Idea Man: The life and creations of Jim Henson part one: The Beginnings
- Leo Aviña
- 5 hours ago
- 11 min read
Disclaimer: The parts of this article that relate to Jim Henson’s life, story, productions and creations are purely informational. However, parts where I review individual movies and shows are exclusively my opinion. Also this article is the first part of a bigger 4-part series about Jim Henson.
Ah, Jim Henson everybody knows who Jim Henson is… right? Frankly, I don’t have high hopes considering the youth of today barely even knows what a cartoon is, but I digress. Anyway, for those of you who don’t know about this legend of a man, Jim Henson is by far and away the greatest puppeteer to ever live. He brought the medium of puppeteering into mainstream entertainment using his expressive and emotionally resonant cast of creations, most of which he called Muppets. Speaking of which, his puppets are some of the most iconic characters in all of animation, (before any of you complain, puppetry IS a form of physical animation); think Elmo, Kermit the Frog, Ms. Piggy, Big Bird, Fozzie Bear, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and so many more it would probably take me hours to list them all.
His impact was instrumental to the foundation of modern puppetry… however, whenever I try to bring up Jim Henson in a conversation with someone, it usually gets shut down due to the person not knowing who Henson is, or the person not caring about the subject in the slightest. This leaves me with a simple, yet tedious predicament; what in the world, am I supposed to do with all this useless knowledge about the Muppets? So, if it isn’t immediately obvious to you, I’m essentially going to use this article and the others that come after this as a landfill for all this excess of Muppet information by covering the Henson’s life, history and IPs made by both Henson himself as well as The Jim Henson Company (formally Muppets Inc.) because they made a lot of other movies and shows after Jim died in 1990. Instead of trying to mention Henson in every conversation, I can now simply re-direct people to this series of articles and let them take in the information themselves. These articles on top of acting as a landfill, are going to essentially work as a living timeline. On each spot where a movie, show or commercial falls on the timeline, I will simultaneously review and give my opinion on it because… well just because I like ya so much :). However, because I don’t have an infinite amount of time to waste on reviewing a bunch of silly puppets, I'm only going to review the first five Muppet movies, the Dark Crystal, five of the most popular shows (in which I will review the three most highly rated episodes, so take these reviews with a hefty grain of salt) and the Wilkins Coffee commercials from the late 50s to early 60s. Here is everything that I’ll review in this series in greater detail…
Movies:
The Muppet Movie (1979)
The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
The Dark Crystal (1982)
The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
A Muppets Christmas Carol (1992)
Muppet Treasure Island (1996)
Shows:
Sam & Friends (1955)
Sesame Street (1969)
The Muppet Show (1974)
Fraggle Rock (1983)
Bear In The Big Blue House (1997)
Commercials:
Wilkins Coffee commercials (1957)
(Side Note: As I’m writing this, Disney just announced yesterday a Muppet Show 50th anniversary special reboot… thing… with Seth Rogen and Sabriana Carpenter that premiers on February 4th. Now this article is probably not going to be out by then, but if you’re reading this, PLEASE WATCH THE SPECIAL ON DISNEY PLUS BECAUSE THERE HAS BEEN A SEVERE DROUGHT OF MUPPET CONTENT FOR LAST 12-13 YEARS AND IF THE SPECIAL DOES WELL ENOUGH, THERE IS A GOOD CHANCE THE MUPPET SHOW WILL BE RE-NEWED FOR A WHOLE SEASON!!!)
Also one last warning before we begin, this is going to be the first part in a large series, in this section. In this part we're only going to be talking about Jim Henson’s upbringing, Sam and Friends and the Wilkins Coffee commercials. The topics of interest will descend in chronological order so in the next part, we’ll cover Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Got it?
Okay, with all that screaming and Ricola out of the way, let’s get into the timeline!
Our story starts on September 24th, 1936 in Greenville, Mississippi at the King’s Daughters Hospital where Betty Henson gave birth to their youngest son, James Maury Henson, soon to be known the world over as Jim Henson. Jim’s father Paul worked for the United States Department of Agriculture forcing Jim, his mother, and Jim’s older brother Paul Jr. to move back and forth between Maryland and Mississippi. In 1948, the family moved for the final time, landing a home just outside of the University of Maryland (where Jim would later attend). At a very young age, Jim began to adore music and would often sing with his older brother while their mother played an old organ, a few of his favorite songs included Half Way Down the Stairs and Coddleston Pie. Jim was also very creative and throughout his childhood, he would spend most of his time with his brother, building various things like model planes and radio sets. Although Jim eventually grew a fondness for the radios he worked with, his passion would be cut short with the invention of television.
