“I’d love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn’t want me, and ‘Sesame Street’ hasn’t asked me for 10 years,” Oz said. “They don’t want me because I won’t follow orders and I won’t do the kind of Muppets they believe in.” On “Sesame Street,” Oz voiced Bert, Grover, and Cookie Monster. But he no longer watches either franchise that he once called home, and he is blunt about the reason why: “The soul’s not there. The soul is what makes things grow and be funny. But I miss them and love them.”
Oz points to Disney’s acquisition of the Muppets characters in 2004 as ruining his once beloved franchise. “[There’s a] demarcation line between the Jim Henson Muppets and the Disney Muppets,” he told The Guardian. “There’s an inability for corporate America to understand the value of something they bought. They never understood, with us, it’s not just about the puppets, it’s about the performers who love each other and have worked together for many years.” During a conversation at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival, Oz called “Sesame Street” a “shadow of what it was because now they’re just aiming it to little kids. And I’m unhappy about that. I would like to be there. I used to go like two days a year just to show everybody how it used to be.” Oz added that Disney’s recent “Muppets” movies just aren’t as connected to their predecessors as he would like them to be. “I thought the first one [James Bobin’s 2011 entry] was really smarmy,” Oz said. “These are my brothers and sisters working in the movie and they didn’t have a good time. When we did movies, we had a great time because Jim was collaborative. That is not what happened in the first movie,” Oz said. “I thought there was wonderful things in it, but in general…I start to vomit when things get over-sentimental and sweet. It’s all because Disney doesn’t understand purity.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
