Disney fired Kermit the Frog’s voice actor. The result? An existential crisis.

Jim Henson’s wife and son handpicked him to be Henson’s successor. Disney encouraged him to do interviews in character. But now, after voicing the role of Kermit the Frog for 27 years, voice actor and puppeteer Steve Whitmire has been fired.

Earlier this month, news broke that Disney’s Muppets Studio had quietly fired Whitmore in October, replacing him with a different performer. But now that the news is out, Whitmire isn’t going quietly. In several blog posts and interviews, he’s accused Disney of firing him without giving him a chance to respond to the company’s complaints about his job performance, and heavily implied that his firing is antithetical both to what’s best for the Muppets and to the late Jim Henson’s vision for the beloved characters.

But Disney and members of the Henson family disagree, alleging multiple instances in which Whitmire behaved unprofessionally and exhibited hostility toward colleagues.

Is Whitmire’s firing simply the result of an escalated workplace feud, or has Whitmire’s longtime sense of ownership over Kermit and the Muppets come into conflict with Disney’s direction for the Muppets franchise? Here’s a rundown of what we do and don’t know about the firing — and what the fallout might mean for Muppets fans.

Whitmire first began working with Muppets in 1978, and ascended through the ranks to be appointed Jim Henson’s successor as Kermit’s voice and puppeteer after Henson’s unexpected death in 1990. He played the role until October 2016, when he alleges Disney fired him over the phone. In a July 11 blog post that he wrote to publicly discuss his firing, Whitmire claims he was fired out of the blue, with no opportunity given to remedy Disney’s “two stated issues which had never been mentioned to me prior to that phone call.”

“I am still trying to make sense of how those two issues were egregious enough to justify ending a 39-year career without at least giving me an ultimatum at the time the issue occurred when I would have had a chance to correct my course,” he later told the Hollywood Reporter.

In multiple interviews, Whitmire has clarified the two issues in question. The first was that he apparently gave too many negative and unwanted notes on ABC’s failed 2015 series The Muppets. In one example Whitmire shared with the Hollywood Reporter, he said he had taken issue with the fact that Kermit lied to his nephew in an episode of the series, which was canceled last spring after one season.

The second issue concerned an incident that occurred 15 months prior to his firing, in which Whitmire failed to complete a short video appearance. The details surrounding the incident are unclear, but it reportedly involved Screen Actors Guild contract negotiations, and Whitmire has claimed that the union had advised him not to do the project.

Ever since the news of his firing became public, however, Whitmire has heavily implied, mainly on his blog, that the real reason he was dismissed is that he cared too much about safeguarding Jim Henson’s vision for the Muppets. “Doing what is best for the Muppets is the lens through which all my interactions have been filtered,” he wrote in his initial July 11 blog post. Then in a follow-up post on July 15, he described himself as “the last samurai” standing between the Muppets and a loss of their core values:

I believe characters like Kermit need to remain built on the sturdy foundation of their past in order to be progressive going forward. Integrity is everything, and that’s true for the Muppets, as well. As one of the last two active originators of the Muppets, I still have a big job to do before the next group can effectively step in.

It is no longer the Muppets if core values are lost or discarded. While I fought very hard for the integrity of the Muppets over the last twelve years largely to my own detriment, maybe I should have fought even harder and louder…and, yes, I would have likely been gone sooner… I fear I was the last samurai.

Though Whitmire hasn’t discussed specific incidents or character issues beyond the one he mentioned to THR, he also wrote that he has long felt the Muppets were losing something vital about themselves that he was trying to defend — to no avail.

“[B]eing outspoken about these very character issues to the top creative executives on the ABC series is at the core of the number one issue stated to me for my termination by [Disney’s] Muppets Studios,” he wrote on his blog. He also said, in his original blog post, that he is “devastated to have failed in my duty” to Henson.

If this is true, it would be a sad and alarming tale for Muppets fans. But Disney and Henson’s family are telling a very different story.

Disney representatives have cast Whitmire’s behavior differently, characterizing him to the Hollywood Reporter as routinely “overly hostile” and claiming a long history of “unacceptable business conduct” that “went on for many years.”

