Selects: How Jim Henson Worked

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Speaker 4 Good morning, everyone. I hope you are watching Saturday Morning Cartoons, or maybe The Muppets, because this one is all about Jim Henson.

Speaker 4 I'm often asked what our favorite episodes are when we do the Q ⁇ A at live shows, and many, many times I go back to the ones on The Muppets and Jim Henson because he was just one of the best.

Speaker 7 This is from January 6th, 2015.

Speaker 4 How Jim Henson Worked, American Hero.

Speaker 5 That's not part of the title. That's just me.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. Howdy.
And Jerry, for the last time.

Speaker 5 this year.

Speaker 2 She's just informed us and she's all smiles.

Speaker 8 She is.

Speaker 2 Not very nice, nice, Jerry.

Speaker 7 How'd you like that presentation earlier?

Speaker 2 The sensitivity training? It was great.

Speaker 5 Yes, people, because we work for a corporation, we have things like sensitivity trainings.

Speaker 7 And in those trainings, you get shown video examples of various forms of harassment. And they are the best, most fun things to watch ever.

Speaker 2 They're pretty overt.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I could watch those all day long.

Speaker 2 I was wondering how much that production company made from that. Yeah.
You know, they did what, like, five little vignettes. They, I'm sure they paid the actors like literal peanuts.

Speaker 7 Yeah, they were bad actors.

Speaker 2 They were like, there's the peanut bucket over there. You can pay yourself.

Speaker 7 Yeah, the one that really got me was the, actually they were all really funny, but the one with the old guy in the

Speaker 7 in the factory loading boxes. like a shipping warehouse.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 7 And they were giving the old man a hard time about everything.

Speaker 2 Because he was old?

Speaker 7 Yeah, because he was old and, you you know, they were giving him a hard time because

Speaker 7 he was out of work for a while and they'd had to cover for him. Right.
The old man, and he had the back brace on. Did you notice that?

Speaker 13 And he just, the look on his face, he just kept getting a little more pouty the whole time.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I was like, dude.
That's good acting. Stick up for yourself.

Speaker 7 Tell these young kids, you know, what to do.

Speaker 2 The back brace prevents him from it.

Speaker 7 Anyway, I just had to bring that up because I just think that stuff is so funny. And what's funny is people really do some of that stuff that you're like, what?

Speaker 7 There's some creeps out there.

Speaker 7 That was a really weird setup for Jim Henson because he's the least harassy guy he was probably ever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he certainly comes across that way.

Speaker 7 He's a genuinely good dude. It's not one of these stories you hear about like

Speaker 7 maybe some of your favorite children's books writers or cartoonists or something.

Speaker 8 Maybe we're kind of bad people.

Speaker 2 No, apparently not at all. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He was

Speaker 2 not only.

Speaker 2 so there's a lot of quotes in this article. John, no, I thought John Strickland wrote it.
It turns out that's not the case. I'm surprised.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because he's friends with, or down with, at least, one of Jim Henson's kids. Oh, really? Who I believe lives here in Atlanta.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 But in this article, it's one of those things where everybody who compliments Jim Henson, who worked with him,

Speaker 2 they go to the trouble of complimenting him in a way that's not just

Speaker 2 like, oh, he was such a great guy. Yeah.
They all back up just a little bit because they're cognizant that that doesn't get it across. Sure.

Speaker 2 And they want you to understand that they're talking about more than just the great guy, like, oh, he's dead, and I'm not going to speak ill of the dead, and he was a great guy.

Speaker 2 And that's a really thoughtless, polite, inoffensive thing to say. Sure.
So, like, Frank Oz said something like,

Speaker 2 he was

Speaker 2 a great guy,

Speaker 2 but at the same time, he was a human,

Speaker 2 but he was still a really great guy. Right.
So, like, what you're thinking of as a great guy, get rid of that and actually replace it with a genuine, human, great guy.

Speaker 7 Yeah, because as a filmmaker, he's a puppeteer, obviously, but he was a filmmaker first and foremost, which a lot of people kind of forget about.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Did you watch any of these? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's a tough, tough job.

