Jim Henson

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**Jim Henson**

Born:	September 24, 1936 Greenville, Mississippi
Died:	May 16, 1990 New York City, New York
Occupation:	American puppeteer, film director and television producer Founder of The Jim Henson Company, Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

For the company founded by Henson, see The Jim Henson Company.

James Maury Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was the most widely known American puppeteer in modern American television history. He was also a film director, television producer, and the founder of The Jim Henson Company, the Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

He was the creator of The Muppets and the leading force behind their long creative run. Henson brought an engaging cast of characters, innovative ideas, and a sense of timing and humor to millions of people. He is also widely acknowledged for the ongoing vision of faith, friendship, magic, and love which was infused in nearly all of his work.

1 Early work
2 1960s
3 1970s
4 Contributions to film
5 Death
6 Tributes
7 Pop culture references
8 Further reading
9 References
10 External links

[edit] Early work

Born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1936, Henson moved with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s. He was raised as a Christian Scientist and was a Sunday School teacher in his 20s, but later withdrew from the Church.

In 1954, while attending Northwestern High School, he began working for WTOP-TV creating puppets for a Saturday morning children's show. The next year he created Sam and Friends, a five-minute puppet show for WRC-TV, while attending the University of Maryland, College Park. Sam and Friends were already recognizable Muppets, and the show included a primitive version of what would become Henson's signature character, Kermit the Frog. Already he was experimenting with the techniques that would change the way puppetry was used on television, notably using the frame defined by the camera shot to allow the puppeteer to work from off-camera.

[edit] 1960s

The success of Sam and Friends led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. (To this day, Muppets appear as "guests" on shows such as The Tonight Show and Hollywood Squares, with particularly memorable appearances by Kermit and Miss Piggy on 60 Minutes and Cookie Monster on Martha Stewart Living.) Henson himself appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show. The greatly increased exposure led to hundreds of commercial appearances (mostly for Wilkins Coffee) by Henson characters through the 1960s.

Being puppets, they have been able to get away with a greater level of slapstick violence than might be acceptable with human actors. A good example is one of the early coffee ads. A Muppet is poised behind a cannon seen in profile. Another Muppet is in front of the barrel end of the cannon. The first Muppet says, "How do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?" The second Muppet responds gruffly, "Never heard of it!" The first Muppet fires the cannon and blows the second Muppet away... then turns the cannon directly toward the viewer and ends the ad with, "Now, how do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?"

In 1963, Henson and his wife Jane, also a puppeteer, moved to New York City, where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. would reside for some time. Henson devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog, the first Muppet to make a regular appearance on a network show, The Jimmy Dean Show. At that time Henson's long-time partner Frank Oz also came on board with the new company.

From 1964 to 1968, Henson began exploring film-making and produced a series of experimental films. His nine-minute experimental film Time Piece was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1966. The NBC TV movie The Cube from 1969 is another experimental film that Jim Henson had produced.

In 1968, Joan Ganz Cooney and the team at the Children's Television Workshop began work on Sesame Street, a visionary children's program for public television. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on the titular street. These included Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird. Kermit was also included as a roving Television News Reporter. Around this time, a frill was added around Kermit's neck to make him more frog-like. The collar was also used to cover the joint where the neck met the body of the Muppet. At first the puppetry was separated from the realistic segments on the street, but after a poor test screening in Philadelphia, the show was revamped to integrate the two and place much greater emphasis on Henson's work.

[edit] 1970s

Henson, Oz, and his team targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, set mostly in the Land of Gorch. Eleven sketches aired between October 1975 and January 1976, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September. The SNL writers never got comfortable writing for the characters.

The failure of the Muppets on SNL might have been a blessing in disguise. Starting in 1976, The Muppet Show was occupying Henson's attention in the UK. The show featured Kermit as host, and a variety of other memorable characters including Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, and Fozzie Bear. A vaudeville-style variety show aimed at a family audience, the show was a sensation in the United Kingdom and soon elsewhere in the world.

Henson directed a small series of TV movie specials, Tales From Muppetland, which were hosted by Kermit the Frog. The series included Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince, and The Muppet Musicians of Bremen. These specials were comedic tellings of classic fairy-tale stories.

In addition to his own works of puppetry, Henson also aided others in their work. A great example occurred in 1979 when he was called to the set of The Empire Strikes Back to aid the famous Stuart Freeborn. While working with Freeborn on the puppet of the great Jedi Master Yoda, a colorful and diminutive character that audiences immediately fell in love with, Henson suggested to George Lucas, creator and executive producer on the film, to use Frank Oz as head puppeteer and also to provide the voice of Yoda. With Henson's help, the creative team brought the creature fully and convincingly to life. The pioneering work done by Oz and Henson in this film brought forward many significant aspects in the technology of modern puppetry.

[edit] Contributions to film

The Muppet Show ended after five seasons, but the characters have appeared in a long series of movies, beginning with 1979's The Muppet Movie. One song from that musical film, "The Rainbow Connection," sung by Kermit, was nominated for an Oscar. The Muppet characters have also appeared in a large number of made-for-TV-movies and television specials.

