December 1, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, threatening viewers into buying Wilkins coffee was just one creative way Jim Henson mastered the television medium for the puppetry arts. Hear how advertising supported art that became education, and - good grief, the comedian is a bear!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the Star and the American People,
and Kermit the Frog and Cookie Monster to Big Bird
and Oscar the Grouch. So many of our most beloved
TV personalities came from the imagination and the hands of
Jim Henson. Joining us now is Brian J. Jones, author
(00:31):
of Jim Henson The Biography, with the full story of
the man behind the Muppets. Take It Away.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Brian Jim was born in Leland, Mississippi, in nineteen thirty
six September twenty three. His father was a agronomous with
Youth Department of Agriculture, and if that was the case,
especially during that point in American history coming out of
the Depression, you were going to either be in Mississippi
or Maryland, and as it turned out, Jim Henson's father
(00:58):
was both places. Jim was sort of born and of
the South, but actually did most of us growing up
in Maryland, which is why he doesn't really have that
Southern accent.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Jim was always sort of a Southern gentleman.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
You can never entirely take the South out of Jim,
but for the most part he was raised right outside
of Washington, d C. In Maryland. His parents were Paul
and Betty Henson. Jim had one older brother named Paul
as well, who was killed.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
At a young age.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Killed at age nineteen while he was serving in the Navy.
He was killed in an automobile elecident down in Florida.
Sort of a defining moment in Jim's life actually, because
that was a moment I think that he realized that
life was short, and as a lot of his colleagues
and his family and his children told me, Jim seemed
to realize there may never be enough time to do
everything he wanted to do. But as his daughter Lisa
(01:46):
put it once that happened with the death of his brother,
he had rocket fuel in his blood and just was
constantly in motion for the rest of his life, constantly
had ideas he was developing. He would have ideas written
on yellow notepads in black pen, which is way he
did everything in his notebooks. And then at the same
time he might have something actually that he was performing,
and he might be also building puppets for another performance
(02:08):
and developing animatronics and writing lyrics for songs for broadway
shows that didn't exist yet and pitching TV series, some
of which made it, some of which didn't. So Jim
is a man constantly in motion. One of the most
important figures in Jim's life and in his development as
an artist is his grandmother, Deer. Now Deer's actually the
(02:28):
daughter of a Civil War map maker, and so I
think you can sort of see Jim's creativity as a
through line all the way back to that ancestor, who
you know, drew beautiful maps and was really really talented.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
And Deer is one of.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
These people who could sew anything. People talked about how
she could sew close out of an old army blanket
that you could barely get a needle through. That she
was just that, you know, that deft with a needle,
and that talented, and that able to create things. And
she's the one that when Jim was a child, really
encouraged him to write and draw, and Deer really encouraged
him to be taught him how to sew. Jim is
(03:00):
one of these one of these people that is self
taught but also went through home economics in college and
was a really master you know it, could sew anything
and knew how to like sew something. So you couldn't
see the scene, So a lot of that came out
of Deer. And he loved just the art of conversation.
How they loved to sit around the dinner table in
the evenings and talk.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And Jim loved.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Conversation, loved to listen to people tell stories. He loved
that his parents would all everybody in the family would
gather around this old pump organ that his mom, Betty
had as she was you know, pumped this with her
feet while she played the organ, and they would stand
around and sing songs from the Pogo song Book, for example,
and songs of Aa Milne. Jim just loved family gatherings.
That's one of those things that influences Jim's work is
(03:41):
just the value the fun that families could have being together,
talking with each other, being with each other, singing songs together,
laughing together. I think that really informs his work going
forward as well. Jim Henson was a gadget guy his
entire life. As a kid, he was always trying to
build radios and as one of his childhood friends told me,
(04:01):
Jim's actually worked.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Jim can actually pick.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Up a radio segment with his old crystal radios that
he was building. He and his brother Paul were always
fiddling with something in the garage. They were always making
model kits and airplanes and you know, building something, creating something,
something gadgety in their garage. And Jim from a young
age was fascinated by television, and he was fascinated by
the very idea that what you were seeing on your
(04:24):
TV screen was going on someplace else.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Right at that moment.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
A lot of TV presentations back then were live, including commercials.
So Jim just he was fascinated by TV, and as
he put it, badgered his parents. He was determined to
get one, and his father actually bought them a television
for the Hentson household in nineteen forty nine, which is
pretty early actually in the development of the TV. There
weren't a lot of people that had TVs at that time,
not a lot of channels around, so Jim was an
(04:49):
early adapter of the tech, which again is something else
he would do throughout his entire life. But fascinated by
a television, Jim wanted more than anything else to be
on television or work on television, needing care if it
was in front of the camera or behind the camera.
When Jim is in high school. He's doing a lot
of work in theater productions and in building sets, and
(05:10):
he really thought that he might get into television as
a stage designer, again, working behind the scenes unseen. Well,
Jim turns out to be sort of unseen a lot
of the time because what offers him his opportunity to
get into television is there's an advertisement in the local
newspapers and one of the TV stations, the local CBS affiliate,
is advertising for as they put a young people to
(05:30):
operate puppets for a local television show, a local kids show.
So Jim, who doesn't really know anything about puppets, Jim
wasn't one of these kids you know growing up who
was playing with puppets all the time. He's not Steven
Spielberg crashing his trains into each other and filming them
and everyone says, oh, that Steven wants to be a
movie director. Jim didn't really play with puppets, really liked
Charlie McCarthy on the radio, Love listening to Egerberger and
(05:52):
Charlie McCarthy. That was sort of the extent of his
familiary with puppets. But when he sees this ad in
the newspaper asking for people who can perform puppets or
a local television show. Jim is determined to do whatever
it takes to get that job and get in the
door by any means necessary. He, in the span of
about two weeks, by checking books out of the local library,
teaches himself how to build puppets and how to perform puppets.
(06:16):
So Jim sort of has this crash core self taught
in the art of performing puppets and goes down to
the local television station auditions and gets the job. That
was really all he kind of wanted puppets for at
that point was just to get him in the door again.
Once he gets in the door, he wants to start
working in stage design and maybe production and directing if
he can.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
But it turns out.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
That Jim is really really good at puppetry, and I
think part of the reason that happened is because he
didn't really know what the rules so to speak of
puppetry and puppet performance were, So he doesn't know what
rules he's breaking, and he doesn't know what rules he's following.
Is he goes along, So Jim has this really intuitive
feel for the way Puppets should look and act on television.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you're listening to Brian J. Jones, author of Jim
Henson The Biography, telling one heck of his story. What
propels Jim Henson, What becomes rocket fuel for his life,
the death of his brother, the early death of his brother.
Life is for the living and every day is precious.
He learns that young always fiddling, always playing with things,
a fascination with TV. And then he answers that ad
(07:23):
for the local CBS affiliate and the rest as we're
going to learn his history when we come back. More
of Jim Henson's remarkable life story here on our American Stories,
Lee Jabib here again. Our American Stories tries to tell
the stories of America's past and present to Americans, and
(07:43):
we want to hear your stories too. There's some of
our favorites. Send them to us. Go to Ouramericanstories dot
com and click the your stories tab. Again, please go
to Ouramericanstories dot com and click the your Stories tab
(08:09):
and we're back with our American Stories and with the
story of Jim Henson, the mastermind behind the Muppets. Back
to Brian J. Jones with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
At that time, there's not a lot of puppetry on television.
It's Kuglafran and Ollie. Jim understood something that kucklo Fran
and Allie didn't quite grasp. They're filming the puppet stage.
Burtils from stands behind the stage, pokes his puppets up
from behind the curtain. France stands in front of that
puppet stage and interacts with the puppets. But they're still
filming the puppet theater. It's almost like if today you
(08:40):
would show a movie by walking into the movie theater
and filming the movie on screen and then showing that
on TV. Jim understood that if you've got the four
sides of the TV, that entire space that the camera
sees is your puppet theater. And what happens then is
that opens up an entire universe for the puppets to
interact in. They can come in from the bottom, they
(09:01):
can come in from the sides, they can rush the
television screen, they can back into a shot by backing
in behind the camera. It creates a whole new three
D world for the puppets to exist in. And that's
Jim's first real big innovation is how puppets look on TV.
And he also understands that if they're on TV, you
want them to have mouths that open, and he wanted
eyes that looked focused.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Jim figured out how to position the eyes.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
He figured out if he slightly cross the eyes, when
you place them, all of a sudden, they're magically focused.
Jim figures all this out just by you knowing how
to build. And the other big innovation that he has
is he also understands that if what you're seeing in
those four sides of the TV monitor is what matters most,
if that's the world where the puppets existing, then you
(09:42):
need to know what that looks like at all times.
And so Jim does something again, finding a solution in
plain side. Jim is one of these guys that, like
can always figure out how to handle a problem in
a way that isn't always obvious. Jim's solution to that
is he just puts a television monitor on the floor.
