Jim Henson

Bio
Jim Henson (September 24, 1936 - May 16, 1990) is the founder of the Muppets and was the performer behind many of its most famous characters, including the company figurehead Kermit the Frog.

Born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1936, Henson moved with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. in the late 1940s. While growing up, he loved watching Disney films and movies with comic legends like Bob Hope and George Burns, and enjoyed listening to such radio acts as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. He would grow up to pay tribute to, and work with, many of these same legends.

In 1955, while in college at the University of Maryland, Jim devised a puppet show called Sam and Friends for a local TV station. The shows aired live twice a day after the news, and often involved the puppets lip-synching to a comedy or novelty record. Jim's co-puppeteer was the woman who would later become his wife, Jane Nebel. Out of the cast of characters created for this series, only Kermit would remain with Jim for later productions.

Jim made several important innovations in terms of how puppets were used on TV. The first is that he did away with tiny one-hand puppets whose heads only bobbed when they moved, preferring instead to use puppets with moving mouths and often real hands. The second innovation was to get rid of the stage that all puppets on TV hid behind, just as they did in conventional theater. Jim wisely realized that the TV screen itself is the stage. Freeing the puppets from the constrictions of the past, Jim found that they were able to move around their environment in a much more imaginative and exciting way.

In the 1960s, Jim kept his fledging company afloat by using his puppets in TV commercials. One of the characters created for these commercials was Rowlf the Dog, who would help Jim get nationwide attention for the first time by appearing in regular comedy bits on The Jimmy Dean Show.

During this time, Jim met and hired two more people who would become enormously important to Jim's work: Frank Oz, who Jim once called "the greatest puppeteer in the world," and Jerry Juhl, who would have a hand in writing nearly every Muppet production for 35 years.

In 1969, Joan Ganz Cooney and the Children's Television Workshop approached Jim about creating and performing puppets on a new show aimed at pre-schoolers. The show, of course, was Sesame Street, and it introduced viewers to such memorable characters as Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Count von Count, Cookie Monster, Grover and eventually Elmo as well.

Performers who contribute or have contributed enormously to the show include (but are not limited to) Carroll Spinney, Kevin Clash, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Fran Brill and Eric Jacobson.

The show was a tremendous critical and ratings success right from the start, and the show still runs to this day.

Jim always felt that puppetry should be for all ages, including adults, and he was frustrated that Sesame left the Muppets pigeonholed as a children's act. Fortunately, Jim got another break when Lord Lew Grade invited him to produce a new half-hour show in England. That show, The Muppet Show, also became one of the most successful TV shows of all time. In addition to Kermit as the host, the show featured characters that would quickly become household names, such as Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Bunsen and Beaker, and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.

Performers who joined Jim's ever-growing team during this period include Dave Goelz, Louise Gold, and Steve Whitmire.

Jim created another innovation starting with The Muppet Show: from now on, all productions would be "platformed up," so that humans could move about freely on platforms and interact convincingly with the puppets, while the puppeteers could remain easily hid, and move about their environment with even greater fluidity than before.

The Muppet Show was so successful that it spawned three movies during Jim's lifetime (and more since): The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan. Each film provided Jim with further opportunities to break technological barriers, including allowing Kermit to ride a bike.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Jim moved on to an even more ambitious project. With the help of fantasy illustrator Brian Froud, Jim created a Tolkien-like world for the film The Dark Crystal. This production was entirely populated by extremely detailed, realistic-looking puppets -- a major breakthrough and change from the (intended) cartoony look of the earlier Muppets. Though an initial box-office failure, The Dark Crystal is a widely respected cult film these days, with a sequel, Power of the Dark Crystal, now in the works.

Based on what Jim and his team learned from their experiences on The Dark Crystal, Jim founded the Creature Shop to create new characters both for Jim's movies and for outside productions. In-house productions included Labyrinth, The Storyteller and Greek Myths, Gulliver's Travels, and Farscape. Outside productions included Dreamchild, The Witches, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Oscar-winning Babe.

in 1983, Jim introduced a new show for children called Fraggle Rock. The show was concerned with promoting understanding across cultures and around the world, a subject that was very important to Jim.