Speaker 14 Super stressful.

Speaker 7 And you and I have seen it can make good guys and good ladies be real jerks

Speaker 7 under stressful situations. You know, it's it's it's a tough thing.
There's a lot of money on the line each day.

Speaker 2 And uh Yeah, it's like everybody relax. It's just millions of dollars.

Speaker 7 But Frank Oz, I think that's the point he was making. Like even when he would get frustrated and uh stressed like that, it was he was still a good guy behind it all.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I read a I read an I guess it was a book review of a biography about him that that showed that it was all somebody said it was all just play to him.

Speaker 2 Like work was play.

Speaker 2 Even though he worked really hard,

Speaker 2 he was able to

Speaker 2 commit himself like that to his work because to him, he was having the time of his life all the time.

Speaker 2 And apparently, like there was just, there was no line between work and play, which now that we've seen that sensitivity training could have gotten him in a lot of big, you know, a lot of trouble.

Speaker 2 But he

Speaker 2 just enjoyed the life that he had from what I understand. Loved cars.

Speaker 2 He had like a lotus that was the same color as Kermit the Frog.

Speaker 2 He had a Rolls-Royce early on

Speaker 2 from

Speaker 2 his work.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about the guy.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, if you haven't, I just need to go ahead and say if you haven't listened to the episode on The Muppets,

Speaker 7 this is

Speaker 7 what I consider just a more in-depth part two on the man himself. But that's one of our favorite all-time episodes and from feedback, one of the great all-time fan episodes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was a great episode.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it was just a lot of fun, and so I hope this augments that one. I hope we do it justice.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 that's actually one of the reasons why we can do this episode, because we already did a Muppets episode.

Speaker 7 And they tweeted about us, too, remember?

Speaker 15 The Henson Company did.

Speaker 7 Yeah, they did. Which was

Speaker 2 it got their actual approval. That's right.
Man, that was something.

Speaker 2 Muppets episode is its own thing. It's about Muppets.

Speaker 2 This is about Jim Henson, and it's appropriate that we're doing this because he was more than just the Muppets, even though everybody pegs him with the Muppets and that is a huge thing.

Speaker 2 He was more than that. And like you said, he was a filmmaker, but originally started out as

Speaker 2 a puppeteer, but kind of a reluctant one.

Speaker 7 Yeah, he was born in

Speaker 7 1936, September 24th,

Speaker 7 James Maury Henson, M-A-U-R-Y, in Mississippi. And his grandmother, maternal grandmother, was a painter and a quilter and a needleworker, and apparently was a big inspiration to him

Speaker 7 just to seek out the creative in life. Right.
Which is pretty great. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 one of the things he got into, well, he was originally kind of a fan of ventriloquism a little bit. But he said later on in life that

Speaker 2 he was never like obsessed with puppets or anything like that, like you would have expected him to be.

Speaker 2 And as he went to college, I think in Maryland,

Speaker 2 he got into, he started out as a studio artist. That's what he was studying.

Speaker 7 Yeah, he loved television above all else from the time he was a little kid. He was just transfixed by the tube.

Speaker 2 He almost kind of made himself destined to be on television by being obsessed with it. Yeah.
But

Speaker 2 he kind of stumbled into puppetry in college, and he started out as a studio art major and ended up graduating with a home ech degree because home ech was the only degree that offered puppet-making courses.

Speaker 7 Yeah, he majored, or he took a puppetry course at first, and then a bunch of textiles and crafts courses, which is a great way to start building and making your own puppets.

Speaker 2 Right. So, but he graduated with a home ech degree.
But by the time he graduated, he was already extremely successful.

Speaker 2 Rolls-Royce that I mentioned, he bought in time to drive to his college graduation yeah because he'd already created successful shows um

Speaker 7 in his town yeah i think he was a in high school he was on the local tv station uh doing little guest spots and then uh in 1955 the show salmon friends uh debuted and that uh you know he also did work on the side making money with um i think he did some of the like really cool concert posters of the day right really color colorful silkscreen posters and salmon friends did really well

Speaker 7 but he still wasn't quite sure. Like, I still don't know if I want to, you know, I'm a filmmaker.
I did these short films, really sort of weird, abstract short films, live action.

