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And we return to our American stories. Joining us now is Brian J. Jones, giving us a little insight on how some of America's most beloved characters came to be. And we're talking about the Muppets and the Muppets' creator, the man, the driving force, the driving creative force behind the Muppets. Jim Henson.
Take it away, Brian. U Oh. Coffee commercials back in 1957 are very different than they were now. Usually they were about 10 to 15 seconds. Normally what they would do is they would put a picture up on screen of coffee and, you know, coffee coming with steam and this beautiful shot of coffee 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 10 seconds to get the message across.
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. The Wilkins people were big fans of Jim and the Muppets and they asked Jim if he would like to develop advertising for Wilkins coffee.
So, what Jim does is creates two characters called Wilkins and Wonkins. And in Jim's idea, Wilkins is the character that will drink Wilkins coffee, and Woinkins is the character that won't drink Wilkins coffee. And if you look at Wilkins and Wonkins, 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 Wonkins, 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 loved that. You see that, for example, in Ernie and Bert. You know, we've got the sort of uptight character, this very horizontal character in Ernie. It's Bunsen and Beaker from The Muppet Show. Again, sort of the roundness of Bunsen and the tall, skinny Beaker.
So Jim loves that style of building. We see that very early on with Wilkins and Wonkins. And the joke he's pulling off is in 10 seconds: what will it take Wonkins to drink coffee? And the answer is quite a lot. Mm-hmm.
What happens in his very first commercial is you've got Womkins staring down the barrel of a cannon, and Wilkins says, You know, hey, buddy, do you like Wilkins' coffee? And Womkins says, I never tasted it. And he fires the cannon at him, blows him off screen, then immediately whirls the camera toward the viewer and says, Now, how about you?
Okay, buddy, what do you think of Wilkins coffee? I never tasted it. Mm-hmm. Now what do you think of Wilkins? And that's the end of the commercial.
And 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. We're here to persuade people to drink more Wilkins coffee. What's the club for? to get their attention. It's a gigantic hit.
Jim starts getting more and more ad work for Wilkins Coffee. I think he does Wilkins commercials for something like nine or ten years, maybe even longer. And coffee companies 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 the names of other companies. He goes and refilms them over and over again with a puppet saying the names of the actual coffee companies.
He does ads for bread companies after that. He creates characters to sell bread. Whatcha eating? A sandwich made with Clawson's bread. Want a bite?
Sure. He's a sharp salesman! He's selling tea. He's selling all sorts of things. The Muppets are actually built on the back of advertising.
You know, 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 1960s. In fact, 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 do new and different things.
Jim Henson always knew the Muppets could hold their own. He had done enough variety show appearances throughout the 60s that he was fairly confident that, if given the opportunity, they could flesh out the characters, they could flesh out the scenarios, and give the Muppets their own variety show.
So, that was something he was pitching for a long time. If you look in his archives, there's pitches for the Muppet Show as far back as 1965, I think.
So, this was something that Jim knew would work. You know, he's on one of the biggest shows in the world, 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. 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 Day Show. It's an hour-long variety show with their special guest, Mia Farrow. Jim's not quite sure what to do with it yet. We're not sure as viewers where it's set. 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 we don't really know. Nobody looks familiar in it. But the Muppets Valentine's Day show does okay in the ratings, does well enough that Michael Eisner says, you know what, 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 is hilarious. It's starting to look a little more familiar. It's the first time we see Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem show up on this. You know, so you've got Animal, and the Swedish chef shows up in it.
Miss 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 Kermit. Kermit'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, but not enough to get his own show.
So, Jim sort of got two strikes 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 Slaughter, who was one of the sort of masterminds behind Laugh In. And George Slaughter tells him, you know, Jim, let's put together a pitch reel for you. And I can take it to CBS.
And let's put together sort of a highlight reel of Muppet performances. And then at the very end of this thing, Jim does something brilliant. It's about two minutes of this pitch man looking right into the camera and calling out executives by name and telling them, you're going to want to buy this show. This show's as American as apple pie. And then you're going to want to buy this show.
The careers of the men who made the decision to put this show on the air will skyrocket. People like Bob Wood, Lee Curlin, Perry Lafferty, Oscar Katz, and even Tom Swafford will become stars in their own right. It's just hilarious. And when you watch it, you can't believe. that CBS would pass, but CBS passes.
So you've 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 in stick-do-itiveness here. Eventually, what happens? He's approached by Lord Lou Grade, who runs ATV Studios in London. Who Again, serendipitously, sort of like Michael Leisner, Lord Grade really gets Jim. Lord Grade came out of vaudeville.
He did something almost similar to what Jim did with television, understanding how the audience perceives the screen. When Lord Grade was dancing in vaudeville, he would dance to Charleston on this oval table, but he would turn the skinny end 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. They're sort of cut from the same cloth. And Lord Grade's the one who says, you know, I'll give you the money you need for this gym. I'll give you $150,000 an episode, which was a phenomenal amount of money in 1975 for a half-hour show. But.
I need you to come over and use my film studios at L Street and film it there. 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 this relationship between Jim and Lou Grade, 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 used to joke that their producer, David Laser, would be claiming a viewership larger than the actual population 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 1977.
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 then when they get on there, they want to do something crazy and different, whether you're bouncing spoons on the end of your nose or you're dancing with a seven-foot carrot like Gilda Radner does. Or, you know, everybody wanted to do the show.
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. Everybody wanted to be on the Muppet Show. A gigantic. Hugely successful show. You know, I had to sort of laugh maybe 10 years ago now when the Muppets were in a commercial during the Super Bowl, I think for Toyota, and people were wringing their hands saying, My God, the Muppets are selling out.
They're doing commercials on what would Jim Henson think? Jim Henson must be rolling in his grave. No, the Muppets have been selling things since about 1957.
So the Muppet organization is built on the back of coffee commercials and then later on out of merchandising. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Madison Derricott. And what a story you listen to. And this is the genius of America and how art and commerce intersect. And indeed, so much of the storytelling we do here in our American Stories is the business of creativity.
Show business, the movie business, the intellectual property business. The story of the Muppets, a story about American perseverance, American creativity. No other country has created something like the Muppets. The Muppet's Story here on Our American Stories. No one knows what the future holds, but you deserve a weather app that can help.
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Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com. This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names. I want to take a second to talk about something that's personal to me. I've had the privilege of working closely with Robert Kraft for a long time. And one thing I've always respected is how seriously he takes up standing up to hate.
As a Jewish athlete my identity is something I am proud of. But I also know what it feels like to be singled out for it. That's why this new commercial for the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. That aired during the big game really hit home. It's about showing up for someone when they're targeted, even if you don't have the perfect words.
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Awards based on 2025 model year. Newer models may be shown. Mm-hmm.