In 1949, at the age of 13, Jim begged his parents to buy him a T.V set, a year later he got his wish. Jim became enamored with T.V. spending most of his teenage years in front of a screen. On T.V, he watched some of the most inventive comedy stars including Ernie Kovacs and Milton Berle, both making strong impressions on Jim’s already creative mind. In high school, Jim joined his school’s drama club where he participated in performing and building sets. As his high school years passed by his love for T.V. grew and his yearning to be a part of it grew even stronger.
During his senior year in high school, Jim scoured through newspapers, looking for ways to break into the industry. Eventually, he discovered his local CBS station, WTOP was looking for young puppeteers. Jim was thrilled. However, there was just one teeeeeensey problem, Jim knew absolutely nothing about puppetry. Determined, Jim checked out two books about puppetering from his local library. With these two books, he learned the basics of puppetry and created his first puppet, Pierre the Rat, which earned him the position at the station. The show he worked on, the Junior Morning Show, violated child labor laws and was swiftly canceled after only three weeks. However, the host of the show, Roy Mecham, invited Jim to work on his other WTOP show called “Saturday”. On the show, Jim would create short skits in which puppets lip synced to popular music. Saturday wouldn’t last long either, but James Kovac, a program director for the local NBC channel WRCTV in Washington DC, noticed Jim’s talents and put him to work on various shows on the channel. It was right around this time where Jim coined the name “muppets” for his creations, many thought it to be a combination of marionette and puppet, but Jim later admitted that it was just something he made up. Early into his freshman year at the University of Maryland, Jim switched his major from Production Design to Home Economics because of a less rigorous course load. Coincidentally, the University of Maryland decided to add a puppetry class to the Home Economics curriculum. This class was taught by a professor who had zero experience in puppetry, meaning Jim had the most experience in the class.
Jim’s experience, tall stature, and confidence caught the eye of one Jane Neville. Jane was another proficient puppeteer in the class and Jim would soon ask her if she wanted to perform with him on some of the programs he was doing on WRCTV. She accepted the offer and the two of them continued to enhance the style of the muppets. Eventually, their skits began to get more elaborate and entertaining; it was no wonder why WRCTV wanted more. WRCTV wanted to put Jim and Jane in a five minute show slot between the evening news and the Tonight Show where they would exclusively do muppet segments. They accepted the offer and created what was considered Jim Henson’s first major work.
Sam & Friends (1955)
Sam and Friends premiered on May 9th, 1955 and starred a full cast of Muppets, many of which were built for some of Jim's previous skits on WRCTV. The show’s titular star, a human puppet named Sam, who in the show’s world was the only character that really existed in reality and the rest of the cast were either figments of his imagination or exaggerated parts of himself. This mentality is evident in the other character’s abstract designs, the main cast included: Yorick, a purple skull who had an insatiable hunger for the other characters on the show, (he was also the audience’s favorite); Professor Madicliffe, an energetic and crazy character who found himself promoting the show’s sponsors, (these sponsors would take up sixty seconds of the four minute run time).; Chicken Liver, a grumpy Muppet who was repulsed by the rest of the cast's immaturity; Harry the Hipster, a cool jazz character who always sported his signature sunglasses; Mushmellon, a stumpy monster who had a permanent grimace on his face; Icky Gunk, a mischievous, sometimes sinister serpent character, and finally, Kermit, a green lizard-frog who found himself on screen a lot more often than the others. The characters would often wear wigs and outfits, almost as if they were real actors, playing a role. In the early days, the show would almost exclusively consist of the characters lip-syncing to various records. On the story front, the show was supposed to revolve around Sam coping with the struggles of everyday life, by finding solace in his friends (keywords: supposed to be, because a lot of the time the show deviated into pure mayhem), the climax of the formula Jim developed was the explosive, fiery, finale, which usually involved a character being swallowed alive or being blown up.
But over time, the show started getting smarter by adding woody humor, puns and sentimentality. However, Jim and WRCTV recorded very few episodes and a lot of the ones that were, have been lost. Ironically there is only one publicly available Sam and Friends Episode with Sam appearing. Luckily, many of the most popular skits have been found or re-preformed by Jim and Jane. Audiences were mesmerized by the muppets; at the time, puppets were thought to be exclusively bouncy marionettes or stiff wooden dolls where only a mouth could move. But the Muppets completely subverted this expectation, the Muppets were lively and emotion filled thanks to their malleable shapes. For example, Kermit could clearly display a certain facial expression, just by Jim adjusting his fingers. Another interesting innovation Jim created was placing live feed monitors on the studio floor, in order to see what camera was seeing, resulting in better performances. Jim would stick with this habit for the rest of his career.