Speaker 2 Experimental.

Speaker 2 Totally experimental. Did you see the timepiece? Oh, yeah.
That one was pretty cool. It was great

Speaker 2 in its way. And did you see The Cube?

Speaker 7 I watched parts of The Cube.

Speaker 2 That was... Did you see the end? No.
Oh, you've got to see the end. I skipped the middle because I was like, okay, I get where you're going with this.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Yeah, well, we should just set it up real quick. The Cube was a show on NBC.
It was a one-hour show

Speaker 2 in 1969.

Speaker 7 The name of the show NBC did was called Experiment in Television.

Speaker 2 Appropriately.

Speaker 7 It was a different thing each week.

Speaker 7 And he had one week's installment called The Cube, which was a guy just stuck in a white room, but other people could come in and out of the room, but he could not, right?

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 2 Okay. And he starts to go kind of crazy.
And it has the look and feel of a color TV ad,

Speaker 2 like lots of overacting and like Carol Burnett-esque characters and stuff like that. But the sentiment behind it and like the

Speaker 2 everything behind it is really neat. And it really gives you a good,

Speaker 2 an eye-opening example of like what Jim Henson was capable of, but also like what he was into. Because, you know, when you think of him, you think of Muppets and Sesame Street in particular.

Speaker 7 Sure. And these are weird, abstract art films.

Speaker 7 Not unlike, you know, you watch like a Jim Morrison art film from film school.

Speaker 7 And it's kind of the same style, you know, that was what was going on back then. Yeah.
And he actually got nominated for an Academy Award for Time Piece.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 Jim Henson had Jim Morrison beat by a mile as far as experimental films went. Yeah, I'll agree with you there.

Speaker 7 So like I said, he wasn't quite convinced that puppetry was his future because he was a filmmaker and he was like puppets are still kind of kid stuff right but post-college he did the old tour of Europe and in Europe puppeteering is a whole different business it was a lot more serious

Speaker 7 and a lot more

Speaker 7 I guess it was treated as art yeah exactly and he said you know what I am gonna give this a shot came back to the US

Speaker 7 married Jane and even though he and Jane separated they never divorced

Speaker 7 oh really I thought they did no they never fulfilled the divorce They just stayed separated. Okay.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 then he started making TV commercials and formed his own company in 1963 with, I don't know if he formed it with Frank Oz, but he hired Frank Oz and Jerry Jewell, who ended up being, obviously, legendary puppeteers.

Speaker 2 And lifelong collaborators of his. Yeah.
Yeah, but he started out making a basically a puppet-based... commercial ad agency in New York

Speaker 2 in 1963.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and they weren't making funny commercials back then, so he was really pretty revolutionary at the time.

Speaker 2 And they did pretty well for themselves. And one of the smartest moves he made early on was all of his contracts said that he retained the rights to any of the creations he made for these companies.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So he was.
creating what some of the things that would later become famous Muppets, like the cookie monster was originally made for a chip maker.

Speaker 2 It was this puppet that couldn't get enough of these chips.

Speaker 7 Yeah, he was the wheel stealer and he he stole cheese wheels.

Speaker 2 Yeah, okay, that's what it was. Yeah.
And he ended up being the cookie monster. And the reason he ended up being the cookie monster is because Jim Henson retained the rights to that creation.

Speaker 7 That was, he was a very savvy business guy, too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and he was using somebody else's dime,

Speaker 2 these advertisers,

Speaker 2 like budgets to kind of hash out and form and make his Muppets.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Rolf the Dog started out on Purina commercials and was later a sidekick on the Jimmy Dean show in 1963.

Speaker 2 Which I remember that from the Muppets episode. Rolf was the first big Muppet.
And he's such a

Speaker 2 bit character now

Speaker 2 that it's just mind-boggling to think he was the one that started it all. Even before Kermit, before Big Bird, it was Rolf.

