Jim Henson

Jim Henson (September 24, 1936 - May 16, 1990) was the creator of the Muppets, and the performer behind many of the troupe's most famous characters, including Kermit the Frog, Ernie and Rowlf the Dog.

Early Years
James Maury Henson was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1936. Henson moved with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburb 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.

Sam and Friends
Henson's earliest foray into television puppetry occurred as a high school senior, in 1954, with The Junior Morning Show, performing Pierre the French Rat and other creations with friend Russell Wall. In 1955, while a college student at the University of Maryland, he 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. Henson's co-puppeteer was the woman who would later become his wife, Jane Nebel. The two would wed in 1959. Out of the cast of characters created for this series, only Kermit would remain with Jim Henson for later productions.

Jim Henson 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 talked, 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. He wisely realized that the TV screen itself is the stage. Freeing the puppets from the constrictions of the past, Henson found that the characters were able to move around their environment in a much more imaginative and exciting way.

Beginning in the late 1950s, while still producing Sam and Friends, Henson kept his fledging company afloat by using his puppets in TV commercials. Early forays included Wilkins and Wontkins and other characters for local companies, under the name "Muppets Inc.", formed in 1958. By the 1960s, the burgeoning Muppets Inc. had expanded to national campaigns, and one of the characters created for these commercials was Rowlf the Dog. Rowlf helped Henson get nationwide attention for the first time by appearing in regular comedy bits on The Jimmy Dean Show. This led to increased appearances by the Muppets on variety shows and talk shows, including Today and The Ed Sullivan Show.

During this time, Jim Henson met and hired two more people who would become enormously important to his work: Frank Oz, who Henson 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 1962, Don Sahlin also joined the Muppets, building Rowlf and laying the foundations for the Muppet Workshop. Apart from puppetry, Henson also experimented as an animator and filmmaker, with such films as the 1965 Academy Award nominated short Time Piece (which he wrote, directed, and starred in), several comedic industrial films (paving the way for the Muppet Meeting Films), the documentary Youth '68, and the hour-long experimental drama The Cube in 1969.

Sesame Street
That same year, Joan Ganz Cooney and the newly-formed Children's Television Workshop approached Henson about creating and performing puppets on a new show aimed at pre-schoolers. The show would become 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.

Jim Henson was initially reluctant to use his characters on an educational kids' series, for fear of being typecast as a children's entertainer. However, Joan Ganz Cooney, once remarked that while the show's creative team had a collective brilliance, Henson was the only "individual genius.": "He was our era's Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers," Cooney said, "and indeed he drew from all of them to create a new art form that influenced popular culture around the world."

On Sesame Street, Jim Henson performed Kermit the Frog, the only major established Muppet to appear regularly on the new series (although Rowlf made one cameo). He also performed such new characters as Ernie and game show host Guy Smiley. Continuing his penchant for animation and live film-making, Henson wrote and directed such inserts as the Number Song Series that always ended with a baker falling down the stairs (Henson dubbed the voice of the baker, even though a different actor portrayed the baker) and several animated shorts, including "King of 8", "Queen of 6", and "Eleven Cheer." He also built the dollhouse seen in the Dollhouse film.

Although increasingly individuals like Don Sahlin, Kermit Love, and other Muppet Workshop employees gained greater responsibility for character development, Henson still supplied the initial sketches for many of the key characters, including Ernie, Bert, and The Amazing Mumford. As evidenced in Jim Henson's Designs and Doodles, while Love and Sahlin built Big Bird, Henson devised the initial concept of a full bodied character, and supplied sketches showing how he would be performed.

By the late-1970s/ early 1980s, he became more involved with other projects, and therefore mainly just performed his characters in inserts rather than in the main street plots. However, he was still involved in related productions, performing his characters in the first Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird, performing his characters' voices in various Sesame Street Live shows, and also performing in Big Bird in China, Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Sesame Street Special, and Sesame Street: 20 and Still Counting. In the last production mentioned, Henson also appeared as himself in two scenes.

The Muppet Show


Henson always felt that puppetry should be for all ages, including adults, and he was frustrated that Sesame Street, even with its appeal to adults, was still children's programming. The Muppets were labeled "kiddie entertainment" by network executives. Fortunately, he received another break when Lord Lew Grade invited him to produce a new half-hour show in England. The resulting Muppet Show 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, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.

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

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

In 1979, Jerry Juhl described Henson's unique working style in an article about the making of The Muppets Go Hollywood special: "The [production assistants] are running around screaming, 'How are we ever going to do all this?' And Jim is wandering around in the middle of it all, perfectly calm, perfectly content. You go to him and ask, 'How's it going?' And he says, 'Oh, fine. There were hardly any airplanes overhead when we filmed Miss Piggy by the pool.' He's just like Kermit -- if The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98."