The company’s official statement, sent to Vox via email, echoes this sentiment:

The role of Kermit the Frog is an iconic one that is beloved by fans and we take our responsibility to protect the integrity of that character very seriously. We raised concerns about Steve’s repeated unacceptable business conduct over a period of many years and he consistently failed to address the feedback. The decision to part ways was a difficult one which was made in consultation with the Henson family and has their full support.

Meanwhile, the New York Times spoke to an unnamed producer on “a Muppets-related project” who generally corroborated Disney’s statement. Members of Henson’s own family, who sold all intellectual property rights to the Muppets to Disney in 2004, have been blunt about supporting the company’s version of events.

On Facebook, one of Henson’s daughters, Cheryl Henson, reportedly wrote that “Steve’s version of history is ridiculously self serving”:

My father never asked him to perform Kermit, my brother Brian did. Steve’s performance of Kermit has strayed far away from my father’s good hearted, compassionate leader of the Muppets. Steve performed Kermit as a bitter, angry, depressed, victim. Worst of all, in the past few years he had not been funny or fun. Recasting Kermit is long over due.

Stop with the pity party!

Let’s get back to [the] true spirit of Jim Henson’s Kermit!

Whitmire disputed Cheryl Henson’s claim on his blog, writing on July 19 that her father seemed to have chosen, but not named, a successor prior to his death.

Henson’s son Brian Henson also spoke out. In his own interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he stated that Whitmire would often “play brinkmanship” and make “outrageous demands” because he was Kermit — and that he probably should have replaced Kermit’s voice actor before selling the Muppets franchise to Disney.

“I have to say, in hindsight, I feel pretty guilty that I burdened Disney by not having recast Kermit at that point because I knew that it was going to be a real problem,” Henson said. “And I have always offered that if they wanted to recast Kermit, I was all for it, and I would absolutely help. I am very glad we have done this now. I think the character is better served to remove this destructive energy around it.”

Henson’s other daughter, Lisa Henson — who is the current president of the Jim Henson Company — confirmed to the New York Times that Whitmire “played brinkmanship.” She also said that he would refuse to appear for “B-level performances, such as a ribbon-cutting,” and that he was hostile to the idea of other people playing Kermit, noting that he refused to have an understudy and “blackballed young performers” by refusing to appear with them.

With so few details about what specifically Whitmire is alleged to have done, it’s hard to know how to read these allegations. Though a Disney representative sent the studio’s official statement to Vox, the representative declined to clarify whether Whitmire’s accounts of the union dispute that influenced his dismissal are accurate. Representatives for Whitmire and SAG did not return Vox’s requests for comment.

Whitmire has continued to insist that he was never rude or inappropriate. “I didn’t yell, or call anyone names, or refuse to do my job,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I just gave lots of definitive notes via emails to this small group about character integrity and always tried to offer alternative solutions.”

But the issue of what is “appropriate” can get complicated when it involves a character like Kermit — because for most of the fictional frog’s “career,” Kermit and the actor who plays him have been one and the same.

It’s hard to overstate just how synonymous Whitmire and Kermit have become over the years. In fact, for a long time, Disney formally encouraged their interchangeability, blurring the line that marked where Kermit ended and Whitmire began.

In a 2015 Longreads profile of Whitmire, writer Jon Irwin recounts that in the buildup to the release of the 2011 film The Muppets, Disney wouldn’t actually allow journalists to interview Whitmire. Instead, they had to interview Kermit:

As part of the pre-launch media rush for 2011’s The Muppets, the first feature film since Disney bought the characters from The Jim Henson Company, journalist Steve Marsh wanted to interview Whitmire. Disney wouldn’t allow it. Instead, Marsh got to interview Kermit while Whitmire stood there, his hand answering questions his own mouth could not. Marsh snuck in a meta-query: “What are the differences between working with Jim and working with Steve?” Kermit answers: “Boy, it’s hard for me to tell. They both have very warm hands.”

That “inseparability” between Whitmire and the role he played is on full display in the following appearance by Whitmire at the Dragon Con fan convention in 2015. Whitmire was apparently scheduled to appear as himself, but he brought along Kermit. Throughout the Q&A session, it’s genuinely hard to know at times whether he’s answering as himself or in character as Kermit, or some unique combination of both:

Irwin noted in his Longreads profile that such a symbiosis between Kermit and his actor had always been a characteristic of Kermit’s, even when he was played by Henson:

In Brian Jay Jones’s extensive Jim Henson: The Biography, Jones writes, “The more Jim performed Kermit, the more the two of them seemed to become intertwined … it was becoming harder to tell where the frog ended and Jim began.”