It's something no other performer gets to do. Any other
performer has to watch themselves on tape after the fact.
Jim can see himself on TV in real time, can
(10:03):
see his performance real time. The only other issue with
that is if you're looking at what's going on in
the TV. If you want your character to go right
on the TV monitor, you actually have to go to
your left over your head to make that happen. And
that's again it's still the Muppet style of performing today.
If you watch them performing on Sesame Street, for example,
they're not watching the puppet over their head. They're looking
down at that monitor on the floor, so they can
(10:24):
see exactly what that camera sees, you know. Sixty years later,
so Jim, who doesn't know anything about puppetry until he
uses it to get on TV, finds out just how
great a performer he is, as do others. So after
he's come in the door at the local CBS station,
the show he's doing goes under very quickly, partly because
they were using miners to work, which was a permitted
(10:46):
under the work permit, and.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Jim immediately gets his own show at the local NBC.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
They scoop him up, and while he's still in college,
he starts performing every single night before the local news.
He performs a show that he he creates and writes
and develops. All the characters were called Salmon Friends, and
this is just a local puppet show. By this time,
Jim is coined the term Muppets, which contrey to most
local legend, isn't really a combination of marionette and puppet.
(11:14):
Jim thought it was a word that sounded great. Buppet's
a word that's around by nineteen fifty four. Jim's got
that very early on, and Kermit comes along in nineteen
fifty five.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Very early in the Muppets story.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Let's not be quite so formal.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Why don't you just call me Kermit and I'll call
you a well, what.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Would you like me to call you?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
When his grandfather was dying, Jim sort of dealt with
that grief the way.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
He always did.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
He started building, and Kermit he builds at that time,
cuts it out of his mother's coat, and he's not
a frog at this point. He's just sort of Kermit
the thing in this abstract form, made out of his
mother's coat, with ping pong balls for eyes. It's basically
a ping pong ball cut in half with a slashed circle,
making the eye looks familiar to us because he's got
(11:58):
sort of the same shaped head, but it he's clearly
not a frog yet, and he's the wrong color. But
that's where karma comes from. Kermit is almost a day
one muppet. Kermit becomes one of the breakout stars of
Sam and Friends.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
And Sam and Francis.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
It becomes this huge local sensation and it catches the
attention of folks in New York City, and Jim does
the Tonight Show when it was still Steve Allen, he
does Jack Parr.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
He starts making all these.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Appearances on variety shows, performing the muppets on the Brain Show,
and he's a huge hit. From there, he gets asked
to participate the Jimmy Dean Show, another gigantic show, and
he creates Rolf the Dog for that show because they
wanted Jimmy to have somebody to talk to. So he
creates sort of this home spun version of a dog
that he names Rolf, and that's one of the first
(12:42):
times jim actually uses his own voice for a character,
and it becomes a breakout star on the Jimmy Dean
Show in the early nineteen sixties, ends up getting more fan.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Mail than Jimmy Dean does.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Jimmy Dean used to sort of complain jokingly that the
dog was more popular than he was on the show.
So Kermit is sort of a local here, Rolf is
seen across the country. It becomes sort of the first
national hit that Jim has. And what's great about Rolf
is Rolf is one of these puppets. Unlike Kermit, who
you know, has arms that are on sticks so you
can sort of wave them around.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Rolf has to pick things up.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Way that's performed is what they call a live hand muppet,
where you put your right hand because Jim's right hand,
and he puts his.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Right hand up in Rolf's head to operate the mouth.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And then Ralf's hands are actually just, you know, sort
of these long arms with fingers hanging off them, and
Jim would put his left hand in the left hand
of Rolf, but then that left the right hand open.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Somebody else has to perform that right hand.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Well.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Jim hired a nineteen year old performer named frank.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Oz, who was just out of high school, to literally
be his right hand man to perform that right hand
for Rolf. And that's how frank Oz breaks into breaks
into what becomes a spectacular show business career. So while
Jim is performing Sam and Friends on television in Washington,
d C. He's approached by a local coffee company called
Wilkins about doing commercial work for them. People were big
(14:00):
fans of Jim and the Muppets, and they asked Jim
if he would like to develop advertising for Wilkins coffee,
and coffee commercials back in nineteen fifty seven are very
different than they were now. Usually they were about ten
to fifteen seconds. Normally, what they would do is they
would put a picture up on screen of coffee and
coffee coming with steam and this beautiful shot of coffee
(14:21):
beans and they would just say, you know, enjoy a
great cup of coffee in the morning from Senka, and
that was essentially the commercial. You've got about ten seconds
to get the message across. So what Jim does is
he creates two characters called Wilkins and Won'tkins. And in
Jim's idea, Wilkins is the character that will drink Wilkins
coffee and Wonkins is the character that won't drink Wilkins coffee.
(14:42):
And if you look at Wilkins and Wilkins, it gives
you a very early idea of Jim's sort of sense
of comedy and building in that you've got Wilkins, who's
sort of tall and skinny and Wokins, who's sort of
triangular and squatty, And that's Laurel and Hardy. It's tall
and skinny versus short and fat up against each other.
Jim love that. You see that, For example, in Ernie
(15:03):
and Burt. You know, we've got this sort of uptight character,
this very horizontal character in Ernie. It's Bunting and Beaker
from the Muppet Show again, sort of the roundness of
Bunting and the tall, skinny Beaker. So Jim loves that
style of building. We see that very early on with
Wilkins and Wilkins. So what happens in his very first
commercial is you've got Wonkins staring down the barrel of
(15:23):
a cannon and Wilkins says, you know, hey, buddy, do
you like Wilkins coffee?
Speaker 3 (15:28):
And Wolkins says, I never tasted it, and he fires
the cannon.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Adham blows him the screen then immediately whirls the camera
toward the viewer and says, now how about you.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Okay, buddy, what do you think of Wilkins comfee? I
never dressed it? Now what do you think of Wilkins?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
And that's the end of the commercial.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
It goes by so quickly that you almost don't realize
what you've just seen is being threatened if you don't
want to drink Wilkins coffee. It's a gigantic hit. Jim
starts getting more and more at work for Wilkins Coffee.
I think he does Wilkins commercials for something like nine
or ten years, maybe even longer. Coffee copanies around the
country start asking him to do the same commercials for them,
and Jim, because he's such a professional, doesn't dub in
(16:05):
the names of other companies. He goes and refilms them
over and over again with the puppets saying the names
of the actual coffee companies. He does ads for bread companies.
After that, he creates characters to sell bread. He's selling tea,
he's selling all sorts of things. The muppets are actually
built on the back of advertising.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
The ad work that Jim does with Wilkins and Wonkins
very successful, gets him a lot of work, and he
does it for a long time on throughout the nineteen sixties. Effect,
he's still doing ad work, and that permits him to
become the creative that he really wants to be, because
he doesn't have to worry about keeping the lights on.
He's got enough resources coming in from advertising to let
him sort of go out and be Jim Henson and
(16:42):
do new and different things.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
But Wilkins and.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Wolkins they're not what you're expecting out of a coffee commercial.
They're a scream, almost literally, and it's no wonder they
were hugely successful. It was a way of selling coffee
nobody had ever thought of before threatening people to drink coffee.
I mean, who would have ever.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Thought, You know, people who don't drink Wilkins coffee just
blow up sometimes. Oh that's a lot of fun, see
what I mean? And you're listening to Brian J. Jones
tell the story of Jim Henson and my goodness, starting
off at the very beginnings of TV and creating his
own sort of school of puppetry because he sort of
learned it off the shelf, then improvised him. Because he
(17:18):
didn't know the rules, he was free to break them.
We learned this about Irving Berlin too. He didn't study music,
he couldn't read music, and he only played the black keys.
And this is so much of what we learn about America.
Our ability to adapt and innovate and break new ground
or do it yourself is Jim realizes the four squares
of the TV is the puppet stage. This is the
(17:39):
great revelation, and of course the humor just in contrast,
and that's the short and the squatty and the toll
on the skinny. Merely the sight of these contrasts is
itself funny. When we come back more of this remarkable
talent and how it came to be the story of
Jim Henson here on our American Stories, and we're back
(18:09):
with our American stories and with Brian Jay Jones sharing
the story of the life and work of Jim Henson.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Back to Brian, Jim has got a great gig going
in the nineteen sixties with Rolf on the Jimmy Dean Show.
But he's also got the Muppets doing variety shows. But
Jim is sort of creatively restless in the nineteen sixties.