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

Fantasy Films
Never one to rest on his laurels, Henson moved on to an even more ambitious project. With the help of fantasy illustrator Brian Froud, he 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 later developed a following as a widely respected cult film, with a sequel, Power of the Dark Crystal, now in the works.

Based on what he and his team learned from their experiences on The Dark Crystal, Jim Henson founded the Creature Shop to create new characters both for Henson movies and for outside productions. In-house productions during his lifetime included Labyrinth and The StoryTeller, while outside productions included Dreamchild, The Bear, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Witches.

Fraggle Rock
In 1983, Henson 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 him. Henson was the guiding force in developing the concept for the series, which began with his own notes for "The Woozle World" scribbled on a small pad. Later, in collaboration with such team members as Jerry Juhl and Jocelyn Stevenson, this extended to specific personality details coining and character names (with Boober named after a cow encountered by Henson's daughters). As Henson defined the series' purpose in that first draft, "What the show is really about is people getting along with other people, and understanding the delicate balance of the natural world. These are topics that can be dealt with in a symbolic way, which is what puppets basically do all the time." From the beginning, Henson also insisted that the show be tailored for different countries, so that the message about brotherhood and understanding conflicting cultures could be spread to as many nations as possible. This led to co-productions, with involvements ranging from completely new frame sequences tailored to each nation to unique Uncle Traveling Matt postcard inserts, to simple dialogue dubs.

Although very much involved in the series as a creator, and serving as a director on several episodes, by this point Jim Henson was becoming increasingly "hands-off" as a performer and beginning to look at ambitious "realistic" puppet projects, instead assigning the regular roles to The Muppet Show veterans as well as up-and-comers and Canadian talent. However, his very occasional appearances on Fraggle Rock showcased two scene-stealing characters, the enigmatic, "implacably calm" Cantus the Minstrel, who represented Henson's Zen-like beliefs and musical interests, and the flamboyant, fast-talking Convincing John, representing Henson's more frenetic, showman qualities.

The Jim Henson Hour
Jim Henson continued to innovate with the creation of the computer-generated character Waldo C. Graphic for The Jim Henson Hour in 1989. Years before widespread use of CGI and the rise of Pixar, Henson had a computerized character interacting with Muppets on a weekly TV show. A puppeteer could perform the character in real time with the other Muppets, thanks to the Henson Performance Control System.

On The Jim Henson Hour, Jim Henson appeared as himself in introductions and closings for the show. He hosted Jim Henson Hour pitch tape and The Secrets of the Muppets. Jim Henson also won an emmy for directing one special featured in this series, Dog City. Although most of his major characters from The Muppet Show made at least one appearance on The Jim Henson Hour, Henson did not perform any new recurring characters in the series.

Henson's Legacy


In late 1989, Jim Henson made a radical change in his career. Wanting to become less of a businessman and focus more on the creative side of the production, he entered into talks with Michael Eisner to sell his company and characters (minus Sesame Street) to the Walt Disney Company. After Henson's sudden and untimely death, negotiations went awry, and Disney would not acquire the Muppets until February 2004, which it now controls through the wholly owned subsidiary Muppets Holding Company LLC.

Henson became infected with an extremely rare bacterium called Group A streptococcus in May 1990 that was discovered too late for him to receive proper treatment. He died at 1:21 a.m. on Wednesday, May 16, 1990, approximately 20 hours after checking himself into the emergency room at New York Hospital, not realizing how sick he really was.

Today, Jim Henson's legacy is carried on in different forms. Sesame Workshop (formerly the Children's Television Workshop) now owns all of the Sesame Street characters and continues to experiment with its format in its 38th season. As noted, the Walt Disney Company 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 Henson's children Brian, Lisa, and Cheryl, John, and Heather, continues to release new material, including Creature Shop films such as MirrorMask.

