However much you might love the Muppets, Frank Oz loves them more. As Jim Henson’s closest collaborator on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, Oz was the person behind dozens of fan-favorite characters, including Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Sam the Eagle, Grover, Cookie Monster, and Bert. He performed with the Muppets from the 1960s through the 1990s, juggling his puppeteer duties with a thriving second career as a film director. Eventually, he did stop playing his characters — but to hear Oz talk about that decision is to understand how hard it was for him. “I had to release them,” he told Yahoo Entertainment, “and it hurt, because I still love ’em so much.” During the conversation, his voice filled with emotion whenever his characters came up; at one point, he referred to the Muppets as “us,” as if his heart too is surrounded by foam and fleece.

Now Oz is returning to his roots with the documentary Muppet Guys Talking (available digitally in March), which revisits The Muppet Show through conversations between the director and four of his original co-stars. At the same time, the Muppets are in an odd position, culturally. Since Disney acquired the characters from the Jim Henson Company in 2004, the studio has struggled to find the correct outlet for Kermit, Piggy, and friends. There have been some successes (the 2011 feature film The Muppets, a very popular YouTube channel) and some notable failures (the 2015 ABC sitcom The Muppets, which last just 16 episodes). Yet the popularity and visibility of the characters remain enormous. Just look at the proliferation of Kermit memes, or 2017’s internet-wide outcry over longtime Muppeteer Steve Whitmire being fired from the role of the beloved green frog (originally played by Jim Henson, who died in 1990).

So where do the Muppets go from here? During a rare interview with Oz on the occasion of Little Shop of Horrors‘ return to theaters, we asked the director for his thoughts about the state of Muppet-kind. Oz talked to Yahoo Entertainment about Henson’s influence on his career and his own reasons for stepping away from the Muppets. He also spoke candidly about Whitmire’s firing (“It’s so sad”) and his thoughts on the direction that Disney has taken with the characters (“I think Disney really, truly believes that they’re doing the best they can”). While Oz spoke with obvious affection and respect for the newer Muppet performers, he was also blunt in expressing his belief that “they can never be as good as me” because “they don’t know the soul [of the characters] as much.” As to the question of whether the characters can evolve for the new millennium, Oz says the answer isn’t to reinvent the Muppets but to “go back and be true to who they are.” Read the Muppets portion of our conversation with Frank Oz below.

Yahoo: When you made Little Shop you were coming off Dark Crystal and The Muppets Take Manhattan as a director. Was there anything you took from those movies and applied to your experience directing your first non-Muppet film?

Frank Oz: If it wasn’t for Jim Henson, I wouldn’t even be here. I mean, Jim is the one I learned everything from. And he had a tremendous love and ability, a talent for music. So as opposed to today, which is bad, the Muppets would never appear without music. Essentially we were always doing music with The Muppet Show, with the Muppet movies. There was always music for the characters that would then move the story along. So I learned all that from Jim, and there’s no question in my mind that I may have not brought it consciously to Little Shop of Horrors, but certainly it was in my genes that Jim taught me that brought me there, absolutely.

View photos Frank Oz and Jim Henson on the set of The Dark Crystal. (Credit: Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection) More