He's got so many different things going on, and again,
partly because he's got so much adwork going on, he
can afford to explore all these different avenues. He actually
(18:38):
has done enough variety shows that he's fairly certain the
muppets can hold their own for half an hour so
he's pitching what will become almost fifteen years later, the
actual Muppet Show. But something happens in nineteen sixty nine
or late sixty eight that really shapes his destiny moving forward,
and that is that he's offered the job working with
Children's Television Workshop they're putting together Sesame Street. They say,
(19:02):
you know, we need to have puppets. We would like
to have puppets on Sesame Street, a little short films
featuring puppets. And John Stone, who is also one of
the sort of founding fathers of Sesame.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
He said, you know, I've got the guy for this.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
It's Jim Henson, and he's so good that if you
can't get him to do puppets for Sesame Street, then
you probably shouldn't have puppets on Sesame Street. I think
the way they ultimately got him was they also said,
there's a lot of different things you can do for this,
and Jim, who considers himself again as an experimental filmmaker,
is allowed to make all these little short films that
(19:35):
so many of us don't even know are Jim Henson films.
So I think part part of what attracted him to
Sesame Street was not only that he really loved the project,
Jim wanted television to matter. This is at the time
when Neil Minno was calling television the vast wasteland. Jim
wanted TV to have value. He loved TV so much
that he wanted everyone else to understand TV could do
some good things. So I think that was one of
(19:56):
the big reasons he took the job, and was to
educate kids and make TV matter, but also because they
were going to let him do all these really interesting
little short films. So he's sort of right there. In
the founding DNA of Sesame Street. The Muppets were so
important to Sesame Here that they wanted them performing all
these little you know what they called inserts. You would
perform these three or four minute little bits that they
(20:17):
would then insert into the show. But initially, when they
were developing Sesime Street, they wanted the segments featuring the
Muppets to be completely distinctive, completely separate from anything else
going on on the street. They wanted Susan and Bob
and mister Hooper they existed in one universe, and Ernie
and Burt and Cookie Muster and all those muppets existed
in their own separate universe as well. They didn't want
them crossing over because, as Jim would call them, the
(20:39):
Eggheads had decided that you couldn't mix the fantasy with
the realistic element, that children wouldn't understand that. But once
they started showing the test pilots of Sesame Street to kids,
they found out they had a problem and that they
would all sit up and watch when the Muppets were
on screen, and then when they went back to Bob
and Susan and mister Hooper, the kids would start to
tune out. So they knew they needed to bring muppets
(21:02):
onto the street itself, and so Jim was tasked with
creating some muppets that would live perpetually on Sesame Street,
and that's where he creates Big Bird and Oscar the Grouse,
specifically to sort of break that wall and put the
Muppets existing on Sesame Street itself. Jim knew there was
no way he could perform those characters himself. It would
involve too much of his time, and Frank Oz was
(21:23):
too important to the company as well, too busy with him.
So he hired a really amazing performer named Carol Spinney,
who performs both Oscar and Big Bird. As he always said,
he doesn't, you know, need to talk to a psychiatrist.
He's working out both sides of his personality all the time.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
It's just an.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Incredible track recordn incredible performer. But Big Bird, you know,
really gave you the point of view of the child.
That was what was so important about Big Bird on there.
Oscar was the one that let you know it was
okay to kind of lose it every once in a
while as long as you came back and people still
liked you.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
But Big Bird was really important to that show.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
And in fact, when Sesame Street first got on the
cover of Time magazine shortly after it went on the air,
it was Big Bird who was on the cover of
the magazine. Jim Henson always knew the Muppets could hold
their own. He had done enough variety show appearances throughout
the sixties that he was fairly confident that if given
the opportunity, they could flesh out the characters, they could
flesh out the scenarios and give them Muppets their own
(22:16):
variety show. So that was something he was pitching for
a long time. If you look into his archives, there's
pitches for The Muppet Show as far back as nineteen
sixty five, I think, so this was something that Jim
knew would work. You know, He's on one of the
biggest shows in the world, was Sesame Street, and he's
developing at the same time sort of these early versions
of The Muppet Show. He initially pitches them as TV specials.
(22:39):
He has a big fan in a young executive at
ABC named Michael Eisner, who gets Jim. I mean, Jim's
lucky that he gets Eisner. Eisner sort of understands him
and green lights a Muppet TV special which is sort
of meant to be a pilot for The Muppet Show.
So the first version is called The Muppets Valentine's Stay Show.
It's an hour long variety show with their special guests
(23:00):
Mia Farrow.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Jim's not quite sure what to do with it yet.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
It's we're not sure as viewers where it's set. It's
it's in a conservatory maybe, but it's an artsy version.
It doesn't have walls, it's kind of framed up, and
the host is somebody.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
We don't really know.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Nobody looks familiar in it, but The Muppets Valentine's Day
Show does okay in the ratings, does well enough that
Michael Aiser says, you know, let's do another one. So
Jim does a second pilot, this time calls it the
Muppet Show Sex and Violence, which Jim just thinks it's hilarious.
It's starting to look a little more familiar. It's the
first time we see Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem
(23:37):
show up on this. You know, so you've got animal
and the Swedish chef shows up in it. Mss Piggy
is there, but she's a background character in a sketch.
But again we don't really know where it's set. It
looks like it's maybe in a TV control room, and
it's hosted by Nigel who's not again not Karma. Karmit's
in it, but he's not the host. So there's still
something off. Still doesn't feel right, and it does okay again,
(23:59):
but not enough to get his own show.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
So Jim sort of got two strikes.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Already for a Muppet show in the United States, and
at that time he's also doing variety shows and he
makes an appearance on The Share Show with a director
named George Slotter, who was one of the sort of
masterminds behind laughing, and George Schlatter tells him, you know, Jim,
let's put together a pittriol for you and I can
take it to CBS, and let's put together sort of
a highlight reel of Muppet performances.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
And then at the very end of this thing, Jim
does something brilliant. It's about two minutes of.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
This pitch man looking right into the camera and calling
out executives by name and telling them, you're gonna want
to buy the show. The show's as American as apple pie.
And then you're gonna want to buy this show. And
it's just hilarious. And when you watch it, you can't
believe that CBS would pass. But CBS passes, so you've
(24:47):
got sort of three strikes on this already. But Jim
is so sure this is gonna work that he's just like,
it's a real study and stick to itiveness here. Eventually,
what happens He's approached by Lord Lou Gray, who runs
a TV studios in London, who, again, serendipitously, sort of
like Michael Eisner, Lord Grade really gets Jim.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
Lord Graid came out of vaudeville.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
He did something almost similar to what Jim did with television,
understanding how the audience perceives the screen. When Lord Grade
was dancing in Vodville, he would dance to Charleston on
this oval table, but he would turn the skinny in
toward the audience, so it looked like it was really hard,
even though the surface area of the table hadn't changed
any at all. The audience thought it was this really
teeny table. So, you know, really really sort of understands Jim.
(25:33):
They're sort of cut from the same cloth. And Lord
Grade is the one who says, you know, I'll give you.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
The money you need for this.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Gim, I'll give you one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
an episode, which was a phenomenal amount of money in
nineteen seventy five for a half hour show, but I
need you to come over and use my film studios
at Elstree and film it there at the ATV studios.
Jim doesn't even ask his wife, doesn't even ask Jane.
He accepts right there that they've got their deal, and
the Muppet Show is born out of the this relationship
(26:01):
between Jim and lou Grad, who both understand each other,
and for five years Jim lives and works in London
creating The Muppet Show, which turns out to be one
of the biggest, most successful shows in the world. It's
one of the first shows sort of made explicitly for syndication.
Every market in the United States picks it up. At
one point they said joke that their producer, David Laser,
would be claiming a viewership larger than the actual population
(26:22):
of the planet. It just got bigger and bigger every
time David Laser would talk about it. You know, wins
the Emmy Award for Best Comedy I think in nineteen
seventy seven. So just the biggest show in the world,
and everybody wants to be on it. Every performer wants
to get on The Muppet Show, and the when they
get on there, they want to do something crazy and different.
Whether you're you know, balancing spoons on the in your nose,
or you're dancing with a with a seven foot carrot
(26:43):
like Gilda Radner does, or you know.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Everybody wanted to do the show.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
It got to the point where they had people like
Kenny Rogers writing them letters saying, please let me come
on and do the show.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Everybody wanted to be on the.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Muppet Show, a gigantic, hugely successful.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Show, and you're listening to author Brian J. Jones tell
the story of Jim Henson and what he saw in
the future of TV was what it was a vision,
then his experience with failure, a couple of pilots, a
CBS pitch, until someone finally gets him, and all of
a sudden, overnight, after a lot of hard work, a
(27:17):
huge sensation and pretty soon every star in the world
wants to appear on The Muppet Show. When we come back,
more of this remarkable story of Jim Henson here on
our American Stories, and we're back with our American stories
(27:40):
and the story of Jim Henson and the Muppets. Back
to Brian J. Jones and the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
What was really great about the Muppet Show was they
got really lucky with time and place in the sense
that you know, it's the seventies, it's not like today.