Sam and Friends was an immediate hit with the people of Washington DC. Those who tuned in on week nights loved the unique and funny show and local journalists praised the new edition to WRCTV’s late night line up. However, in the summer of 1955, WRCTV canceled Sam and Friends in order to re-arrange the late night block. As soon as the news broke, thousands of angry fans contacted the station until they had no choice but to un-cancel the show. Although Sam and Friends wasn’t dead, on April 15th, 1956 Jim’s brother Paul Jr. was killed in a fatal car accident. But the loss of his brother only fueled Jim to make his skits more lively, zany and optimistic rather than edgy or cynical. Jim would later describe himself as having an unnatural amount of "ridiculous optimism” that the audience of his shows naturally gravitate towards. Later on, the muppets would make appearances on both to another WRCTV show, Footlight Theater and just four months later, the Tonight Show with Steve Allen. Skipping several years in which Sam and Friends won an Emmy, Jim and got engaged to Jane, Lisa Henson (Jim’s daughter) was born and Jim signed proficient puppeteers Jerome Jewell as well as Frank Oz. However, on December 15th, 1961, the final episode of Sam and Friends aired, a decision made by Jim himself.
Review:
After watching the four Sam and Friends episodes/skits, (including the Glow Worm, Huntley and Brinkely, Visual Thinking and C’est Si Bon), I can confidently say that everything that my research told me was true. If I had one critique, I'd probably say that isn’t all that funny by today’s standards/comedy (with the exception of Huntely and Brinkely, which actually got a few laughs out of me), but if I was a kid in the 1950s and this is all I had to watch, I would be entertained for hours upon hours. Overall, Sam and Friends was the world’s first look at the Muppets; the comedy was inventive, its characters full of emotion and it overall is a very good first outing by the duo of Jim and Jane. However, wit
h the exception of the Huntley and Brinkely skit or if you’re somebody who’s just itching to consume as much Muppet media as possible, I probably wouldn’t recommend this, just on account of the fact that it's not as funny today that there’s only a handful surviving full episodes available to the public
Wilkins Coffee (1957)
A key event I intentionally didn’t mention took place in the summer of 1957. The John H. Wilkins Company approached Jim and Jane to create a series of commercials to promote Wilkins Coffee. The duo happily agreed, but if Wilkins Coffee wasn’t expecting anything but pure anarchy, they were in for quite the surprise. These ten second adverts featured two new muppets; Wilkins, a Muppet that loved Wilkins Coffee and Wontkins, a muppet that hated it. In almost all the commercials Wilkins would torture or punish Wotkins for not drinking the coffee, sometimes threatening the audience as well. Both characters would be voiced by Jim in his first consistent vocal role outside of Sam and Friends. The short ads were pure violent slapstick at its finest, and they were a LOT more successful than Jim or Wilkins could have imagined. They became something of a phenomenon on a national scale, which further placed the Muppets in the national cultural consciousness (AKA pop culture).
Review:
As someone who spends a decent amount of time bored on the internet, I sometimes stumble upon something weird and obscure. So on some random ass day in the middle of my fourth grade summer, that's exactly what I was doing. I’m not sure how, but I managed to stumble upon a fifteen minute Wilkins Coffee Commercial compilation and let me tell you, I ate it up like a ravenous, rabies infested raccoon finding the half regurgitated remains of a crunch wrap supreme in the back alleys of a Taco Bell. It was right up my alley in terms of humor at the time and as I found more and more compilations with very little views, I got the impression that I had found some hidden gem online. And still today, those commercials are timeless to me. Me and my Dad will often quote the shorts to a tee, and unlike Sam and Friends where you’d have to live during the time period to get a chuckle at. The Wilkins commercials by comparison are a lot more funny because they use the most timeless form of entertainment: comedic shock and violence. I adore these commercials and I highly recommend them. I'll leave a link below this review to a playlist of shorts:
Conclusion:
So, there you have it; the humble, slightly violent, and caffeinated start of the Muppet empire. From being a kid desperate for a TV set of his own, Jim Henson had risen to be a man who effectively reinvented the medium, proving that puppets don’t need to be stiff, wooden dolls but could be varied, odd, and sometimes explosive. From the abstract, lip-syncing jazziness of Sam & Friends to the slapstick mayhem of the Wilkins
ads, Jim and Jane had set the scene for the ‘ridiculous optimism’ that would change the face of the entertainment world forever.
However we’re just scratching the surface on this felt-covered mountain. Next time around, we’re leaving the local DC stations behind and diving head first ourselves into the colorful, global phenomena of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Stay tuned, because the story only gets stranger from here…
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