Speaker 7 Kermit kind of stole the show, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And we'll talk a little more about Kermit and where he came from right after this.

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Speaker 7 All right, so it's 1969 and a very,

Speaker 7 very

Speaker 7 big thing happens to Jim Henson. He was invited to be on the pilot of a show created by the Children's Television Workshop called Sesame Street.
He did not create it.

Speaker 16 Some people think he did.

Speaker 7 But he did

Speaker 7 make his mark by creating most of the iconic characters. And if you were a fan of the old Sesame Streets back then,

Speaker 7 not all, but many of those little short films, the little claymation ones or the live-action ones, he directed those as well. Yeah.
Which is pretty cool. I never knew that.

Speaker 2 I think I knew that. Did you? Yeah,

Speaker 2 he was our Rus Vic.

Speaker 2 No. He was their Rus Vic.
That's right. Russ Vic is ours.
That's right. So, Chuck,

Speaker 2 the whole thing that...

Speaker 2 changed everything for him was Sesame Street. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He wasn't a creator of Sesame Street. They They just hired him on.
And they actually kind of won him over because remember one of the things that Jim Henson always struggled with his whole career was

Speaker 2 he wanted to

Speaker 2 explore places that puppets had never really gone to. Right.

Speaker 2 In themes that they hadn't gone to, at least not in the modern age.

Speaker 2 But he was fighting against them not being taken seriously.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it wasn't like he was anti-puppet by any means. He was anti- or anti-kids, Because one of the big reasons he signed on with Children's Television Workshop was their goal to educate kids.
Right.

Speaker 7 It meant a lot to him. But like you said, I think to merge those worlds successfully was a big part of his goal

Speaker 2 and struggle for a little while. Russ Vick, by the way, made the little interstitial things for the stuff you should know television show.

Speaker 7 Yeah. The animations.

Speaker 2 Which is why I reference him. Yeah.
So the Children's Television Workshop, which is now called the Sesame Workshop, from what I understand, they won him over big time.

Speaker 2 He makes all of these characters from like Big Bird, and I think Kermit came before Sesame Street. And he started out, I think we talked about this in the Muppet episode, too.

Speaker 2 He started out looking really weird.

Speaker 7 Yeah, like a lizard almost.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And not cool at all, like really kind of freaky.
Yeah. Which is something that I, now that I know a little more about Jim Henson, I think maybe he might have even been going for.
Right.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that Sesame Street allowed him to do was to really kind of

Speaker 2 explore something that he'd long been obsessed with, which was television and where it converged with puppets, which was all new territory. And Jim Henson was at the bleeding edge of it.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Because if you think about it, when you go to a puppet show live, you know,

Speaker 2 you're looking at what's essentially a mechanism for hiding the human. And there's just a little area that the puppet can move around in.

Speaker 7 A A little tiny fixed stage. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So Jim Henson stepped back and said, okay, the television is that little tiny area that the puppet can move around in.

Speaker 2 But it also opens up the whole world for a puppet because you're using camera angles and there's editing and it's not in person.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Just frame out the people.

Speaker 2 So, and again, we talked about this in the Muppet episode. He created something called Platforming Up.
Yeah. To where the puppeteers no longer had to crouch down

Speaker 2 to to mo to maneuver the puppets yeah because he was a tall guy yeah tall and lanky man he was skinny oh those running shots and time pieces exactly because he was in it they were hysterical yeah and he weighs about 70 pounds somehow his big lanky legs but um so yeah the performers could stand up which was a huge weight off yeah but at the same time because you're working with cameras and stuff like that and they have the whole universe to move around in and jim henson wanted them to move around as much as possible it also put him in some weird positions.

Speaker 7 Yeah, if you ever,

Speaker 7 well, some people might think it's like kind of ruining the thing, but I think it's really neat.

Speaker 7 If you just look up on Google Images, Muppets, Muppets Show Behind the Scenes pictures, and it'll show the stage sets, you know, like

Speaker 7 six feet off the ground

Speaker 7 and all the people standing beneath.

