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This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. and Kermit the Frog and Cookie Monster, the Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.
So many of our most beloved TV personalities came from the imagination and the hands of Jim Henson. Joining us now is Brian J. Jones, author of Jim Henson, a biography, with the full story of the man behind the Muppets. Take it away, Brian. Mm.
Jim was born in Leland, Mississippi in 1936, September 23rd. His father was an agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And if that was the case, especially during that point in American history coming out of the Depression, you were going to either be in Mississippi or Maryland. And as it turned out, Jim Henson's father was both places.
Jim was sort of born and of the South, but actually did most of his growing up in Maryland, which is why he doesn't really have that Southern accent. Jim was always sort of a Southern gentleman. You could never entirely take the South out of Jim, but for the most part, he was raised right outside of Washington, D.C., in Maryland. His parents were Paul and Betty Henson. Jim had one older brother named Paul as well, who was killed at a young age, killed at age 19 while he was serving in the Navy.
He was killed in an automobile accident down in Florida.
Sort of a defining moment in Jim's life, actually, because that was a moment, I think, that he realized that life was short. And as a lot of his colleagues and his family and his children told me, Jim seemed to realize there may never be enough time to do everything he wanted to do. But as his daughter Lisa put it, once that happened with the death of his brother, he had rocket fuel in his blood and just was constantly in motion for the rest of his life. Constantly had ideas he was developing. He would have ideas written on yellow notepads and black pen, which is the way he did everything, in his notebooks.
And then at the same time, he might have something actually that he was performing and he might be also building puppets for another performance and developing animatronics and writing lyrics for songs for Broadway shows that didn't exist yet. And pitching TV series, some of which made it, some of which didn't.
So, Jim is a man constantly in motion. One of the most important figures in Jim's life and in his development as an artist is his grandmother, Deere.
Now, Deere's actually the daughter of a Civil War map maker. And so, I think you can sort of see Jim's creativity as a through line all the way back to that ancestor who, you know, drew beautiful maps and was really, really talented. And Deere is one of these people who could sew anything. People talked about how she could sew clothes out of an old army blanket that you could barely get a needle through. That she was just that deft with a needle and that talented and that able to create things.
And she's the one that, when Jim was a child, really encouraged him to write and draw. And Deere really encouraged him to be creative, taught him how to sew. Jim is one of these people that is self-taught, but also went through home economics in college and was a really master, you know, could sew anything and knew how to sew something so you couldn't see the seam.
So a lot of that came out of Deere, and he loved just the art of conversation, how they loved to sit around the dinner table in the evenings and talk. And Jim loved conversation, loved to listen to people tell stories. Stories. He loved that his parents would all, everybody in the family would gather around this old pump organ that his mom Betty had, and she would, you know, pump this with her feet while she played the organ, and they would stand around and sing songs from the Pogo song book, for example, and songs of A.A. Milne.
Jim just loved family gatherings. That's one of those things that influences Jim's work: just the value, the fun that families could have being together, talking with each other, being with each other, singing songs together, laughing together. I think that really informs his work going forward as well. Yeah. Uh Jim Henson was a gadget guy his entire life.
As a kid, he was always trying to build radios. And as one of his childhood friends told me, Jim's actually worked. Jim could actually pick up a radio signal with his old crystal radios that he was building. He and his brother Paul were always fiddling with something in the garage. They were always making model kits and airplanes and, you know, building something, creating something, something gadgety in their garage.
And Jim, from a young age, was fascinated by television. And he was fascinated by the very idea that what you were seeing on your TV screen was going on someplace else right at that moment. A lot of TV presentations back then were live, including commercials.
So, Jim just was fascinated by TV, and as he put it, he badgered his parents. He was determined to get one. And his father actually bought them a television for the Henson household in 1949, which is pretty early actually in the development of TV. There weren't a lot of people that had TVs at that time, not a lot of channels around.
So, Jim was an early adapter of the tech, which again is something else he would do throughout his entire life. But fascinated by a television, Jim wanted more than anything else to be on television or work on television. He didn't care if it was in front of the camera or behind the camera. Mm-hmm. When Jim is in high school, he's doing a lot of work in theater productions and in building sets.