Henson was also responsible for two non-Muppet Show-related movies, 1982's high fantasy The Dark Crystal and the 1986 Labyrinth, the latter of which was co-produced by George Lucas. To provide a visual style distinct from the Muppets, the puppets in these two movies were based on conceptual artwork by Brian Froud.

Henson also continued creating children's programs— Fraggle Rock and the animated Muppet Babies—and new prime-time ventures such as the folk tale and mythology oriented show, The Storyteller. The Jim Henson company continues to produce new series and specials.

In 1982, Henson founded the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States.

Henson also founded Jim Henson's Creature Shop to build creatures for a large number of other films and series (most recently the science fiction production Farscape and the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and is considered one of the most advanced and well respected creators of film creatures.

[edit] Death

Jim Henson died of pneumonia caused by severe Streptococcus "A" bacteria^[1] at the age of 53 on May 16, 1990, the same day as Sammy Davis, Jr..

At the memorial service many people were moved to see Kermit sitting on the coffin with a sign saying 'I lost my voice.' On the DVD commentary for the movie Love Actually, director/writer Richard Curtis describes another episode at Henson's memorial service:

At the end of (the memorial service)... Frank Oz was talking and he suddenly lifted up Kermit's puppet and started to sing this song called One Voice. [Frank Oz was actually performing Fozzie Bear and the final song the puppeteers sang was Just One Person.] And it turned out that all the guys in the memorial service had brought their puppets with them, and they lifted them up, and when you turned around and looked backwards there were fifty puppets all singing. And Big Bird walked down the aisle of Saint Paul's Cathedral [the service was actually held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine] and they all came forward and just this massive chorus of puppets all singing...It was an extraordinary thing...

A memorial service for him aired on PBS ^{[citation needed]} and drew millions of viewers and dozens of celebrities in reverence for his life and work. As per Henson's wishes, no one in attendance wore black, and a Dixieland jazz band finished the service by performing "When The Saints Go Marching In." In what was probably one of the most touching moments of the service, the Muppet character Big Bird (performed by Caroll Spinney) walked out onto the stage and sang a quavering rendition of Kermit the Frog's signature song, "Bein' Green."^[2]

As of 2006, he is still credited as a performer on Sesame Street for archive footage.

The Jim Henson Company, Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop have continued on after his death. His son Brian and daughter Lisa are currently the co-chairs and co-CEOs of the Company; his daughter Cheryl is the president of the Foundation. Steve Whitmire, a veteran member of the Muppet puppeteering crew, has assumed the roles of the two most famous characters played by Jim Henson himself, Kermit the Frog and Ernie.

On February 17, 2004, it was announced that the Muppets (excluding the Sesame Street characters, which are separately owned by Sesame Workshop) and Bear in the Big Blue House properties had been sold by Henson's heirs to The Walt Disney Company. The Jim Henson Company retains Creature Shop, as well as the rest of its film and television library including Fraggle Rock, Farscape, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth.

[edit] Tributes

Statue of Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog, on display outside of Adele H. Stamp Student Union in College Park, Maryland by sculptor, Jay Hall Carpenter.

Henson is tributed both as himself and as Kermit the Frog, on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The only other person to receive this honor is Mel Blanc, the voice actor of Bugs Bunny.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze was dedicated to him.
On September 24, 2003, University of Maryland, College Park honored alumnus Jim Henson with a life-sized statue of him conversing with Kermit the Frog by noted sculptor Jay Hall Carpenter in front of the Adele Stamp Student Union building on the College Park campus.^[3]
In 2006, the University of Maryland, College Park introduced 50 statues of their school mascot, Testudo the Terrapin, with various designs chosen by different sponsoring groups. Among them was Kertle, a statue designed to look like Kermit the Frog, by artist Elizabeth Baldwin.
A TV special was produced, The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson, in which the Muppets paid tribute to Henson. The special featured interviews with Steven Spielberg and others.
A museum was built in memory of him in Leland, Mississippi. Official certificates from the state legislature honoring Jim Henson and fun Muppets paraphernalia are on display here.

[edit] Pop culture references

Tom Smith's Henson tribute song, "A Boy and His Frog",^[4] won the Pegasus Award for Best Filk Song in 1991.
Stephen Lynch has produced a song titled "Jim Henson's Dead," in which he pays homage to many of the characters from The Muppet Show and Sesame Street.
J. G. Thirlwell (under the Foetus In Excelsis Corruptus alias) has performed a reworked version of Elton John's Rocket Man titled "Puppet Dude," with the lyrics altered to refer to Jim Henson. This can be found on the Male live album.
Jim Henson is found tied up in an episode of Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse. Mickey Mouse then screams, "He wouldn't sell!" referring to the Walt Disney Company's many attempts to purchase the Muppets.
In his comedy special No Cure For Cancer, Denis Leary mentions, in passing, Kermit singing "It's Not Easy Being Green" at Henson's memorial service.

[edit] Further reading

Finch, Christopher, Charles S. Finch and Jim Henson. Jim Henson: The Works: The Art, the Magic, the Imagination. David McKay, 1993, hardcover, 251 pages, ISBN 0-679-41203-4.