From a Q&A session at Niagara Falls Comic Con.
Woman: I wanted to ask you about the understudies for Caroll, Matt Vogel and Eric Jacobson. I've seen Eric do a few performances as Oscar and he's flawless. Deb Spinney: He's great.
Woman: I could barely tell the difference. I was wondering, have you been talking to him or have been training him?
Caroll Spinney: Yes. Well, Eric for years never had a character.
Deb: He would do Anything Muppets in the background.
Caroll: So if they needed somebody to go in Hooper's Store and sit down and order a cup of coffee or something.
Deb: Now he does all of Frank Oz's characters except for Cookie Monster.
We never thought anybody could do Frank's characters, cause they all have unique voices, even though you can always tell it's Frank. But still they're really hard characters to do. And Eric is unbelievable. I guess everybody probably knows that for years now, Matt has been in the wings helping Caroll out with Big Bird. And Caroll hand-picked Matt out of a bunch of people who tried it out. And we absolutely adore Matt, he's the best. But up until recently, we didn't have anybody who could stand in for Caroll as Oscar. So about a year ago, Sesame Street decided it's time to find somebody. They sent us tapes of 8 performers who were trying out to be the understudy for Oscar. And they didn't tell us who they were. Of coarse, they were all guys from SS. And Caroll got a tape, I got a tape, I think about 8 different people, producers and directors, they all got tapes on their own, and we all listened on our own, and we had to write who we thought sounded closest to Oscar. We knew it'd be a good puppeteer, because they were Muppeteers from SS. And we all picked the same person: And that was Eric. And so he's phenomenal. Caroll has done, I wouldn't call it a workshop, but we spent quite a few hours with Eric personally, giving him all the hints and thises and thats about how you do Oscar. And of coarse Eric is flawless with voices. And he's been studying it really, really hard. Cause when he first did it, he sounded a lot like him, now he sounds exactly like him. So he works real hard at it. So we're real proud of him. It's like our children, you know?
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