And he really thought that he might get into television as a stage designer, again, working behind the scenes, unseen.
Well, Jim turns out to be sort of unseen a lot of the time because what offers him his opportunity to get into television is there's an advertisement in the local newspapers, and one of the TV stations, the local CBS affiliate, is advertising for, as they put it, young people to operate puppets for a local television show, a local kids' show.
So, Jim, who doesn't Really, I know anything about puppets. Jim wasn't one of these kids, you know, growing up who was playing with puppets all the time. He's not Steven Spielberg crashing his trains into each other and filming them, and everyone says, Oh, that Steven wants to be a movie director. Jim didn't really play with puppets, really liked Charlie McCarthy on the radio, loved listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. That was sort of the extent of his familiarity with puppets.
But when he sees this ad in the newspaper asking for people who can perform puppets for a local television show, Jim is determined to do whatever it takes to get that job and get in the door by any means necessary. Mm. He, in the span of about two weeks, by checking books out of the local library, teaches himself how to build puppets and how to perform puppets.
So, Jim sort of has this crash course self-taught in the art of performing puppets and goes down to the local television station, auditions, and gets the job. That was really all he kind of wanted puppets for at that point was just to get him in the door. Again, once he gets in the door, he wants to start working in stage design and maybe production and directing if he can. But it turns out that Jim is really, really good at puppetry. And I think part of the reason that happened is because he didn't really know what the rules, so to speak, of puppetry and puppet performance were.
So he doesn't know what rules he's breaking and he doesn't know what rules he's following as he goes along.
So Jim has this really intuitive feel for the way puppets should look and act on television. And you're listening to Brian J. Jones, author of Jim Henson, the biography, telling one heck of a story. What propels Jim Henson, what becomes rocket fuel for his life, the death of his brother, the early death of his brother. Life is for the living, and every day is precious.
He learns that young, always fiddling, always playing with things, a fascination with TV. And then he answers that ad for the local CBS affiliate. and the rest as we're going to learn is history. when we come back more of Jim Henson's remarkable life story here. on our American stories.
Lee Habib here again. Our American Stories tries to tell the stories of America's past and present to Americans, and we want to hear your stories too. They're some of our favorites. Send them to us. Go to ouramericanstories.com and click the Your Stories tab.
Again, please go to ouramericanstories.com. and click. The Your Stories tab. This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names. You know, I always got something going on: lifting, chasing my kid.
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See home depot.com/slash pricematch for details. Shop now. And we're back with Our American Stories and with the story of Jim Henson, the mastermind behind The Muppets. Back to Brian J. Jones with the story.
At that time, there's not a lot of puppetry on television. It's Kuklafran and Ollie. Jim understood something that Kuklafran and Ollie didn't quite grasp. They're filming the puppet stage. Bert Tilstrom stands behind the stage, pokes his puppets out from behind the curtain.
Fran stands in front of that puppet stage and interacts with the puppets, but they're still filming the puppet theater. It's almost like if today you would show a movie by walking into the movie theater and filming the movie on screen and then showing that on TV. Jim understood that if you've got the four sides of the TV, that entire space that the camera sees is your puppet theater. And what happens then is that opens up an entire universe for the puppets to interact in. They can come in from the bottom.
They can come in from the sides. They can rush the television screen. They can back into a shot by backing in behind the camera. It creates a whole new 3D world for the puppets to exist in. And that's Jim's first real big innovation is how puppets look on TV.
And he also understands that if they're on TV, you want them to have mouths that open. And he wanted eyes that looked focused. Jim figured out how to position the eyes. He figured out if you slightly cross the eyes when you place them, all of a sudden they're magically focused. Jim figures all this out.
out just by knowing how to build. And the other big innovation that he has is he also understands that if what you're seeing in those four sides of the TV monitor is what matters most, if that's the world where the puppet's existing, then you need to know what that looks like at all times. And so Jim does something, again, finding a solution in plain sight. Jim is one of these guys that like can always figure out how to handle a problem in a way that isn't always obvious. Jim's solution to that is he just puts a television monitor on the floor.
