jim henson: Jim Henson with Kermit the Frog

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Jim Henson with Kermit the Frog

Posted by nonong at 5:04 PM

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

Early YearsEdit

James Maury Henson was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1936. Ten years later, in 1946, Henson moved with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburb near Washington, D.C.. While growing up, he loved watching Disney films and movies with comic legends like Bob Hope and George Burns, and enjoyed listening to such radio acts as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. He would grow up to pay tribute to—and work with—many of these same legends. Henson graduated as a member of the National Honor Society from Northwestern Senior High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, on June 14, 1954.^[1]

Sam and FriendsEdit

Henson made his earliest foray into television puppetry with friend and first puppeteering partner Russell Wall in the summer of 1954. The two created and performed the puppets Pierre the French Rat and Longhorn and Shorthorn for The Junior Morning Show on local station WTOP.^[2] Although the show lasted only three weeks before being cancelled, Henson quickly landed a puppeteering job on the show Aftertnoon at NBC affiliate WRC-TV.^[3]

In 1955, while a college student at the University of Maryland, WRC-TV offered Henson his own show, resulting in the creation of Sam and Friends. The five-minute shows aired live twice a day after the news, and often involved the puppets lip-synching to a comedy or novelty record. Henson's co-puppeteer was the woman who would later become his wife, Jane Nebel. The two wed on May 28, 1959.^[4] Of the cast of characters created for this series, only Kermit would remain as a major figure with Jim Henson for later productions.

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

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

During this time, Jim Henson met and hired two more people who would become enormously important to his work: Frank Oz, who Henson once called "absolutely the greatest puppeteer in the world"^[5] and Jerry Juhl, who would have a hand in writing nearly every Muppet production for 35 years. In 1962, Don Sahlin also joined the Muppets, building Rowlf and laying the foundations for the Muppet Workshop. Apart from puppetry, Henson also experimented as an animator and filmmaker, with such films as the 1965 Academy Award nominated short Time Piece (which he wrote, directed, and starred in), several comedic industrial films (paving the way for the Muppet Meeting Films), the documentary Youth '68, and the hour-long experimental drama The Cube in 1969.