Seth MacFarlane Sings The Muppets is out September 18th. Fourteen tracks, arranged by Andrew Cottee, produced by Joel McNeely, conducted by John Wilson, recorded at Skywalker Ranch with players flown in from London to sit next to the best of Los Angeles.
The reason he made it is the part I love. His argument: these songs ARE standards. "Rainbow Connection," "Bein' Green," "I'm Going To Go Back There Someday," "Moving Right Along"... they sit comfortably next to Johnny Mercer and Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. They simply arrived in the wrong decade. By the time Paul Williams and Joe Raposo and Jeff Moss were writing them, the crooners had largely hung up their hats and pop had moved on. So the question became: what would Frank or Bing have done with "Rainbow Connection"?
There is a detail in there that is quietly heartbreaking. The original orchestrations for those great MGM musicals were mostly DESTROYED. Too expensive to store. John Wilson and company had to reconstruct those charts by ear, from fragments and recordings, to play that music live again.
An entire craft, thrown in a dumpster because somebody needed the parking space, rebuilt by people who cared enough to listen very, very hard.
If you want a metaphor for why we preserve things, why we teach things, why we tell young performers to go study the old stuff... there it is.
Preordered. Obviously.
And then there is "The Magic Store"
If you have seen The Muppet Movie, you know the closer.
I am not going to reprint the lyric here (Paul deserves his royalties and I deserve to not get a letter), but go listen to that first verse again with your career in your ears. It starts with a kid showing off at school, doing bad impressions and ignoring his homework, playing to a mirror... and it ends with the movie you are currently watching.
That is the whole arc. Weird kid. Obsession. Work. THE THING.
It is the best four minute argument for making your own stuff that has ever been recorded, and it was written for fleece and foam.
If The Muppet Movie does not both make you laugh until you cannot breathe AND put a lump in your throat, my friend, I gently suggest you may be in the wrong business.
So here is the takeaway
The cassettes were research. The records were research. The puppets in the basement were research. The impressions that annoyed your family at dinner were research.
Nobody hands you a career for having good taste. You have to MAKE THE THING out of it.
Seth made a student film. Paul walked into a treehouse full of monsters and wrote the songs. Jim built a scene under a song that did not fit rather than lose the song.
Your version may be smaller yet it counts exactly the same.
Go dig out the weird thing you loved at nine years old. That is not nostalgia. That is your inventory.
Watch the full panel here: https://youtu.be/0hvarxByKx0?si=0w4uTvIeISE3qj3P
Nate Begle is a voice actor, audio producer, writer, director, puppeteer and VO coach.
Life in Every Line. Stories that Stick.