It's something no other performer gets to do. Any other performer has to watch themselves on tape after the fact. Jim can see himself on TV in real time, can see his performance real time. The only other issue with that is if you're looking at what's going on in the TV, if you want your character to go right on the TV monitor, you actually have to go to your left over your head to make that happen. And that's, again, is still the Muppet Sound of performing today.
If you watch them performing on Sesame Street, for example, they're not watching the puppet over their head. They're looking down at that monitor on the floor so they can see exactly what that camera sees. You know, 60 years later, So Jim, who doesn't know anything about puppetry until he uses it to get on TV, finds out just how great a performer he is, as do others.
So after he's come in the door at the local CBS station, the show he's doing goes under very quickly, partly because they were using minors to work, which wasn't permitted under the work permit. And Jim immediately gets his own show at the local NBC. They scoop him up. And while he's still in college, he starts performing every single night before the local news. He performs a show that he creates and writes and develops all the characters for called Salmon Friends.
And this is just a local puppet show. By this time, Jim has coined the term Muppets, which contrary to most local legend, isn't really a combination of marionette and puppet. Jim thought it was a word that sounded great, but Muppet's a word that's around by 1954. Jim's got that very early on. And Kermit comes along in 1955, very early in the Muppets story.
Let's not be quite so formal. Why don't you just call me Kermit and I'll call you, well, what would you like me to call you? When his grandfather was dying, Jim sort of dealt with that. Grief the way he always did. He started building.
And Kermit, he builds at that time, cuts it out of his mother's coat. And he's not a frog at this point, he's just sort of Kermit the thing in this abstract form. Made out of his mother's coat with ping pong balls for eyes. It's basically a ping pong ball cut in half with a slashed circle making the eye. Looks familiar to us because he's got sort of the same shaped head, but he's clearly not a frog yet and he's the wrong color.
But that's where Kermit comes from. Kermit is almost a day one Muppet. Kermit becomes one of the breakout stars of Salmon Friends. And Salmon Friends becomes this huge local sensation, and it catches the attention of folks in New York City. And Jim does the Tonight Show when it was still Steve Allen.
He does Jack Parr. He starts making all these appearances on variety shows, performing the Muffins of the Variety Show, and he's a huge hit. From there, he gets asked to participate in the Jimmy Dean show, another gigantic show, and he creates Rolf the dog for that show, because they wanted Jimmy to have somebody to talk to.
So he creates sort of this homespun version of a dog that he names Rolf, and that's one of the first times Jim actually uses his own voice for a character. And it becomes a breakout star on the Jimmy Dean show in the early 1960s. He ends up getting more fan mail than Jimmy Dean does. Jimmy Dean used to sort of complain jokingly that the dog was more popular than he was on the show.
So Kermit is sort of a local hero. Rolf is seen across the country. It becomes sort of the first national hit that Jim has. And what's great about Rolf is Rolf is one of these puppets, unlike Kermit, who, you know, has arms that are on sticks, so you can sort of wave them around. Rolf has to pick things up.
The way that's performed is what they call a live hand Muppet, where you put your right hand, because Jim's right hand, and he puts his right hand up in Rolf's head to operate the mouth. And then Rolf's hands are actually just, you know, sort of these long arms with fingers hanging off them. And Jim would put his left hand in the left hand of Rolf, but then that left the right hand open.
Somebody else has to perform that right hand.
Well, Jim hired a 19-year-old performer named Frank Oz, who was just out of high school, to literally be his right-hand man, to perform that right hand for Rolf. And that's how Frank Oz breaks into what becomes a... spectacular show business career.
Okay.
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. And 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 what Jim does is he creates two characters called Wilkins and Wointkins. 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, you've got this sort of uptight character, this very horizontal character in Ernie. It's Bunton and Beaker from The Muppet Show. Again, sort of the roundness of Bunton and the tall, skinny Beaker.
So Jim loves that style of building. We see that very early on with Wilkins and Wonkins.