Speaker 7 I think it's awesome to look at, but some people don't like, you know, they want to keep that illusion alive. Right.
So depending on what kind of person you are, either seek that out or don't.

Speaker 2 And we gave that warning in the Muppets episode, too. Did we?

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah, I think they're really cool pictures.
I agree. Because, you know, a lot of times

Speaker 7 they're looking at video monitors

Speaker 7 standing there, contorted, using both hands. Right.

Speaker 7 Like

Speaker 7 the way puppeteers work together to me is just a miracle because they're acting.

Speaker 7 as the puppets, but they're moving, still moving among one another as humans underneath, which can be be really complicated we in fact we know some really really talented puppeteers here in Atlanta yeah the Center for Puppetry Arts is yeah I think the nation's largest puppet puppeteer organization yep and that is where we had our TV show debut party premiere party yeah Like it was a really cool experience like Emmett Otter and the gang are right there on display.

Speaker 7 I think the Henson and Kermit cut the ribbon for the grand opening

Speaker 7 back when it opened and

Speaker 7 ended up donating like 500 puppets and Muppets to the Center for Puppetry Arts. So if you ever visit Atlanta, people always email us and say, what should we do?

Speaker 7 I highly recommend going and checking out the Center for Puppetry Arts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because they have a museum with, like you said, Emmett Otter. Oh, man.
There's all sorts of cool stuff. Like a full-size, life-size Skexy behind glass scary as you can imagine.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but I was talking about Raymond Carr, our friend, who...

Speaker 7 I hate to keep bringing up the TV show, but it all kind of overlaps. He was the production designer for Stuff You Should Know on Science Channel.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 And he and his friends, Brandon and the gang, are amazing puppeteers, and they're doing some really, really leading-edge, like, cool stuff here in Atlanta. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Like these giant puppets operated, like, you know, 15-foot-tall puppets operated by like six and eight people. Have you ever seen the Spaceman that they do?

Speaker 2 No. Oh, man.
It's unbelievable.

Speaker 7 It's really cool. It's like, I don't know how tall he is.
He seems like he's 20 feet tall. And they, you know, do these at parades and stuff.
And it's just really, really cool stuff.

Speaker 23 That's awesome.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 But Henson is a huge inspiration to them, obviously.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I think anybody who works even remotely in puppets has got to be inspired by Jim Henson.
He's a man.

Speaker 2 One of the other things that he came up with was

Speaker 2 that was based on putting Muppets or puppets on TV was using softer materials. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Everything else was like up to that point stiff wood marionettes, ventriloquist dummies, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 He used like foam, and it allowed

Speaker 2 the puppets themselves to have more expressive faces, which is great for close-up on TV. Yeah, absolutely.
And it also, I mean,

Speaker 2 now looking back, you just are like, well, yeah, of course, it's what puppets do. That's what...
I know.

Speaker 2 But that was Jim Henson that came up with that, and it changed everything because it took something like, I mean, imagine howdy-duty. It was like, yeah, it's cool.

Speaker 2 You know, it's howdy-duty or whatever. But whether close-up or far away, he looked exactly the same.
It was like a woodhead with like a moving lower jaw.

Speaker 2 And, you know, he gave you nightmares.

Speaker 2 With Kermit the Frog or something like that, the fact that he could have different expressions and react differently and his emotions could be shown on his face, that made him that much more popular, that much more approachable

Speaker 2 to people who were into him.

Speaker 7 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Which is everybody. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah, show me someone who doesn't like Muppets in any form. I get it if you don't like it anymore, maybe, but your heart is cold and dead inside.

Speaker 7 For a while, and this is something I don't think I knew,

Speaker 7 he dabbled on Saturday Night Live in season one. Lorn Michaels got him a deal to perform some sketches, and

Speaker 7 ultimately it wasn't a huge success, and it wasn't the greatest marriage, but it was pretty cool that he was seeking out, you know, different avenues to get. those puppets on television.
It was.