Whe if a show's not a hit within the first
week it comes out, they yank it off the air
streaming under they cancel it. They were sort of given
the time that they needed to develop the characters and
for Jim when it came to the Muppets character was
always King, and you had to figure out the relationship
(28:09):
between your characters. That's what people responded to. The Muppets
are funny, but the Muppets are also family, and that's
something that Jim understood intuitively, that performers understood intuitively, and
that are writers like Jerry Jewel understood intuitively. Now, the
issue you had is in the first season of The
Muppa Show, Jerry Joel was not the head writer.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
So that first season of.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
The Muppet Show is about a lot of quick hit sketches.
It deliberately almost looks like laughing. You had some laughing
writers writing on it. By the second season, Jerry Joel
comes in as head writer and you start to really
develop the relationships between the characters. One of my very
favorite moments is early on that you know, Fozzy was
intended to be Frank Oz's main character until Miss Piggy
sort of took over. But even early on they weren't
(28:51):
quite sure what to do with Fozzy. Jerry Joel said,
you know, he was great to Heckle, like they could
have Statler and walerf Hecklam. He was a great character
to Heckle, But he said but then you really felt
sorry for him. They didn't really know what to do
with Fozzy. But there's a great sketch called good Grief.
The Comedians are Bear. Jerry Joel wrote it. They send
it down to the floor to be performed very late
in the day. Did not have any time to rehearse it,
(29:11):
just sort of read through it once and then just
cut the two of them loose. And the sketch is
about Fozzy trying to get Kermit to help him tell
a joke, and he keeps telling Kermit to come in
with a punchline when he hears him say the word here.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Now, fraud of my heart, you will just wait until
I say the word here.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
When you hear me say the word here, you.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Will rush up to me and say good grief.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
The comedians are.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Bear, good grief. The comedians are bear.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Check when you say the word here, right, gotcha?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
But unfortunately there's an hr E and there's an hg R.
And Kerma keeps getting those words messed up and comes
in at the wrong time.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Ready, okay, here we go now, Dan, Hi Yeah, hi ya,
hi yah. You're a wonderful looking nance. It's a pleasure
to be here. Climb Grief the comedian, So here was
not wrong here?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Which is right here? The other hears it's utter chaos.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
And at one point in that routine, Fozzy's hat falls
off and you can't stop camera from him to pick
up put back.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
They just they just keep rolling. Hey, hey, folks, this
is a story again.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Love to hear good grief the comedians. I was here, and.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
As Jerry says, they just played the hell out of it.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
And that was the moment when they realized that the
point of Fozzy was, you know, he's the great sidekick,
but he just you know, he just wants to approval.
He just he just wants to make you laugh and
he wants to be approved and he and he wants
to be loved. And Frank Oz said, you know, that's
the moment when you get a handle on the character.
And that's sort of the moment that Fazzy Bear arrives.
But they were given time to let that happen. Miss
(30:50):
Piggy is a character that had to sort of arrive.
She didn't show up fully formed. She was initially a
back row character, was sort of handed around between performers
or when she first appeared on The Muppet show. If
you watch some of those Muppet shows on Disney right now,
you'll hear her speaking with the wrong voice at one
point because Richard Hunt and other performers performing her, Oz
(31:12):
ends up performing her at one point and they're still
not quite sure, you know, what they're doing with her.
She's not a primary character, but she gets annoyed with
Kermit and she was supposed to slap him, and Frank
Oz turned the slap into a karate chop instead. He
thought it was just funnier. Well, that's another story that
Jerry Joel says. When they were watching it happen, the
(31:32):
room just stopped and everybody knew you had to see
it again. They knew that that character had arrived. And
that's the moment Miss Piggy's is sort of born. And
you know, Frank I was always tad about she was.
She was kind of a truck river who wanted to
be a runway model, and that character ends up just
taking over. The character was so strong that that Piggy
becomes the breakout star of the Muppet Show. You know,
(31:54):
it gets her own posters, and she's on magazine covers
and she's got her own makeups. It's just this huge
breakout star born out of this impromptu moment when they
were just trying to find the character. You had to
have time, and as we know about Jim, time was
something he didn't always think he had, but the Muppet
Show was given the time it needed, and typical of
(32:14):
Jim Henson, in around nineteen eighty, he says, you know,
that was a really really.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Nice show, and he takes off the air, willingly takes
it off the air because he wants to go and
do other things, namely movies.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
But you know, only Jim would take off a show
at the height of its power, calling it a very
nice show, just so he can go off and do
other things, so he's not stretched too thin, he can
pour his creativity into that next project. Jim brought this
innate sense of joy to almost everything that he did,
Even serious projects like Labyrinth was something that he just
(32:47):
loved doing. He loved building that world, he loved working
with David Bowie, you know, he loved developing the animatronics
for The Dark Crystal. He loved telling the stories and
something like you know, the Jim Henson storyteller. Jim just
brought joy to every project he did. He wanted his
performers to have fun. The Sesame Street performers talk about
the best times they had is laying in a pile
(33:10):
laughing with each other, you know, with their arms up
in the air because of just what they were doing.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Was so much fun.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Jim also understood that children aren't stupid. Jim never spoke
down to a child. There's a great sketch. It's a
sketch I love so much, but I think it also
really speaks to Jim's power as a performer. And it's
Kermit with a little girl named Joey singing the ABC's
and she keeps stopping to say cookie Monster. And there's
no script for this. This is Jim as Kermit interacting
(33:39):
with a child who believes in Kermit entirely. I guess
to remember. Jim is kneeling on the floor right in
front of her, but he's gone. She's focusing right on Kermit,
meeting Kermit at his level, and Kermit is talking to
her straight on. She gets the giggles and Kermit gets infuriated,
and then she says she loves him, and he comes
back and says he loves her too.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
This, you know, this is Jim.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
It goes q RS, you're just teasing me.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
W x y Z.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Next time Coaster with Joe, I.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Love you, I love you too.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
I mean, this is the way Jim was with children,
meeting them right at their level, you know, having that
fake exasperation and trying not to laugh at the same time.
That's the way he dealt with kids, and that's part
of the strength of the Muppets, both on Sepston Street
and on The Muppet Show. Jim also understood that their
parents aren't stupid, that the parents like to have fun.
If the parents are sitting there watching assessments you with
their kids, then darn it. He would like to be
(34:46):
sure that they're entertained as well. So that's something again
Jim just sort of inherently understood, and it came from
sitting around with his own family, listening to people talk
and listening to people laugh, and listening to them tell
stories and listening to.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Them be respectful of each other.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
So that that's the methodology that Jim brought to the Muppets,
and I think that's why the Muppets feel like family.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Years before his death.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
In nineteen eighty six, he was feeling very introspective and
he thought this was a good time to write letters
to his children, to tell them how much he loved them,
how much he loved what he did and what he
wanted to have done after he died, And what he
tells everybody in these letters is, you know, don't be
sad that I'm gone. You know, I'll see you again someday.
(35:28):
I'm sure if I can watch over you and help
you know that, I'll do that. Take care of each other,
look out for each other, and ultimately he says, you know,
it's a good life.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
But Jim had set out the way he wanted his
funeral carried out, which was, you know, people should dress colorfully,
nobody should wear black, and wanted people to just talk
about how much fun they'd had working together and how
much they loved doing these things, which is exactly what
they did at the funeral. So this is a memorial service,
and the really remarkable part of it occurs towards the
end when all them up and performers come up on
(35:58):
stage to sing some of Jim's favorite songs. It's about
a fifteen minute segment, but the last three minutes or
so is them singing just one person, which is is
from the musical Snoopy.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
It's just one person believes in you. It's all about
the joy of collaboration.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
You know, it's just one person believes in you, and
then you know, why not another, you know, get together
with another person and then bring in three people and
four and just keep adding people and collaboration gets better
and better, and it's more joyful the more people you
bring into it. And as they're singing the song, they
keep bringing more and more Muppets into this until the
entire stage is filled with the Muppet performers meaning up.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
As It's just a really remarkable moment.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Every performer I talked with who was on that stage
said they to this day still don't know how they
got through it. Everybody's crying through it. I don't know
how they're managing sing but somehow they are. But it's
a really incredible, really poignant moment, and one that one.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
That Jim said asked be done.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
It's just it's it's just a it's a fantastic moment,
you know, a showman, a showman to.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
The very end, and a terrific job on the production
editing and storytelling by our own Madison Dericott and a
special thanks to Brian J. Jones. He's the author of
Jim Henson, the Biography. It's available on Amazon or wherever
you buy your books. Pick it up. You will not
regret it. And my goodness, the Muppets aren't just funny.
(37:32):
Their family and they were. They were America's family, those characters,
and they were real characters to kids and adults alike.
They came to life. One of the great attributes of
Henson was never talking down to his audience, whether it
be kids or adults. And always there was that innate
sense of joy in the performances. Always it was there.