Okay.
So, what happens in his very first commercial is you've got Woemkins staring down the barrel of a cannon, and Wilkins says, You know, hey, buddy, do you like Wilkins coffee? And Woemkins says, I never tasted it. And he fires the cannon at him, blows him on my 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. Yeah. Now what do you think of Wilkins? And that's the end of the commercial.
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. 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 10 years, maybe even longer. 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 the puppets saying the names of the actual coffee companies. He does ads for bread companies after that. He creates characters to sell bread. 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 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. Things. But Wilkins and Wonkins, they're not what you're expecting out of a coffee commercial. They're a scream, almost literally. And it's no wonder they were hugely successful.
It was a way of selling coffee nobody had ever thought of before. Threatening people to drink coffee. I mean, who would have ever thought? You know, people who don't drink Wilkins coffee just blow up sometimes. Oh, that's a lot of f ⁇ .
See what I mean? And you're listening to Brian J. Jones tell the story of Jim Henson. And my goodness, starting off at the very beginnings of TV and creating his own sort of school of puppetry, because he sort of learned it off the shelf, then improvised. And because he didn't know the rules, he was free to break them.
We learned this about Irving Berlin too. He didn't study music. He couldn't read music and he only played the black keys. And this is so much of what we learn about America: our ability to adapt and innovate and break new ground. We're do-it-yourselfers.
Jim realizes the four squares of the TV is the puppet stage. This is the great revelation. And of course, the humor just in contrasts. And that's the short and the squatty and the tall and the skinny. Merely the sight of these contrasts is itself funny.
When we come back, more of this remarkable talent and how it came to be. The story of Jim Henson here on Our American Stories. People don't listen to radio ads. While you're driving or making a sandwich, your subconscious pays full attention.
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Order today and get your Custom Sunday Lawn Plan. Ready for the season ahead. Sunday, a smarter, healthier yard. This is Julian Edelman from Dudes on Dudes with Gronk and Jules. One thing I've learned over the years: before you head out on any adventure, you gotta be ready to stay hydrated because dehydration ruins the fun faster than you can spell it.
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Bring in a splash of color with spring blooms and fresh plants from the Home Depot Garden Center. Then refresh your garden beds and keep them clear of weeds with Earth Grow mulch. Five bags for $10 to make your yard feel like new. Start your spring with low prices now through April 2nd, only at the Home Depot. Exclusions apply.
See home depot.com/slash pricematch for details. Shop now. Is your Jesus shaped more by culture than scripture? In our instant world, we've made Jesus a life coach, a therapist, a political ally. The Missing Messiah, a new book by Kyle Eidelman and Mark Moore, helps us understand how Western culture has gradually reshaped Jesus into our image and recognize the difference between a personalized savior and revolutionary king.
If you believe there's a more dangerous, more majestic Messiah than the one you've inherited, visit missingmessiah.com to learn Learn more today. And we're back with Our American Stories and with Brian J. Jones sharing the story of the life and work of Jim Henson. Back to Brian. Yeah.
Jim has got a great gig going in the 1960s with Rolf on the Jimmy Dean show, but he's also got the Muppets doing variety shows. But Jim is sort of creatively restless. In the 1960s, he's got so many different things going on. And again, partly because he's got so much ad work going on, he can afford to explore all these different avenues. He actually has done enough variety shows that he's fairly certain the Muppets can hold their own for half an hour.
So he's pitching what will become almost 15 years later the actual Muppet show. But something happens in 1969 or late 68 that really shapes his destiny moving forward. And that is that he's offered the job working with Children's Television Workshop. As they're putting together Sesame Street, they say, you know, we need to have puppets. We would like to have puppets on Sesame Street, little short films featuring puppets.
And John Stone, who is also one of the sort of founding fathers of Sesame, said, you know, I've got the guy for this. It's Jim Henson. And he's so good that if you can't get him to do puppets for Sesame Street, then you probably shouldn't have puppets on Sesame Street. I think the way they ultimately got him was they also said there's a lot of different things you can do for this. And Jim, who considers himself again as an experimental filmmaker, is allowed to make all these little short films that so many of us don't even know are Jim Henson films.