Jim continued to innovate with the creation of the computer-generated character Waldo C. Graphic for The Jim Henson Hour in 1989. Years before most people knew what CGI meant or had heard of Pixar, Jim had a computerized character interacting with Muppets on a weekly TV show. What's more, a puppeteer could perform the character in real time with the other Muppets, thanks to the Performance Control System.

In late 1989, Jim made a radical change in his career. Wanting to be less of a businessman and focus more on the creative side of the production, Jim entered into talks with Michael Eisner to sell the Muppets to the Walt Disney Company. (After Jim's sudden and untimely death, negotiations went awry, and Disney would not acquire the Muppets until February 2004.)

Jim came down with a severe case of pnuemonia in May 1990, which unfortunately was discovered too late to recieve proper treatment. He died on May 16.

Today, Jim's legacy is carried on in different forms. Sesame Workshop (formerly the Children's Television Workshop) now owns all the Sesame characters, and continues to experiment with its format in its 36th season. As noted, Disney owns the Muppet characters and continues to use them in new productions such as The Muppets' Wizard of Oz. And the Jim Henson Company itself, under the guidance of Jim's children Brian, Lisa, and Cheryl, continues to release new Creature Shop films such as MirrorMask.

Innovator, performer, gentle genius: Jim Henson will never be forgotten by the people who worked with him, or the audience whose lives he touched.

Puppeteer Credits

 * Muppet Characters: Kermit the Frog, Doctor Teeth, Rowlf the Dog, the Swedish Chef, Waldorf, Link Hogthrob, Mahna Mahna, the Newsman, Wally, Jim Henson Muppet, Zeke
 * Sesame Characters: Ernie, Guy Smiley, Kermit, Bip Bipadotta, Captain Vegetable, Thomas Twiddlebug, Sammy the Snake, Sinister Sam
 * Fraggle Rock: Cantus, Convincing John
 * Saturday Night Live: King Ploobis
 * The Christmas Toy: Jack-in-the-Box
 * The Dark Crystal: High Priest Skeksis (puppetry only), Jen (puppetry only)
 * Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas: Harrison Fox, Harvey, Snake
 * Tales from Muppetland: The King, Mean Floyd
 * The Great Santa Claus Switch: Fred, Lothar
 * Muppet Meeting Films: Leo
 * Sam and Friends: Sam, Kermit
 * The Tale of the Bunny Picnic: Dog
 * Time Piece: The man
 * Dog City: Bugsy Them

Director Credits

 * Muppet*Vision 3-D
 * The Jim Henson Hour (select episodes)
 * The Storyteller (select episodes)
 * Labyrinth
 * The Tale of the Bunny Picnic
 * Muppet Meeting Films (select episodes)
 * Fraggle Rock (select episodes)
 * The Dark Crystal (co-director with Frank Oz)
 * John Denver and the Muppets: Rocky Mountain Holiday
 * The Great Muppet Caper
 * Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas
 * The Muppets Valentine Show
 * The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
 * The Frog Prince
 * Sesame Street (select episodes)
 * The Cube
 * Hey Cinderella!
 * Time Piece

Trivia

 * Henson attended the University of Maryland, College Park. On September 24, 2003, the University honored him by dedicating a life-sized statue of Henson and Kermit, in front of the Adele Stamp Student Union on the College Park campus.
 * He shares the same birthday (September 24) with Steve Whitmire, the fellow Muppeteer who took over Kermit the Frog after Henson's death.
 * He is pictured on a USA 37¢ commemorative stamp issued September 28, 2005.
 * He was honored with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.
 * In 1991, an album that focused exclusively on songs sung by Jim Henson's characters, Jim Henson: A Sesame Street Celebration, was released.