(37:53):
And that scene, that memorial service, I remember it, and
I remember it like I remember Jimmy Stewart reading the
poem about his dog who died, and Johnny Carson just
before he died. These things stay with you forever. The
story of Jim Henson an American original. Here on our
American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the Star and the American People,
and Kermit the Frog and Cookie Monster to Big Bird
and Oscar the Grouch. So many of our most beloved
TV personalities came from the imagination and the hands of
Jim Henson. Joining us now is Brian J. Jones, author
(00:31):
of Jim Henson The Biography, with the full story of
the man behind the Muppets. Take It Away.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Brian Jim was born in Leland, Mississippi, in nineteen thirty
six September twenty three. His father was a agronomous with
Youth Department of Agriculture, and if that was the case,
especially during that point in American history coming out of
the Depression, you were going to either be in Mississippi
or Maryland, and as it turned out, Jim Henson's father
(00:58):
was both places. Jim was sort of born and of
the South, but actually did most of us growing up
in Maryland, which is why he doesn't really have that
Southern accent.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Jim was always sort of a Southern gentleman.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
You can never entirely take the South out of Jim,
but for the most part he was raised right outside
of Washington, d C. In Maryland. His parents were Paul
and Betty Henson. Jim had one older brother named Paul
as well, who was killed.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
At a young age.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Killed at age nineteen while he was serving in the Navy.
He was killed in an automobile elecident down in Florida.
Sort of a defining moment in Jim's life actually, because
that was a moment I think that he realized that
life was short, and as a lot of his colleagues
and his family and his children told me, Jim seemed
to realize there may never be enough time to do
everything he wanted to do. But as his daughter Lisa
(01:46):
put it once that happened with the death of his brother,
he had rocket fuel in his blood and just was
constantly in motion for the rest of his life, constantly
had ideas he was developing. He would have ideas written
on yellow notepads in black pen, which is way he
did everything in his notebooks. And then at the same
time he might have something actually that he was performing,
and he might be also building puppets for another performance
(02:08):
and developing animatronics and writing lyrics for songs for broadway
shows that didn't exist yet and pitching TV series, some
of which made it, some of which didn't. So Jim
is a man constantly in motion. One of the most
important figures in Jim's life and in his development as
an artist is his grandmother, Deer. Now Deer's actually the
(02:28):
daughter of a Civil War map maker, and so I
think you can sort of see Jim's creativity as a
through line all the way back to that ancestor, who
you know, drew beautiful maps and was really really talented.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
And Deer is one of.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
These people who could sew anything. People talked about how
she could sew close out of an old army blanket
that you could barely get a needle through. That she
was just that, you know, that deft with a needle,
and that talented, and that able to create things. And
she's the one that when Jim was a child, really
encouraged him to write and draw, and Deer really encouraged
him to be taught him how to sew. Jim is
(03:00):
one of these one of these people that is self
taught but also went through home economics in college and
was a really master you know it, could sew anything
and knew how to like sew something. So you couldn't
see the scene, So a lot of that came out
of Deer. And he loved just the art of conversation.
How they loved to sit around the dinner table in
the evenings and talk.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And Jim loved.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Conversation, loved to listen to people tell stories. He loved
that his parents would all everybody in the family would
gather around this old pump organ that his mom, Betty
had as she was you know, pumped this with her
feet while she played the organ, and they would stand
around and sing songs from the Pogo song Book, for example,
and songs of Aa Milne. Jim just loved family gatherings.
That's one of those things that influences Jim's work is
(03:41):
just the value the fun that families could have being together,
talking with each other, being with each other, singing songs together,
laughing together. I think that really informs his work going
forward as well. Jim Henson was a gadget guy his
entire life. As a kid, he was always trying to
build radios and as one of his childhood friends told me,
(04:01):
Jim's actually worked.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Jim can actually pick.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Up a radio segment with his old crystal radios that
he was building. He and his brother Paul were always
fiddling with something in the garage. They were always making
model kits and airplanes and you know, building something, creating something,
something gadgety in their garage. And Jim from a young
age was fascinated by television, and he was fascinated by
the very idea that what you were seeing on your
(04:24):
TV screen was going on someplace else.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Right at that moment.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
A lot of TV presentations back then were live, including commercials.
So Jim just he was fascinated by TV, and as
he put it, badgered his parents. He was determined to
get one, and his father actually bought them a television
for the Hentson household in nineteen forty nine, which is
pretty early actually in the development of the TV. There
weren't a lot of people that had TVs at that time,
not a lot of channels around, so Jim was an
(04:49):
early adapter of the tech, which again is something else
he would do throughout his entire life. But fascinated by
a television, Jim wanted more than anything else to be
on television or work on television, needing care if it
was in front of the camera or behind the camera.
When Jim is in high school. He's doing a lot
of work in theater productions and in building sets, and
(05:10):
he really thought that he might get into television as
a stage designer, again, working behind the scenes unseen. Well,
Jim turns out to be sort of unseen a lot
of the time because what offers him his opportunity to
get into television is there's an advertisement in the local
newspapers and one of the TV stations, the local CBS affiliate,
is advertising for as they put a young people to
(05:30):
operate puppets for a local television show, a local kids show.
So Jim, who doesn't really know anything about puppets, Jim
wasn't one of these kids you know growing up who
was playing with puppets all the time. He's not Steven
Spielberg crashing his trains into each other and filming them
and everyone says, oh, that Steven wants to be a
movie director. Jim didn't really play with puppets, really liked
Charlie McCarthy on the radio, Love listening to Egerberger and
(05:52):
Charlie McCarthy. That was sort of the extent of his
familiary with puppets. But when he sees this ad in
the newspaper asking for people who can perform puppets or
a local television show. Jim is determined to do whatever
it takes to get that job and get in the
door by any means necessary. He, in the span of
about two weeks, by checking books out of the local library,
teaches himself how to build puppets and how to perform puppets.
(06:16):
So Jim sort of has this crash core self taught
in the art of performing puppets and goes down to
the local television station auditions and gets the job. That
was really all he kind of wanted puppets for at
that point was just to get him in the door again.
Once he gets in the door, he wants to start
working in stage design and maybe production and directing if
he can.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
But it turns out.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
That Jim is really really good at puppetry, and I
think part of the reason that happened is because he
didn't really know what the rules so to speak of
puppetry and puppet performance were, So he doesn't know what
rules he's breaking, and he doesn't know what rules he's following.
Is he goes along, So Jim has this really intuitive
feel for the way Puppets should look and act on television.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you're listening to Brian J. Jones, author of Jim
Henson The Biography, telling one heck of his story. What
propels Jim Henson, What becomes rocket fuel for his life,
the death of his brother, the early death of his brother.
Life is for the living and every day is precious.
He learns that young always fiddling, always playing with things,
a fascination with TV. And then he answers that ad
(07:23):
for the local CBS affiliate and the rest as we're
going to learn his history when we come back. More
of Jim Henson's remarkable life story here on our American Stories,
Lee Jabib here again. Our American Stories tries to tell
the stories of America's past and present to Americans, and
(07:43):
we want to hear your stories too. There's some of
our favorites. Send them to us. Go to Ouramericanstories dot
com and click the your stories tab. Again, please go
to Ouramericanstories dot com and click the your Stories tab
(08:09):
and we're back with our American Stories and with the
story of Jim Henson, the mastermind behind the Muppets. Back
to Brian J. Jones with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
At that time, there's not a lot of puppetry on television.
It's Kuglafran and Ollie. Jim understood something that kucklo Fran
and Allie didn't quite grasp. They're filming the puppet stage.
Burtils from stands behind the stage, pokes his puppets up
from behind the curtain. France stands in front of that
puppet stage and interacts with the puppets. But they're still
filming the puppet theater. It's almost like if today you
(08:40):
would show a movie by walking into the movie theater
and filming the movie on screen and then showing that
on TV. Jim understood that if you've got the four
sides of the TV, that entire space that the camera
sees is your puppet theater. And what happens then is
that opens up an entire universe for the puppets to
interact in. They can come in from the bottom, they
(09:01):
can come in from the sides, they can rush the
television screen, they can back into a shot by backing
in behind the camera. It creates a whole new three
D world for the puppets to exist in. And that's
Jim's first real big innovation is how puppets look on TV.
And he also understands that if they're on TV, you
want them to have mouths that open, and he wanted
eyes that looked focused.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Jim figured out how to position the eyes.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
He figured out if he slightly cross the eyes, when
you place them, all of a sudden, they're magically focused.
Jim figures all this out just by you knowing how
to build. And the other big innovation that he has
is he also understands that if what you're seeing in
those four sides of the TV monitor is what matters most,
if that's the world where the puppets existing, then you
(09:42):
need to know what that looks like at all times.
And so Jim does something again, finding a solution in
plain side. Jim is one of these guys that, like
can always figure out how to handle a problem in
a way that isn't always obvious. Jim's solution to that
is he just puts a television monitor on the floor.
It's something no other performer gets to do. Any other
performer has to watch themselves on tape after the fact.