So I think part of what attracted him to Sesame Street was not only that he really loved the project. Jim wanted television to matter. This is at the time when Neil Minnow was calling television the vast wasteland. Jim wanted TV to have value. He loved TV so much that he wanted everyone else to understand TV could do some good things.
So I think that was one of the big reasons he took the job and was to educate kids and make TV matter, but also because they were going to let him do all these really interesting little short films.
So he's sort of right there in the founding DNA of Sesame Street. The Muppets were so important to Sesame Heath that they wanted them performing all these little, you know, what they called inserts. You would perform these three or four-minute little bits that they would then insert into the show. But initially, when they were developing Sesame Street, they wanted the segments featuring the Muppets to be completely distinctive, completely separate from anything else going on on the street. They wanted Susan and Bob and Mr.
Hooper, they existed in one universe, and Ernie and Burt and Cookie Monster and all those Muppets existed in their own separate universe as well. They didn't want them crossing over because, as Jim would call them, the eggheads had decided that you couldn't mix the fantasy with the realistic element, that children wouldn't understand that. But once they started showing the test pilots of Sesame Street to kids, they found out they had a problem in that they would all sit up and watch when the Muppets were on screen. And then when they went back to Bob and Susan and Mr. Hooper, the kids would start to tune out.
So they knew they needed to bring Muppets onto the street itself. And so Jim was tasked with creating some Muppets that would live perpetually on Sesame Street. And that's where he creates Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, specifically to sort of break that wall and put the Muppets existing on Sesame Street itself. Jim knew there was no way he could perform those characters himself. It would involve too much of his time.
And Frank Oz was too important to the company as well, too busy with him.
So he hired a really amazing performer named Carol Spinney who performs both Oscar and Big Bird. As he always said, he doesn't, you know, need to talk to a psychiatrist. He's working out both sides of his personality all the time. Just an incredible track record, incredible performer. But Big Bird, you know, really gave you the point of view of the child.
That was what was so important about Big Bird on there. Oscar was the one that let you know it was okay to kind of lose it every once in a while, as long as you came back and people still liked you. But Big Bird was really important to that show. And in fact, when Sesame Street first got on the cover of Time Magazine shortly after it went on the air, it was Big Bird. who was on the cover of the magazine.
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 them up to 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, with 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 as 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 Slotter, 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.
And 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-to-itiveness here. Eventually, what happens? He's approached by Lord Lew Grade, who runs ATV Studios in London. Cool. 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 in 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 Stree and film it there at the ATV studios. Jim doesn't even ask his wife. He 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. And you're listening to author Brian J. Jones tell the story of Jim Henson.
And what he saw in the future of TV was, well, it was a vision. Then his experience with failure. A couple of pilots, a CBS pitch, until someone finally gets him. And all of a sudden, overnight, after a lot of hard work, a huge sensation. And pretty soon every star in the world wants to appear on The Muppet Show.
When we come back, more of this remarkable story of Jim Henson here on Our American Stories. People don't listen to radio ads. While you're driving or making a sandwich, your subconscious pays full attention.
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Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures. Mm. And we're back with Our American Stories and the story of Jim Henson and the Muppets. Back to Brian J.
Jones and the rest of the story. What was really great about the Muppet Show was they got really lucky with time and place in the sense that, you know, it's the 70s. It's not like today where if a show is not a hit within the first week it comes out, they yank it off the air or they stop streaming it or they cancel it. They were sort of given the time that they needed to develop the characters. And for Jim, when it came to the Muppets, character was always king.
And you had to figure out the relationship between your characters. That's what people responded to. The Muppets are funny, but the Muppets are also family. And that's something that Jim understood intuitively, that performers understood intuitively, and that writers like Jerry Jewel understood intuitively.
Now, the issue you had is in the first season of the Muppet Show, Jerry Joel was not the head writer.
So that first season of the Muppet Show is about a lot of quick-hit sketches. It deliberately almost looks like laugh-in. You had some laugh-in writers writing on it. By the second season, Jerry Joel comes in as headwriter, and you start to really develop the relationships between the characters. One of my very favorite moments is early on.