Speaker 7 And his big break came

Speaker 7 in 1975.

Speaker 7 He wanted to make The Muppet Show. And he had a lot of trouble in the U.S.
still, even though he had his various successes on commercials and stuff.

Speaker 7 So he had to go to London, and a TV producer named Lord Lou Grade gave him a deal with Grade's ATV Studios and said, you know what, you can make your show.

Speaker 7 And The Muppet Show was born.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah?

Speaker 7 Bada bing, bada boom.

Speaker 2 That was it. That was it.
And you can really see Jim Henson's love of variety shows and just kind of,

Speaker 2 well just the stage

Speaker 2 in the Muppet show because if you think about it it's set the whole thing set backstage at a variety show it's such a great idea when you look back at it it's like we take it for granted a little bit because we were kids but now as an adult it's like what a perfect way to frame this world is it's basically like 30 rock or 30 rock was the muppet show right where the muppet show started all that yeah i don't know if carol burnett was before The Muppet Show.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was before. Was it? Yeah.
So she did a lot of backstage stuff, didn't she?

Speaker 2 I wonder who started that.

Speaker 7 I don't know. I mean, hers was more sketch.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but some of it was like backstage. Was it? I believe so.
No, I don't remember that. Unless I'm hallucinating right now.

Speaker 7 They need to have a good old-fashioned variety show again.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they don't have those anymore.

Speaker 7 Those were big back in the day, you know? Like, a host comes out and then there's sketches and singing.

Speaker 2 Remember our cabaret? No, it wasn't cabaret. What was it, the episode we did?

Speaker 2 Oh, Burlesque? Burlesque. Yeah.
Yeah, how that started out in vaudeville. And Burlesque had, that's where stand-up comedy came from.
That was an interesting episode.

Speaker 7 Yeah. I miss those variety shows, though, like the Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton and Kale Burnett.
All the Bandrell sisters.

Speaker 2 Although Kenny and Dolly could just sit on a couch and stare at the camera for an hour, and I'd watch that. Yeah.
They are

Speaker 2 great entertainers. Yeah.
Love those two.

Speaker 7 um

Speaker 7 all right so where are we in our timeline

Speaker 2 well chuck the muppet show has just hit oh that's right things are going pretty well they have been going pretty well already for henson apparently in 1970 rubber ducky hit number 16 on the billboard charts and for those who don't know uh ernie is voiced by jim henson so jim henson sang a song rubber ducky that made it to number 16 on the billboard charts and that was 1970 a year after The Cube, before The Muppet Show even happened.

Speaker 7 Before Sesame Street even, right?

Speaker 2 No, Sesame Street was 69. I think

Speaker 2 the same year as The Cube. Wow.
That's crazy. That's the new touchstone for his life, The Cube.

Speaker 7 Yeah, PC and BC.

Speaker 7 So The Muppet Show was a huge hit. It won

Speaker 7 a lot of awards. It garnered critical praise and won the hearts of children all over the world.

Speaker 2 But it was also for adults, too. Oh, yeah.
I think that's why he was able to pull it off in Great Britain because they have better senses of humor.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and speaking of adults,

Speaker 7 he got into some more serious themes with his next great show, Fraggle Rock,

Speaker 7 in 1983.

Speaker 2 I never saw a second of that show.

Speaker 7 Oh, man, really?

Speaker 2 Wasn't it on HBO?

Speaker 7 Yeah, it was one of the first HBO original series.

Speaker 2 We either had Showtime or we didn't have HBO.

Speaker 7 It was awesome. Fraggle Rock was great.
And the idea there is you had

Speaker 7 the Fraggle gang, and then you had, well, you had three different groups. You had the home of Doc, who was an inventor, and his dog, Sprocket.

Speaker 7 You had the Fraggles, who shared caves underground of Fraggle Rock with their neighbors, the Doozers and the Gorgs, and these gigantic creatures that are in Gorg's garden.

Speaker 7 And the whole point of that show... was to show how different types of people can live together and work together in peace.

