Jim Henson

• 1. Introduction

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  Jim Henson made his first Kermit the Frog from a halved table tennis ball and fabric cut from an old coat that belonged to his mother. A scrap of denim from a pair of jeans formed the sleeve for the puppeteer's arm. From those humble parts came a frog who would one day sing on national television and sell millions of records. The man who built him was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on the 24th of September 1936. He would die in New York City at the age of 53, with the suddenness of his illness shocking a nation. Henson called the arrival of his family's first television "the biggest event of his adolescence." What did a freshman with a degree in home economics do to change how puppets appear on screen? Why did advertising agencies, a Soviet puppet master, and the Library of Congress all come to claim a piece of his work? And why did Frank Oz later say a business deal with Disney is "probably what killed Jim"? The answers stretch from a Saturday morning children's show that lasted three weeks to a memorial where no one wore black.

• 2. Foam Rubber Revolution

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  Henson rejected the carved wooden puppet entirely. Rather than rigid figures, he built characters from softer, flexible materials like foam rubber, giving the puppeteer direct control over the mouth. "A lot of people build very stiff puppets," he once said. "Your hand has a lot of flexibility to it, and what you want to do is to build a puppet that can reflect all that flexibility." That softness let a Muppet move its mouth in time with dialogue and convey a wider range of emotion. On Sam and Friends, the puppet show he created at WRC-TV, Henson abandoned the convention of pointing a camera at a stationary puppet theatre. Instead he used the image created by the TV camera and lens to engage dynamically with his characters. He believed television puppets needed to have "life and sensitivity." He told people that "Muppet" was a portmanteau of "marionette" and "puppet," though many of his early creations were actually hand puppets, rod puppets, or some combination of the two. This reinvention earned him recognition he had not expected. During six weeks in Europe in the summer of 1958, he went intending to study painting and was surprised to learn that puppets were considered as serious an art form as painting or sculpture.

• 3. Selling By Laughing

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  Wontkins might be shot from a cannon, struck in the head with a hammer or a baseball bat, or have a pie thrown in his face. He was one half of a pair of Muppets, with Wilkins, created for the local Wilkins Coffee company in Washington, D.C. The formula was simple. Wilkins would extol the coffee while Wontkins voiced his hatred for it, prompting violent retaliation. Both were usually voiced by Henson himself. "Till then, advertising agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television," Henson explained. "We tried to sell things by making people laugh." Those first seven-second spots were an immediate hit. Over 300 Wilkins and Wontkins commercials were made, most in black and white, with a few in color. The characters proved so good at selling coffee that the formula was remade for other companies, including Community Coffee, Red Diamond Coffee, La Touraine Coffee, Nash's Coffee, and Jomar Instant coffee. Other industries followed, from bakeries like Merita Breads to service station chains and beverage bottlers such as Faygo. Henson once promoted Frito-Lay's Munchos potato snacks using an early version of a character who would become Cookie Monster. The commercial work eventually ended, and Henson said it was a pleasure to get out of that world.

• 4. The Team Behind The Frog

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  Jerry Juhl joined Henson as a writer in 1961, and puppet performer Frank Oz came aboard in 1963, both hired to replace Jane after she stopped performing to raise their children. Henson credited the two of them with developing much of the humor and character of his Muppets. His partnership with Oz lasted until his death and shows most clearly in their portrayals of Bert and Ernie, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Kermit and Fozzie Bear. In New York City, Henson formed a partnership with Bernie Brillstein, who managed his career until the end. More performers followed over the years, among them Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Fran Brill, and Kevin Clash. Henson's teammates compared his role to that of Kermit himself, calling him a shy, gentle boss with "a whim of steel" who ran things like "an explosion in a mattress factory." Caroll Spinney, who performed Big Bird, recalled that Henson would never say he disliked something. "He would just go 'Hmm.'... And if he liked it, he would say, 'Lovely!'" Henson saw Kermit as an alter ego, though a bolder one. "He can say things I hold back," Henson said of the character.