You know, Fozzie was intended to be Frank Oz's main character until Miss Piggy sort of took over. But even early on, they weren't quite sure what to do with Fozzie. Jerry Joel said, you know, he was great to heckle. Like, they could have Statler and Waldorf heckle him. He was a great character to heckle.
But he said, but then you really felt sorry for him. They didn't really know, really know what to do with Fozzie. But there's a great sketch called Good Grief: the Comedian's a Bear. Jerry Joel wrote it. They sent it down to the floor to be performed very late in the day.
Did not have any time to rehearse it, just sort of read through it once and then just cut the two of them loose. And the sketch is about Fozzie trying to get Kermit to help him tell a joke, and he keeps telling Kermit to come in with a punchline when he hears him say the word here. Fraud of my heart, you will just wait until I say the word here. When you hear me say the word here, you will rush up to me and say, Good grief, the comedians are bear. Good grief, the comedians are bear!
Check! When you say the word here, right, gotcha. But unfortunately, there's an H-E-R-E, and there's an H-E-A-R, and Kermit keeps getting those words messed up and comes in at the wrong time. Ready?
Okay, here we go.
Now then, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya! You're a wonderful-looking audience. It's a pleasure to be here. Come, Grief, the comedian of the birds! She just said here.
That was the wrong here. Which is the right here? The under here. It's utter chaos. And at one point in that routine, Fozzie's hat falls off, and you can't stop camera from to pick up a putback.
They just keep rolling. Go, go, go. Hey, hey, folks, this is a story you gotta love to hear. Good grief to comedians of our beach comedy! Not that here.
No wish here. Another here. What am I going to know? Come on, what you care? And as Jerry Joel says, they just played the hell out of it.
And that was the moment when they realized that the point of Fozzie was, you know, he's the great sidekick, but he just, you know, he just wants approval. He just wants to make you laugh and he wants to be approved and he wants to be loved. And Frank Oz said, you know, that's the moment when you get a handle on the character. And that's sort of the moment that Fozzie Bear arrives. But they were given time to let that happen.
Miss Piggy is a character that had to sort of arrive. She didn't show up fully formed. She was initially a back row character, was sort of handed around between performers when she first appeared on the Muppet show. If you watch some of those Muppet shows on Disney right now, you'll hear her speaking with the wrong voice at one point because Richard Hunt, another performer, is performing her. Oz ends up performing her at one point, and they're still not quite sure.
You know what they're doing with her. She's not a primary character, but she gets annoyed with Kermit, and she was supposed to slap him. And Frank Oz turned the slap into a karate chop instead. He thought it was just funnier. This is over.
Well, that's another story that Jerry Joel says when they were watching it happen, the room just stopped, and everybody knew you had to see it again. They knew that that character had arrived. And that's the moment Miss Piggy is sort of born. And, you know, Frank Oz always talked about how she was kind of a truck driver who wanted to be a runway model. And that character ends up just taking over.
The character was so strong that Piggy becomes the breakout star of the Muppet Show. You know, gets her own posters, and she's on magazine covers, and she's got her own makeup. It's just this huge breakout star, born out of this impromptu moment when they were just trying to find the character. You had to have time. And as we know about Jim, time was something he didn't always think he had.
But the Muppet Show was given the time it needed. And typical of Jim Henson in around 1980, he says, you know, that was a really, really nice show. And he takes it off the air. Willingly takes it off the air because he wants to go and do other things, namely movies. But you know, only Jim would take off a show at the height of its power, calling it a very nice show, just so he can go off and do other things.
So he's not stretched too thin. He can pour his creativity into that next project. Jim brought this innate sense of joy. To almost everything that he did. Even serious projects like Labyrinth was something that he just loved doing.
He loved building that world. He loved working with David Bowie. You know, he loved developing the animatronics for the Dark Crystal. He loved telling the stories in something like, you know, the Jim Henson Storyteller. Jim just brought joy to every project he did.