Jim can see himself on TV in real time, can
(10:03):
see his performance real time. The only other issue with
that is if you're looking at what's going on in
the TV. If you want your character to go right
on the TV monitor, you actually have to go to
your left over your head to make that happen. And
that's again it's still the Muppet style of performing today.
If you watch them performing on Sesame Street, for example,
they're not watching the puppet over their head. They're looking
down at that monitor on the floor, so they can
(10:24):
see exactly what that camera sees, you know. Sixty years later,
so Jim, who doesn't know anything about puppetry until he
uses it to get on TV, finds out just how
great a performer he is, as do others. So after
he's come in the door at the local CBS station,
the show he's doing goes under very quickly, partly because
they were using miners to work, which was a permitted
(10:46):
under the work permit, and.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Jim immediately gets his own show at the local NBC.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
They scoop him up, and while he's still in college,
he starts performing every single night before the local news.
He performs a show that he he creates and writes
and develops. All the characters were called Salmon Friends, and
this is just a local puppet show. By this time,
Jim is coined the term Muppets, which contrey to most
local legend, isn't really a combination of marionette and puppet.
(11:14):
Jim thought it was a word that sounded great. Buppet's
a word that's around by nineteen fifty four. Jim's got
that very early on, and Kermit comes along in nineteen
fifty five.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Very early in the Muppets story.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Let's not be quite so formal.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Why don't you just call me Kermit and I'll call
you a well, what.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Would you like me to call you?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
When his grandfather was dying, Jim sort of dealt with
that grief the way.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
He always did.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
He started building, and Kermit he builds at that time,
cuts it out of his mother's coat, and he's not
a frog at this point. He's just sort of Kermit
the thing in this abstract form, made out of his
mother's coat, with ping pong balls for eyes. It's basically
a ping pong ball cut in half with a slashed circle,
making the eye looks familiar to us because he's got
(11:58):
sort of the same shaped head, but it he's clearly
not a frog yet, and he's the wrong color. But
that's where karma comes from. Kermit is almost a day
one muppet. Kermit becomes one of the breakout stars of
Sam and Friends.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
And Sam and Francis.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
It becomes this huge local sensation and it catches the
attention of folks in New York City, and Jim does
the Tonight Show when it was still Steve Allen, he
does Jack Parr.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
He starts making all these.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Appearances on variety shows, performing the muppets on the Brain Show,
and he's a huge hit. From there, he gets asked
to participate the Jimmy Dean Show, another gigantic show, and
he creates Rolf the Dog for that show because they
wanted Jimmy to have somebody to talk to. So he
creates sort of this home spun version of a dog
that he names Rolf, and that's one of the first
(12:42):
times jim actually uses his own voice for a character,
and it becomes a breakout star on the Jimmy Dean
Show in the early nineteen sixties, ends up getting more fan.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Mail than Jimmy Dean does.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Jimmy Dean used to sort of complain jokingly that the
dog was more popular than he was on the show.
So Kermit is sort of a local here, Rolf is
seen across the country. It becomes sort of the first
national hit that Jim has. And what's great about Rolf
is Rolf is one of these puppets. Unlike Kermit, who
you know, has arms that are on sticks so you
can sort of wave them around.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Rolf has to pick things up.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Way that's performed is what they call a live hand muppet,
where you put your right hand because Jim's right hand,
and he puts his.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Right hand up in Rolf's head to operate the mouth.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And then Ralf's hands are actually just, you know, sort
of these long arms with fingers hanging off them, and
Jim would put his left hand in the left hand
of Rolf, but then that left the right hand open.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Somebody else has to perform that right hand.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Well.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Jim hired a nineteen year old performer named frank.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Oz, who was just out of high school, to literally
be his right hand man to perform that right hand
for Rolf. And that's how frank Oz breaks into breaks
into what becomes a spectacular show business career. So while
Jim is performing Sam and Friends on television in Washington,
d C. He's approached by a local coffee company called
Wilkins about doing commercial work for them. People were big
(14:00):
fans of Jim and the Muppets, and they asked Jim
if he would like to develop advertising for Wilkins coffee,
and coffee commercials back in nineteen fifty seven are very
different than they were now. Usually they were about ten
to fifteen seconds. Normally, what they would do is they
would put a picture up on screen of coffee and
coffee coming with steam and this beautiful shot of coffee
(14:21):
beans and they would just say, you know, enjoy a
great cup of coffee in the morning from Senka, and
that was essentially the commercial. You've got about ten seconds
to get the message across. So what Jim does is
he creates two characters called Wilkins and Won'tkins. And in
Jim's idea, Wilkins is the character that will drink Wilkins
coffee and Wonkins is the character that won't drink Wilkins coffee.
(14:42):
And if you look at Wilkins and Wilkins, it gives
you a very early idea of Jim's sort of sense
of comedy and building in that you've got Wilkins, who's
sort of tall and skinny and Wokins, who's sort of
triangular and squatty, And that's Laurel and Hardy. It's tall
and skinny versus short and fat up against each other.
Jim love that. You see that, For example, in Ernie
(15:03):
and Burt. You know, we've got this sort of uptight character,
this very horizontal character in Ernie. It's Bunting and Beaker
from the Muppet Show again, sort of the roundness of
Bunting and the tall, skinny Beaker. So Jim loves that
style of building. We see that very early on with
Wilkins and Wilkins. So what happens in his very first
commercial is you've got Wonkins staring down the barrel of
(15:23):
a cannon and Wilkins says, you know, hey, buddy, do
you like Wilkins coffee?
Speaker 3 (15:28):
And Wolkins says, I never tasted it, and he fires
the cannon.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Adham blows him the screen then immediately whirls the camera
toward the viewer and says, now how about you.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Okay, buddy, what do you think of Wilkins comfee? I
never dressed it? Now what do you think of Wilkins?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
And that's the end of the commercial.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
It goes by so quickly that you almost don't realize
what you've just seen is being threatened if you don't
want to drink Wilkins coffee. It's a gigantic hit. Jim
starts getting more and more at work for Wilkins Coffee.
I think he does Wilkins commercials for something like nine
or ten years, maybe even longer. Coffee copanies around the
country start asking him to do the same commercials for them,
and Jim, because he's such a professional, doesn't dub in
(16:05):
the names of other companies. He goes and refilms them
over and over again with the puppets saying the names
of the actual coffee companies. He does ads for bread companies.
After that, he creates characters to sell bread. He's selling tea,
he's selling all sorts of things. The muppets are actually
built on the back of advertising.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
The ad work that Jim does with Wilkins and Wonkins
very successful, gets him a lot of work, and he
does it for a long time on throughout the nineteen sixties. Effect,
he's still doing ad work, and that permits him to
become the creative that he really wants to be, because
he doesn't have to worry about keeping the lights on.
He's got enough resources coming in from advertising to let
him sort of go out and be Jim Henson and
(16:42):
do new and different things.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
But Wilkins and.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Wolkins they're not what you're expecting out of a coffee commercial.
They're a scream, almost literally, and it's no wonder they
were hugely successful. It was a way of selling coffee
nobody had ever thought of before threatening people to drink coffee.
I mean, who would have ever.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Thought, You know, people who don't drink Wilkins coffee just
blow up sometimes. Oh that's a lot of fun, see
what I mean? And you're listening to Brian J. Jones
tell the story of Jim Henson and my goodness, starting
off at the very beginnings of TV and creating his
own sort of school of puppetry because he sort of
learned it off the shelf, then improvised him. Because he
(17:18):
didn't know the rules, he was free to break them.
We learned this about Irving Berlin too. He didn't study music,
he couldn't read music, and he only played the black keys.
And this is so much of what we learn about America.
Our ability to adapt and innovate and break new ground
or do it yourself is Jim realizes the four squares
of the TV is the puppet stage. This is the
(17:39):
great revelation, and of course the humor just in contrast,
and that's the short and the squatty and the toll
on the skinny. Merely the sight of these contrasts is
itself funny. When we come back more of this remarkable
talent and how it came to be the story of
Jim Henson here on our American Stories, and we're back
(18:09):
with our American stories and with Brian Jay Jones sharing
the story of the life and work of Jim Henson.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Back to Brian, Jim has got a great gig going
in the nineteen sixties with Rolf on the Jimmy Dean Show.
But he's also got the Muppets doing variety shows. But
Jim is sort of creatively restless in the nineteen sixties.