But what happens when one is no longer with the other? The unfortunate truth is that Jim ended; now the frog would have to begin again. If Kermit was Jim, who, then, is Steve?

It seems clear that from Whitmire’s perspective, Henson intended this interdependent relationship between frog and actor to be a feature, a positive thing for the character of Kermit. In fact, he noted as much in a July 18 blog post in which he recalled Henson’s horror at the prospect that Disney might view the voice actors behind a character as interchangeable and easily replaced.

During discussions between Disney and the Jim Henson Company in 1989, a merger that fell through after Henson’s death the next year, the following encounter, according to Whitmire, took place between Henson and several Disney executives:

It was Jim’s desire that Disney use his chosen performers to continue with the characters, and I was witness to a comment from an executive who chided Jim to his face, saying ‘That’s not how we do business. If Mickey-1 won’t do it for what we offer, then we move on to Mickey-2, and keep going down the line until somebody will do it for our price. ...’ Jim looked horrified.

Given this context, it is perhaps significant that when asked to perform imitations by an audience member at Whitmire’s 2015 Dragon Con appearance, “Kermit” chose to imitate a Muppet named Constantine.

Constantine appears in the 2014 movie Muppets Most Wanted as a Kermit impostor. The villain of the film, he successfully kidnaps and replaces Kermit just in time for Kermit’s wedding to Miss Piggy, prompting a climactic wedding scene in which she has to try to tell the two of them apart:

The voice actor who plays Constantine in the film is, ironically, Whitmire’s eventual replacement for the role of Kermit, Matt Vogel. Given Lisa Henson’s comments to the New York Times that Whitmire was hostile to the idea of understudies and to younger puppeteers, the scene takes on an eerie meta-quality: It’s almost as if the film, by teasing Kermit’s potential interchangeability, is foreshadowing the replacement of Whitmire.

But among Muppet fans, the idea that Kermit is only his voice won’t be an easy sell. Comments sections across the internet are littered with fans arguing over whether Jim Henson is the only true Kermit, or whether the character’s voice is truly the only thing that matters. Such comments have persisted since Whitmire took over the role, and videos comparing Whitmire’s and Henson’s voices have thousands of views on YouTube.

“As a puppeteer myself, I’ve never had more admiration for any performer than I have for Steve Whitmire,” wrote one Muppets fan on Reddit after the news of Whitmire’s firing broke. “Whitmire’s performance of Kermit is what separates [Kermit] from being Kermit and being a stand in. ... Steve Whitmire’s name might not be household the way Jim Henson is, but to me and a lot of puppeteers he’ll be an icon forever.”

One of those other puppeteers is the new voice of Kermit, Vogel, who reportedly grew up watching Sesame Street and was inspired by the show and Henson’s work on it to make puppeteering his career. Whitmire has clearly personally identified with Kermit for most of his life, but he’s certainly not the only person involved with the Muppets who feels a deep connection to them.

And that’s a sign that no matter what happened behind the scenes, and no matter how heartbroken people might feel for Whitmire, Disney’s apparent approach to Kermit — the belief that as a character, Kermit is much larger than the person who voices and operates him — is ultimately probably the right one.

Cheryl Henson’s characterization of Whitmire as playing Kermit as “a bitter, angry, depressed victim” may have been partly a reaction to the decisions of Muppets writers in recent years, particularly on the failed 2015 TV series, which overtly portrayed Kermit as, in the words of Vox’s own critic at large Todd VanDerWerff, “a huge dick.” These are the kinds of decisions Whitmire might be referring to when he talks about giving notes on the character prior to his ousting — indeed, the Kermit problem seemed to have affected the entire ensemble during The Muppets.

The Muppets have always walked a thin line between sadness and silliness, and it seems likely that Kermit’s personality changes on the TV show were part of its attempt to make the Muppets more explicitly targeted to adults. It’s certainly tempting to assume that Disney’s decision to cast a less outspoken actor in the role of Kermit is a result of that failed endeavor. But with no major new projects on the horizon for the Muppets, it’s unclear what immediate effects, if any, the actor change will have.

In the meantime, for Kermit, at least, only one thing seems to remain eternal: It’s not easy being green.