Dave Goelz
Dave Goelz is an actor, born 1946.
Goelz joined Jim Henson's Muppet team in 1973 and never left. The characters he has carried since make an odd set to hold in one pair of hands: Gonzo the Great, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Zoot, Beauregard and Waldorf, which covers the daredevil, the scientist, the silent saxophone player, the janitor and half of the heckling balcony.
Gonzo is the one worth arguing about, because Gonzo is the only Muppet whose act is genuinely unsettling. He performs stunts that could kill him, he is in love with a chicken, and Goelz plays every bit of it with the earnest tremble of a performer who believes the audience is on his side. The gentleness is what makes the strangeness land. In The Muppet Christmas Carol he casts Gonzo as Charles Dickens, narrating a Victorian ghost story more or less straight, and it remains the best sustained piece of acting in any Muppet film.
He also worked the parts of the Henson catalogue that were never funny. Fizzgig in The Dark Crystal is pure animal reaction. Sir Didymus in Labyrinth is a tiny knight with real dignity. Boober and Uncle Traveling Matt in Fraggle Rock are two ends of the same anxious temperament, one afraid of everything and one too oblivious to notice.
Fifty years in, he is still doing it, from the Fraggle revival to Zoot on The Muppets Mayhem, with occasional visits to Pixar as the guard Frank in the Inside Out films.
Movies (28)
- Inside Out 2 (2024)
- Inside Out (2015)
- Labyrinth (1986)
- The First Snow of Fraggle Rock (2025)
- The Parent Trap (1961)
- The Muppet Show (2026)
- The Muppets (2011)
- The Dark Crystal (1982)
- Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
- The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
- The Muppet Movie (1979)
- Muppet Treasure Island (1996)
- Muppets from Space (1999)
- The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
- The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland (1999)
- Jim Henson Idea Man (2024)
- It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002)
- The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
- Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021)
- The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (2005)
- Seth Rogen's Hilarity for Charity (2018)
- Kermit's Swamp Years (2002)
- Disneyland's 35th Anniversary Celebration (1990)
- The Earth Day Special (1990)
- A Muppet Family Christmas (1987)
- The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson (1990)
- The Muppets Go Hollywood (1979)
- John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together (1979)
TV (10)
Where to start with Dave Goelz
The Muppet Christmas Carol first, and not for nostalgia. Goelz has to hold a whole Dickens adaptation together as narrator, and the film only works because the voice can drop the joke and simply tell the story.
Then go back to the source. The Muppet Show is where Gonzo, Zoot, Beauregard and Bunsen Honeydew were built, and it is the fastest way to hear how different four characters from one performer can sound. The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper are the pair that turned the act into cinema.
For the non-comic puppetry, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth show the craft with the punchlines removed, and Fraggle Rock has his warmest work in Boober. Skip the middle-period specials unless you are a completist, and take Muppet Treasure Island over the other literary adaptations, since it gives Gonzo the most to do.