• 5. Counting Films And Cookie

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  In 1969, producer Joan Ganz Cooney and her staff at the Children's Television Workshop, impressed by the Henson team, asked them to work full-time on Sesame Street. The program premiered on National Educational Television on the 10th of November 1969. Henson performed Ernie, the game-show host Guy Smiley, and Kermit, who often appeared as a roving news reporter. His characters first ran separately from the realistic street segments, but the show was revamped to integrate the two, placing greater emphasis on his work. PBS called Henson "the spark that ignited our fledgling broadcast service." Behind the camera, Henson produced a series of counting films for the numbers 1 through 10, each ending with a baker, voiced by Henson, falling down the stairs while carrying that number of desserts. He made inserts for the numbers 2 through 12 with titles like "Dollhouse," "King of Eight," and "Eleven Cheer." He directed the original "C Is for Cookie." He also created Tales from Muppetland, comic retellings of classic fairy tales hosted by Kermit, including Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince, and The Muppet Musicians of Bremen.

• 6. I Won't Write For Felt

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  "I won't write for felt," quipped Michael O'Donoghue, one of the writers on Saturday Night Live. Henson and his team had brought a series of Land of Gorch sketches to the show's first season, worried that the company was becoming typecast purely as children's entertainment. Eleven of those sketches aired between October 1975 and January 1976 on NBC, with four more appearances later that year. The SNL writers were not comfortable with the characters and frequently disparaged them. Henson admired Lorne Michaels but concluded that "what we were trying to do and what his writers could write for it never gelled." The American networks were no more welcoming to his next idea. In 1976 they rejected his proposed weekly Muppet series, believing the characters would appeal only to children. So Henson pitched British impresario Lew Grade, scrapped a planned Broadway show, and moved his creative team to England. The Muppet Show began taping at ATV Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, with Kermit as host alongside Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, Fozzie Bear, and the band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem with their chaotic drummer Animal. The show would be syndicated worldwide, reaching the broad audience the networks had refused him.

• 7. Darker Crystals

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  Edgar Bergen, the radio ventriloquist Henson had idolized as a child, died at age 75 during production of The Muppet Movie, which Henson dedicated to his memory. That 1979 film was a critical and financial success, making $65.2 million domestically and ranking as the 61st highest-grossing film at the time. Henson, as Kermit, sang "Rainbow Connection," which reached number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. Even as the Muppets thrived, Henson developed a growing, brooding interest in mortality. He co-directed The Dark Crystal with Frank Oz in 1982, basing its puppets on conceptual artwork by Brian Froud to create a visual style distinct from the Muppets. The film won the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and the Grand Prize at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, finding an enormous following on VHS after a soft theatrical run. Labyrinth, which Henson directed alone in 1986, drew some praise but disappointed at the box office. The setback hit him hard. His son Brian Henson described it as "the closest I've seen him to turning in on himself and getting quite depressed." In 1984 Henson traveled to Moscow to make a film about Sergei Obraztsov, the puppeteer whose 1950 book My Profession he had borrowed from a public library as a teenager. He donated four dolls to replenish the Moscow Museum of Obraztsov Puppets: Fraggle, Skeksi, Bugard, and Robin the Frog.

• 8. A Sore Throat

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  On the 4th of May 1990, Henson made his final television appearance with Kermit on The Arsenio Hall Show in Los Angeles. Afterward he told his publicist privately that he was tired and had a sore throat, but believed it was minor. He woke around 2:00 a.m. on the 15th of May having trouble breathing, and began coughing up blood. He suggested to his wife that he might be dying, yet did not want to interrupt his schedule for a hospital. Two hours later he agreed to be taken by taxi to the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. X-rays revealed multiple abscesses in both lungs. He was placed on a ventilator, deteriorated despite multiple antibiotics, and died at 1:21 a.m. the following day at the age of 53. The hospital's intensive care director, David Gelmont, first announced Streptococcus pneumoniae, then by the 29th of May reclassified the cause as organ dysfunction from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. Gelmont noted that Henson might have been saved had he reached the hospital just a few hours sooner. At the time of his death, Henson was in negotiations to sell his company and characters, excluding those from Sesame Street, to The Walt Disney Company for almost $150 million. Frank Oz later judged the strain harshly. "The Disney deal is probably what killed Jim," he said in 2021. "It made him sick." At Henson's memorial in Manhattan, in accordance with his wishes, no one wore black, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band closed the service with "When the Saints Go Marching In."