Puppeteer Credits

 * The Muppet Show characters: Balloon-Head Conductor, Beaver (episode 217), Black Rooster (episode 303), Doglion (episode 224), Droop (episode 115), Dr. Teeth, The Eel (episode 124), Flower-Eating Monster, Fuzz Brother, Green Heap, Hillbilly Singer, Jim, Kermit the Frog, Kermit the Protozoa, Lenny the Lizard (episode 204), Link Hogthrob, Mahna Mahna, Mary Louise (episode 121), Mean Mama (episode 203), Miss Kitty (episode 113), The Newsman, The Newspig, Nigel, Robot Kermit, Rover Joe the Hound Dog (occasional), Rowlf the Dog, Silver Beak, Slim Wilson (episode 413), The Swedish Chef, Timmy Monster (occasional), Waldorf, Wally, Wally Whoopie, Youknow Bird, Zeke
 * Sesame Street characters: Baby Monster (1969), Bad Bart, Betty Lou (occasional), Bip Bippadotta, Captain Vegetable, Ernie, Father, The Geefle, Grandmother Happy, Guy Smiley, Harold Happy, Harvey Monster (occasional), Hippie (1969), J Friend Singer, Kermit the Frog, The King, King Peter the Persnickety, Librarian, Little Bird (1969), Little Chrissy (puppetry), The Messenger, Mr. Essex, Mr. Johnson (early segments), Mr. Nose, Pat Playjacks, Salvador Dada, Sammy the Snake, Scudge (1969), Showered Rosell, Sinister Sam, Spaceship Surprise Captain, Thomas Twiddlebug, Warren Wolf, Witch, Yip Yip Martians, Zizzy Zoomer
 * Sam and Friends: Sam, Professor Madcliffe, Harry the Hipster, Omar, Pierre the French Rat, others
 * Commercials: Wilkins and Wontkins, Scoop and Skip, Baskerville the Hound, The LaChoy Dragon (voice), Sir Linit, Southern Colonel, Arnold, Nutty Bird, Sour Bird, Kenner Gooney Bird, Fred, Mert, Mack, Boy Twin
 * Tales of the Tinkerdee: Charlie the Ogre
 * TV Appearances: Floating Face
 * The Ed Sullivan Show: Amanda, Beautiful Day Monster, Business Business Creatures (Blue Monster, Orange Creature), Conrad Love, Dasher, Donder, The Glutton, Thudge
 * The Wizard of Id: The Wizard, The Spook
 * The Great Santa Claus Switch: Fred the Elf, Lothar
 * Tales from Muppetland: King Goshposh, King Rupert the Second, Mean Floyd
 * Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass: Gonzo (non-speaking), Hoggie Marsh
 * Muppet Meeting Films: Leo
 * Saturday Night Live: King Ploobis
 * The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence: George Washington, Hudson
 * Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas: Harrison Fox, Harvey, Snake
 * Fraggle Rock: Cantus the Minstrel, Convincing John
 * The Dark Crystal: High Priest Skeksis (puppetry), Jen (puppetry), Dying Skeksis Emperor (puppetry)
 * The Christmas Toy: Jack-in-the-Box
 * The Tale of the Bunny Picnic: Dog
 * Inner Tube: Jake
 * The Jim Henson Hour: Timecaster
 * Dog City: Bugsy Them

Directing Credits

 * Time Piece (also wrote and starred as "The Man")
 * Youth '68
 * The Cube
 * Hey, Cinderella!
 * Sesame Street
 * Number Song Series
 * Dollhouse
 * 1-2-3-4-5
 * Queen of 6
 * King of 8
 * Eleven Cheer
 * Number Twelve Rocks
 * The Frog Prince
 * The Muppets Valentine Show
 * The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
 * Muppet Meeting Films (select episodes)
 * Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas
 * John Denver and the Muppets: Rocky Mountain Holiday
 * The Great Muppet Caper
 * Fraggle Rock
 * Episode 101: Beginnings
 * Episode 102: Wembley and the Gorgs
 * Episode 106: The Preachification of Convincing John
 * Episode 111: Catch the Tail by the Tiger
 * Episode 113: We Love You, Wembley
 * Episode 118: The Minstrels
 * Episode 122: Mokey's Funeral
 * Episode 208: All Work and All Play
 * Episode 210: A Friend in Need
 * Episode 219: Doomsday Soup
 * Episode 303: Boober and the Glob
 * The Dark Crystal (co-director with Frank Oz)
 * Labyrinth
 * The StoryTeller
 * Episode 106: The Soldier and Death
 * Episode 105: The Heartless Giant
 * The Jim Henson Hour (select episodes)
 * Dog City
 * Song of the Cloud Forest
 * ''The Tale of the Bunny Picnic
 * Muppet*Vision 3D
 * The Earth Day Special (Kermit segment)

Trivia

 * He shares the same birthday (September 24) with Steve Whitmire, the fellow Muppeteer who took over Kermit the Frog after Henson's death.
 * In 1991, an album that focused exclusively on songs sung by Jim Henson's characters, Jim Henson: A Sesame Street Celebration, was released.
 * A young Jim Henson was portrayed in Kermit's Swamp Years by Christian Kebbel.
 * In the 1960s, Jim Henson wrote and illustrated an unreleased children's book called Watermellon's I Don't Know.
 * He drew the tattoos seen on Lydia, the pig who performed in "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" in episode 102 of The Muppet Show.
 * According to 4Kids Entertainment, in publicity materials for the upcoming Jim Henson Designs product line, his name "achieves 95% awareness among consumers surveyed, and a 98% favorability rating among these same consumers".