He wanted his performers to have fun. The Sesame Street performers talk about the best times they had is laying in a pile, laughing with each other, you know, with their arms up in the air because just what they were doing was so much fun. Jim also understood that children aren't stupid. Jim never spoke down to a child. There's a great sketch.
It's a sketch I love so much, but I think it also really speaks to Jim's power as a performer. And it's Kermit with a little girl named Joey singing the ABCs, and she keeps stopping to say Cookie Monster. And there's no script for this. This is Jim as Kermit interacting with a child who believes in Kermit entirely. You have to remember, Jim is kneeling on the floor right in front of her, but he's gone.
She's focusing right on Kermit, meeting Kermit at his level, and Kermit is talking to her straight on. She gets the giggles, and Kermit gets infuriated, and then she says she loves him, and he comes back and says he loves her too. This, you know, this is Jim. It goes Q-R-S. You're just teasing me.
W, X, Y, and Z.
Now I'm species.
Next time, Cookie Monster can do it with you. I'm leaving. I love you. I love you too. I mean, this is the way Jim was with children, meeting them right at their level, you know, having that fake exasperation and trying not to laugh at the same time.
That's the way he dealt with kids. And that's part of the strength of the Muppets, both on September Street and on the Muppets show. Jim also understood that their parents aren't stupid, that the parents like to have fun. If the parents are sitting there watching Session Street with their kids, then darn it, he would like to be sure that they're entertained as well.
So that's something, again, Jim just sort of inherently understood. And it came from sitting around with his own family, listening to people talk, and listening to people laugh, and listening to them tell stories, and listening to them be respectful of each other.
So that's the methodology that Jim brought to the Muppets. And I think that's why the Muppets feel like family. Years before his death in 1986, he was feeling very introspective and he thought this was a good time to write letters to his children to tell them how much he loved them, how much he loved what he did, and what he wanted to have done after he died. And what he tells everybody in these letters is: you know, don't be sad that I'm gone. You know, I'll see you again someday, I'm sure.
If I can watch over you and help you, know that I'll do that. Take care of each other, look out for each other. And ultimately, he says, you know, it's a good life, enjoy it. But Jim had set out the way he wanted his funeral carried out, which was, you know, people should dress colorfully, nobody should wear black, and wanted people to just talk about how much fun they'd had working together and how much they loved doing these things, which is exactly what they did at the funeral.
So this is a memorial service, and the really remarkable part of it occurs toward the end when all the Muppet performers come up on stage to sing some of Jim's favorite songs. It's about a 15-minute segment, but the last three minutes or so is them singing just one person, which is from the musical Snoopy. If just one person believes in you. It's all about the joy of collaboration. You know, if just one person believes in you, and then, you know, why not another person, you know, get together with another person, and then bring in three people and four and just keep adding people.
And collaboration gets better and better, and it's more joyful the more people you bring into it. And as they're singing the song, they keep bringing more and more Muppets into this until the entire stage is filled with the Muppet performers. All those people believe in you. It's just a really remarkable moment. Every performer I talked with who was on that stage said they, to this day, still don't know how they got through it.
Everybody's crying through it. I don't know how they're managing to sing, but somehow they are. But it's a really incredible, really poignant moment, and one that Jim said asked, be done. It's just a fantastic moment. You know, a showman to the very end.
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Madison Derricott. And a special thanks to Brian J. Jones. He's the author of Jim Henson, the biography. It's available on Amazon or wherever you buy your books.
Pick it up. You will not regret it. And my goodness, the Muppets aren't just funny. their family, and they were, they were America's family. Those characters, and they were real characters to kids and adults alike.
They came to life. One of the great attributes of Henson was never talking down to his audience, whether it be kids or adults. And always there was that innate sense of joy in the performances. Always it was there. And that scene, that memorial service, I remember it.
And I remember it like I remember Jimmy Stewart reading the poem about his dog who died on Johnny Carson just before he died. These things stay with you forever. The story of Jim Henson, an American original. Here on Our American Stories. We've been duped, hoodwinked, conned for 50 years.
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Mm-hmm.