He's got so many different things going on, and again,
partly because he's got so much adwork going on, he
can afford to explore all these different avenues. He actually
(18:38):
has done enough variety shows that he's fairly certain the
muppets can hold their own for half an hour so
he's pitching what will become almost fifteen years later, the
actual Muppet Show. But something happens in nineteen sixty nine
or late sixty eight that really shapes his destiny moving forward,
and that is that he's offered the job working with
Children's Television Workshop they're putting together Sesame Street. They say,
(19:02):
you know, we need to have puppets. We would like
to have puppets on Sesame Street, a little short films
featuring puppets. And John Stone, who is also one of
the sort of founding fathers of Sesame.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
He said, you know, I've got the guy for this.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
It's Jim Henson, and he's so good that if you
can't get him to do puppets for Sesame Street, then
you probably shouldn't have puppets on Sesame Street. I think
the way they ultimately got him was they also said,
there's a lot of different things you can do for this,
and Jim, who considers himself again as an experimental filmmaker,
is allowed to make all these little short films that
(19:35):
so many of us don't even know are Jim Henson films.
So I think part part of what attracted him to
Sesame Street was not only that he really loved the project,
Jim wanted television to matter. This is at the time
when Neil Minno was calling television the vast wasteland. Jim
wanted TV to have value. He loved TV so much
that he wanted everyone else to understand TV could do
some good things. So I think that was one of
(19:56):
the big reasons he took the job, and was to
educate kids and make TV matter, but also because they
were going to let him do all these really interesting
little short films. So he's sort of right there. In
the founding DNA of Sesame Street. The Muppets were so
important to Sesame Here that they wanted them performing all
these little you know what they called inserts. You would
perform these three or four minute little bits that they
(20:17):
would then insert into the show. But initially, when they
were developing Sesime Street, they wanted the segments featuring the
Muppets to be completely distinctive, completely separate from anything else
going on on the street. They wanted Susan and Bob
and mister Hooper they existed in one universe, and Ernie
and Burt and Cookie Muster and all those muppets existed
in their own separate universe as well. They didn't want
them crossing over because, as Jim would call them, the
(20:39):
Eggheads had decided that you couldn't mix the fantasy with
the realistic element, that children wouldn't understand that. But once
they started showing the test pilots of Sesame Street to kids,
they found out they had a problem and that they
would all sit up and watch when the Muppets were
on screen, and then when they went back to Bob
and Susan and mister Hooper, the kids would start to
tune out. So they knew they needed to bring muppets
(21:02):
onto the street itself, and so Jim was tasked with
creating some muppets that would live perpetually on Sesame Street,
and that's where he creates Big Bird and Oscar the Grouse,
specifically to sort of break that wall and put the
Muppets existing on Sesame Street itself. Jim knew there was
no way he could perform those characters himself. It would
involve too much of his time, and Frank Oz was
(21:23):
too important to the company as well, too busy with him.
So he hired a really amazing performer named Carol Spinney,
who performs both Oscar and Big Bird. As he always said,
he doesn't, you know, need to talk to a psychiatrist.
He's working out both sides of his personality all the time.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
It's just an.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Incredible track recordn incredible performer. But Big Bird, you know,
really gave you the point of view of the child.
That was what was so important about Big Bird on there.
Oscar was the one that let you know it was
okay to kind of lose it every once in a
while as long as you came back and people still
liked you.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
But Big Bird was really important to that show.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
And in fact, when Sesame Street first got on the
cover of Time magazine shortly after it went on the air,
it was Big Bird who was on the cover of
the magazine. Jim Henson always knew the Muppets could hold
their own. He had done enough variety show appearances throughout
the sixties that he was fairly confident that if given
the opportunity, they could flesh out the characters, they could
flesh out the scenarios and give them Muppets their own
(22:16):
variety show. So that was something he was pitching for
a long time. If you look into his archives, there's
pitches for The Muppet Show as far back as nineteen
sixty five, I think, so this was something that Jim
knew would work. You know, He's on one of the
biggest shows in the world, was Sesame Street, and he's
developing at the same time sort of these early versions
of The Muppet Show. He initially pitches them as TV specials.
(22:39):
He has a big fan in a young executive at
ABC named Michael Eisner, who gets Jim. I mean, Jim's
lucky that he gets Eisner. Eisner sort of understands him
and green lights a Muppet TV special which is sort
of meant to be a pilot for The Muppet Show.
So the first version is called The Muppets Valentine's Stay Show.
It's an hour long variety show with their special guests
(23:00):
Mia Farrow.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Jim's not quite sure what to do with it yet.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
It's we're not sure as viewers where it's set. It's
it's in a conservatory maybe, but it's an artsy version.
It doesn't have walls, it's kind of framed up, and
the host is somebody.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
We don't really know.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Nobody looks familiar in it, but The Muppets Valentine's Day
Show does okay in the ratings, does well enough that
Michael Aiser says, you know, let's do another one. So
Jim does a second pilot, this time calls it the
Muppet Show Sex and Violence, which Jim just thinks it's hilarious.
It's starting to look a little more familiar. It's the
first time we see Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem
(23:37):
show up on this. You know, so you've got animal
and the Swedish chef shows up in it. Mss Piggy
is there, but she's a background character in a sketch.
But again we don't really know where it's set. It
looks like it's maybe in a TV control room, and
it's hosted by Nigel who's not again not Karma. Karmit's
in it, but he's not the host. So there's still
something off. Still doesn't feel right, and it does okay again,
(23:59):
but not enough to get his own show.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
So Jim sort of got two strikes.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Already for a Muppet show in the United States, and
at that time he's also doing variety shows and he
makes an appearance on The Share Show with a director
named George Slotter, who was one of the sort of
masterminds behind laughing, and George Schlatter tells him, you know, Jim,
let's put together a pittriol for you and I can
take it to CBS, and let's put together sort of
a highlight reel of Muppet performances.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
And then at the very end of this thing, Jim
does something brilliant. It's about two minutes of.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
This pitch man looking right into the camera and calling
out executives by name and telling them, you're gonna want
to buy the show. The show's as American as apple pie.
And then you're gonna want to buy this show. And
it's just hilarious. And when you watch it, you can't
believe that CBS would pass. But CBS passes, so you've
(24:47):
got sort of three strikes on this already. But Jim
is so sure this is gonna work that he's just like,
it's a real study and stick to itiveness here. Eventually,
what happens He's approached by Lord Lou Gray, who runs
a TV studios in London, who, again, serendipitously, sort of
like Michael Eisner, Lord Grade really gets Jim.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
Lord Graid came out of vaudeville.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
He did something almost similar to what Jim did with television,
understanding how the audience perceives the screen. When Lord Grade
was dancing in Vodville, he would dance to Charleston on
this oval table, but he would turn the skinny in
toward the audience, so it looked like it was really hard,
even though the surface area of the table hadn't changed
any at all. The audience thought it was this really
teeny table. So, you know, really really sort of understands Jim.
(25:33):
They're sort of cut from the same cloth. And Lord
Grade is the one who says, you know, I'll give you.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
The money you need for this.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Gim, I'll give you one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
an episode, which was a phenomenal amount of money in
nineteen seventy five for a half hour show, but I
need you to come over and use my film studios
at Elstree and film it there at the ATV studios.
Jim doesn't even ask his wife, doesn't even ask Jane.
He accepts right there that they've got their deal, and
the Muppet Show is born out of the this relationship
(26:01):
between Jim and lou Grad, who both understand each other,
and for five years Jim lives and works in London
creating The Muppet Show, which turns out to be one
of the biggest, most successful shows in the world. It's
one of the first shows sort of made explicitly for syndication.
Every market in the United States picks it up. At
one point they said joke that their producer, David Laser,
would be claiming a viewership larger than the actual population
(26:22):
of the planet. It just got bigger and bigger every
time David Laser would talk about it. You know, wins
the Emmy Award for Best Comedy I think in nineteen
seventy seven. So just the biggest show in the world,
and everybody wants to be on it. Every performer wants
to get on The Muppet Show, and the when they
get on there, they want to do something crazy and different.
Whether you're you know, balancing spoons on the in your nose,
or you're dancing with a with a seven foot carrot
(26:43):
like Gilda Radner does, or you know.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Everybody wanted to do the show.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
It got to the point where they had people like
Kenny Rogers writing them letters saying, please let me come
on and do the show.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Everybody wanted to be on the.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Muppet Show, a gigantic, hugely successful.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Show, and you're listening to author Brian J. Jones tell
the story of Jim Henson and what he saw in
the future of TV was what it was a vision,
then his experience with failure, a couple of pilots, a
CBS pitch, until someone finally gets him, and all of
a sudden, overnight, after a lot of hard work, a
(27:17):
huge sensation and pretty soon every star in the world
wants to appear on The Muppet Show. When we come back,
more of this remarkable story of Jim Henson here on
our American Stories, and we're back with our American stories
(27:40):
and the story of Jim Henson and the Muppets. Back
to Brian J. Jones and the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
What was really great about the Muppet Show was they
got really lucky with time and place in the sense
that you know, it's the seventies, it's not like today.
