Muppet Meeting Films

Muppet Meeting Films are a series of short films produced for public screening during business meetings and training sessions, beginning in 1975 and continuing sporadically through the 1990s.

The first films were commissioned in 1965 by IBM. Jim Henson developed these films with then-IBM employee David Lazer (head of the company's film and television division) who went on to produce many of the Muppet productions of the next twenty years, including The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie.

One of the IBM films, "Coffee Break Machine", features an early version of Cookie Monster, who devours a complex machine as the machine describes its purpose and construction. At the end of the sketch, the talking machine explains that it's wired with a security system set to explode if tampered with. The monster promptly combusts. This film was so successful that Henson performed the sketch in 1967 for The Ed Sullivan Show, and it was remade as a Muppet Show sketch.

The IBM films were a hit, and in 1975, Henson Associates created the Muppet Meeting Films, which could be licensed to other companies.

The films were produced as collections of three or four skits, usually running about two or three minutes each. The first collection, "Muppet Picker Upper", used puppets that would soon become major characters on The Muppet Show. After this collection, the Classic Muppets didn't appear in the Meeting Films, except for a brief Kermit cameo in 1993, and one film featuring Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear in the late 90s.

The rest of the Meeting Films taped with Henson feature two characters -- Leo, a master speechmaker and wordsmith, and Grump, a cynical crank. Leo and Grump are a classic duo performed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, much like Kermit/Piggy and Ernie/Bert.

Around 1985, some other puppets were introduced, but none of them have constant identities, personalities, or voices. The most prominent is the David Lazer Muppet, an orange supervisor character (and caricature of David Lazer). The character was identified on Henson.com as "The Company Man" but unnamed in the films until 1992's "Executive Island", where he was referred to as Finneman. The only other character that maintains a constant voice and identity is Big Head, a grumpy boss character played by David Rudman, also introduced in 1992.

In the Meeting Films made after Henson's death, Frank Oz no longer performed and Leo and Grump were retired. A team of Muppet performers appear in the rest of the films, including Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson, Joey Mazzarino, David Rudman, Kevin Clash, and Julianne Buescher. They were directed by David Gumpel.

Other characters to appear included Beautiful Day Monster, Luncheon Counter Monster, and a monster who was later used on Muppets Tonight as Big Mean Carl. Several of the generic supporting characters were later adapted as characters for Statler and Waldorf: From the Balcony, notably Ted Thomas and The Weather Guy.

The films continue to be distributed as rentals for business use by Enterprise Media. According to the company's website, popular titles include "Sell, Sell, Sell" (the top-ranked release), "Let's Have the Dam Break", "The Meeting That Would Not Die", "The Sky's The Limit" and "Win! Win! Win!".