Puppeteer Caroll Spinney, who brought Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to life on the iconic children’s television show Sesame Street for half a century, died on Sunday at the age of 85.
Spinney died at home in Connecticut after living for some time with the movement disorder dystonia, which causes uncontrollable muscle contractions, according to a statement from Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces the show.
The actor retired from the show last year, having hand-picked successors to play both Big Bird and Oscar — two very different characters he helped create, delighting millions of children. Those characters — one a towering yellow bird, the other a grumpy, green monster in a trash can — existed in what many considered a magical world created by puppet master Jim Henson and including pals Bert and Ernie, the lovable Cookie Monster and the goofy Kermit the Frog.
Photo: AFP
Spinney once told The New York Times he had modeled Oscar the Grouch on a cross between a “magnificently rude” restaurant waiter and a ranting New York cab driver.
In 1973, a year after then US president Richard Nixon made his dramatic trip to China, Spinney flew to Beijing for a performance dressed as Big Bird — he said he only paid half-price for the plane ticket because the character was only six years old.
When Henson died in 1990, Big Bird sang Kermit’s sweetly melancholy tune It’s Not Easy Being Green at a memorial service.
“Caroll was an artistic genius whose kind and loving view of the world helped shape and define Sesame Street from its earliest days in 1969 through five decades,” Sesame Workshop said in a statement.
“His enormous talent and outsized heart were perfectly suited to playing the larger-than-life yellow bird who brought joy to generations of children and countless fans of all ages around the world, and his lovably cantankerous grouch gave us all permission to be cranky once in a while.”
Poignantly, Spinney’s death came as the show marked its 50th birthday, and as it is lauded with one of America’s top cultural awards — the Kennedy Center Honors — at a gala Sunday in Washington.
Spinney himself won multiple Daytime Emmys for his work, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award. He also earned a Grammy Award, for best children’s recording.
At the time of his retirement, he was quoted as saying that his Big Bird alter ego had “opened my mind and nurtured my soul.”
He hand-picked his successors in the two major roles — after mentoring them for more than two decades.
A shy child, Spinney embraced puppetry and reportedly owned 70 puppets by the age of 12. He met Henson at a puppeteers festival in 1962 and bumped into him again in 1969; months later, he joined Sesame Street.
Spinney’s life was the subject of the 2014 documentary I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story.
Big Bird, the instantly recognizable giant yellow bird with the huge beak, is more than 250cm tall.
Spinney, who was 178cm tall, had to use his hands and wires to manipulate the towering puppet, guided by a TV monitor in the costume.
In 2000, he was named a Living Legend by the US Library of Congress, and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Henson’s family said in a statement that Spinney managed to “perfectly convey the humor and heart in our father’s creations. Big Bird was childlike, without being childish. And Oscar the Grouch reflected universal feelings we all share, no matter our age.”
“That he could do this work so brilliantly, responsibly and with such infectious love and joy is his gift to us all,” the statement said.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
RSS