Whe if a show's not a hit within the first
week it comes out, they yank it off the air
streaming under they cancel it. They were sort of given
the time that they needed to develop the characters and
for Jim when it came to the Muppets character was
always King, and you had to figure out the relationship
(28:09):
between your characters. That's what people responded to. The Muppets
are funny, but the Muppets are also family, and that's
something that Jim understood intuitively, that performers understood intuitively, and
that are writers like Jerry Jewel understood intuitively. Now, the
issue you had is in the first season of The
Muppa Show, Jerry Joel was not the head writer.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
So that first season of.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
The Muppet Show is about a lot of quick hit sketches.
It deliberately almost looks like laughing. You had some laughing
writers writing on it. By the second season, Jerry Joel
comes in as head writer and you start to really
develop the relationships between the characters. One of my very
favorite moments is early on that you know, Fozzy was
intended to be Frank Oz's main character until Miss Piggy
sort of took over. But even early on they weren't
(28:51):
quite sure what to do with Fozzy. Jerry Joel said,
you know, he was great to Heckle, like they could
have Statler and walerf Hecklam. He was a great character
to Heckle, But he said but then you really felt
sorry for him. They didn't really know what to do
with Fozzy. But there's a great sketch called good Grief.
The Comedians are Bear. Jerry Joel wrote it. They send
it down to the floor to be performed very late
in the day. Did not have any time to rehearse it,
(29:11):
just sort of read through it once and then just
cut the two of them loose. And the sketch is
about Fozzy trying to get Kermit to help him tell
a joke, and he keeps telling Kermit to come in
with a punchline when he hears him say the word here.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Now, fraud of my heart, you will just wait until
I say the word here.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
When you hear me say the word here, you.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Will rush up to me and say good grief.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
The comedians are.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Bear, good grief. The comedians are bear.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Check when you say the word here, right, gotcha?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
But unfortunately there's an hr E and there's an hg R.
And Kerma keeps getting those words messed up and comes
in at the wrong time.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Ready, okay, here we go now, Dan, Hi Yeah, hi ya,
hi yah. You're a wonderful looking nance. It's a pleasure
to be here. Climb Grief the comedian, So here was
not wrong here?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Which is right here? The other hears it's utter chaos.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
And at one point in that routine, Fozzy's hat falls
off and you can't stop camera from him to pick
up put back.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
They just they just keep rolling. Hey, hey, folks, this
is a story again.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Love to hear good grief the comedians. I was here, and.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
As Jerry says, they just played the hell out of it.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
And that was the moment when they realized that the
point of Fozzy was, you know, he's the great sidekick,
but he just you know, he just wants to approval.
He just he just wants to make you laugh and
he wants to be approved and he and he wants
to be loved. And Frank Oz said, you know, that's
the moment when you get a handle on the character.
And that's sort of the moment that Fazzy Bear arrives.
But they were given time to let that happen. Miss
(30:50):
Piggy is a character that had to sort of arrive.
She didn't show up fully formed. She was initially a
back row character, was sort of handed around between performers
or when she first appeared on The Muppet show. If
you watch some of those Muppet shows on Disney right now,
you'll hear her speaking with the wrong voice at one
point because Richard Hunt and other performers performing her, Oz
(31:12):
ends up performing her at one point and they're still
not quite sure, you know, what they're doing with her.
She's not a primary character, but she gets annoyed with
Kermit and she was supposed to slap him, and Frank
Oz turned the slap into a karate chop instead. He
thought it was just funnier. Well, that's another story that
Jerry Joel says. When they were watching it happen, the
(31:32):
room just stopped and everybody knew you had to see
it again. They knew that that character had arrived. And
that's the moment Miss Piggy's is sort of born. And
you know, Frank I was always tad about she was.
She was kind of a truck river who wanted to
be a runway model, and that character ends up just
taking over. The character was so strong that that Piggy
becomes the breakout star of the Muppet Show. You know,
(31:54):
it gets her own posters, and she's on magazine covers
and she's got her own makeups. It's just this huge
breakout star born out of this impromptu moment when they
were just trying to find the character. You had to
have time, and as we know about Jim, time was
something he didn't always think he had, but the Muppet
Show was given the time it needed, and typical of
(32:14):
Jim Henson, in around nineteen eighty, he says, you know,
that was a really really.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Nice show, and he takes off the air, willingly takes
it off the air because he wants to go and
do other things, namely movies.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
But you know, only Jim would take off a show
at the height of its power, calling it a very
nice show, just so he can go off and do
other things, so he's not stretched too thin, he can
pour his creativity into that next project. Jim brought this
innate sense of joy to almost everything that he did,
Even serious projects like Labyrinth was something that he just
(32:47):
loved doing. He loved building that world, he loved working
with David Bowie, you know, he loved developing the animatronics
for The Dark Crystal. He loved telling the stories and
something like you know, the Jim Henson storyteller. Jim just
brought joy to every project he did. He wanted his
performers to have fun. The Sesame Street performers talk about
the best times they had is laying in a pile
(33:10):
laughing with each other, you know, with their arms up
in the air because of just what they were doing.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Was so much fun.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Jim also understood that children aren't stupid. Jim never spoke
down to a child. There's a great sketch. It's a
sketch I love so much, but I think it also
really speaks to Jim's power as a performer. And it's
Kermit with a little girl named Joey singing the ABC's
and she keeps stopping to say cookie Monster. And there's
no script for this. This is Jim as Kermit interacting
(33:39):
with a child who believes in Kermit entirely. I guess
to remember. Jim is kneeling on the floor right in
front of her, but he's gone. She's focusing right on Kermit,
meeting Kermit at his level, and Kermit is talking to
her straight on. She gets the giggles and Kermit gets infuriated,
and then she says she loves him, and he comes
back and says he loves her too.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
This, you know, this is Jim.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
It goes q RS, you're just teasing me.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
W x y Z.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Next time Coaster with Joe, I.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Love you, I love you too.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
I mean, this is the way Jim was with children,
meeting them right at their level, you know, having that
fake exasperation and trying not to laugh at the same time.
That's the way he dealt with kids, and that's part
of the strength of the Muppets, both on Sepston Street
and on The Muppet Show. Jim also understood that their
parents aren't stupid, that the parents like to have fun.
If the parents are sitting there watching assessments you with
their kids, then darn it. He would like to be
(34:46):
sure that they're entertained as well. So that's something again
Jim just sort of inherently understood, and it came from
sitting around with his own family, listening to people talk
and listening to people laugh, and listening to them tell
stories and listening to.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Them be respectful of each other.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
So that that's the methodology that Jim brought to the Muppets,
and I think that's why the Muppets feel like family.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Years before his death.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
In nineteen eighty six, he was feeling very introspective and
he thought this was a good time to write letters
to his children, to tell them how much he loved them,
how much he loved what he did and what he
wanted to have done after he died, And what he
tells everybody in these letters is, you know, don't be
sad that I'm gone. You know, I'll see you again someday.
(35:28):
I'm sure if I can watch over you and help
you know that, I'll do that. Take care of each other,
look out for each other, and ultimately he says, you know,
it's a good life.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
But Jim had set out the way he wanted his
funeral carried out, which was, you know, people should dress colorfully,
nobody should wear black, and wanted people to just talk
about how much fun they'd had working together and how
much they loved doing these things, which is exactly what
they did at the funeral. So this is a memorial service,
and the really remarkable part of it occurs towards the
end when all them up and performers come up on
(35:58):
stage to sing some of Jim's favorite songs. It's about
a fifteen minute segment, but the last three minutes or
so is them singing just one person, which is is
from the musical Snoopy.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
It's just one person believes in you. It's all about
the joy of collaboration.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
You know, it's just one person believes in you, and
then you know, why not another, you know, get together
with another person and then bring in three people and
four and just keep adding people and collaboration gets better
and better, and it's more joyful the more people you
bring into it. And as they're singing the song, they
keep bringing more and more Muppets into this until the
entire stage is filled with the Muppet performers meaning up.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
As It's just a really remarkable moment.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Every performer I talked with who was on that stage
said they to this day still don't know how they
got through it. Everybody's crying through it. I don't know
how they're managing sing but somehow they are. But it's
a really incredible, really poignant moment, and one that one.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
That Jim said asked be done.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
It's just it's it's just a it's a fantastic moment,
you know, a showman, a showman to.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
The very end, and a terrific job on the production
editing and storytelling by our own Madison Dericott and a
special thanks to Brian J. Jones. He's the author of
Jim Henson, the Biography. It's available on Amazon or wherever
you buy your books. Pick it up. You will not
regret it. And my goodness, the Muppets aren't just funny.
(37:32):
Their family and they were. They were America's family, those characters,
and they were real characters to kids and adults alike.
They came to life. One of the great attributes of
Henson was never talking down to his audience, whether it
be kids or adults. And always there was that innate
sense of joy in the performances. Always it was there.
(37:53):
And that scene, that memorial service, I remember it, and
I remember it like I remember Jimmy Stewart reading the
poem about his dog who died, and Johnny Carson just
before he died. These things stay with you forever. The
story of Jim Henson an American original. Here on our
American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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