Speaker 7 It was really cool. Didn't know it at the time when I was, you know, 12 years old.
But what I was learning about was acceptance.

Speaker 7 And he won three Cable Ace Awards, five international Emmys, and Fraggle Rock was one of the first big hits for HBO as far as TV goes. Yeah.
Great, great show.

Speaker 7 Lots of great songs that, I mean, he had every kind of, like, he had reggae, rock, country, bluegrass. Really? He was all over the map with the music on Fraggle Rock.

Speaker 2 And he, I mean, he wrote a lot of songs, too. I think he wrote Rubber Ducky.
I'm sure he wrote a lot of the stuff on Fraggle Rock. It was just yet another thing he did was write music.

Speaker 2 Renaissance Man.

Speaker 2 The other show that he came out with in the 80s, in the mid-80s, that I was big time into was Muppet Babies.

Speaker 7 I never saw one second of that.

Speaker 2 Man, I love that show.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we're just enough apart in age where, like,

Speaker 7 certain things I saw,

Speaker 7 you were too young for, and then certain things I was too old for.

Speaker 2 You know what's weird, though? I'm just going to say this. So, Yumi and I are the same age.

Speaker 2 Her sister is like five years younger than us.

Speaker 2 And I used to love Muppet Babies. Yeah.
Yumi's sister used to watch Muppet Babies. So Yumi was like, why were you watching Muppet Babies if my younger sister was watching Muppet Babies?

Speaker 7 And Yumi didn't watch Muppet Babies.

Speaker 2 No, she watched like Donahue or something like that.

Speaker 2 I watched Muppet Babies. I'm not ashamed anymore to say that.

Speaker 7 Well, when was that? 1984? I was 13. So yeah, I was just, I was starting to be a teenager.
Muppet Babies didn't appeal.

Speaker 2 I think it was on for like four or five seasons. So maybe I was watching it at the beginning of the series.

Speaker 2 Mika was watching it. That's what I've been telling Yumi.

Speaker 7 In 84, you would have been what?

Speaker 2 Eight? Oh, yeah, that's a perfect age for Muppet Babies. So I think we just saw it on different ends of the series, is what it was.
Is that what it is?

Speaker 2 But have you ever heard of Ron Funches?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the comedian. Yeah.
Yeah. He has a little bit about Muppet Babies that's pretty hilarious.
Oh, really? Yeah. He's awesome.
Love that guy. Yeah.
We saw him live.

Speaker 2 He's just a beautiful human being.

Speaker 7 Muppet Babies was cartoon, though, right? Right. It was not live puppets, correct?

Speaker 2 At all? No, it was cartoon. Okay.
It was so cute.

Speaker 7 Were they just the regular Muppets as babies? Yes. Oh, well, I'll have to watch that sometime.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they like used their imagination. And

Speaker 2 like Gonzo had a thing for Indiana Jones, so he was frequently exploring caves and like swinging on vines with an Indiana Jones fedora on and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 7 Well, see, I would probably enjoy that now.

Speaker 2 You would. Yeah.
Definitely.

Speaker 7 All right.

Speaker 2 I'm going to go get Muppet Babies. Chuck, Chuck, he did even more TV that we'll talk about in a second, okay?

Speaker 3 Okay.

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Speaker 2 Okay, and we're back. And we're still in the 80s.

Speaker 7 That's right. And you were talking about other TV.

Speaker 7 As we said, the man loved television and filmmaking. And so he got away from the Muppets and Puppets every now and then.

Speaker 7 Collaborated with Raymond Scott, who was an Electronica pioneer, actually, on shorts called Ripples and Wheels That Go. And he did that for the Montreal Expo in 67.

Speaker 7 And I know we're jumping around in time, but we're just trying to paint the full picture here, not going necessarily in order.

Speaker 7 And then he also did this cool thing called the floating face, which was a sketch that was on the tonight show and the Mike Douglas show in the 60s.

Speaker 7 Did you see any of that?

Speaker 2 A little bit.

Speaker 7 It was a little weird. It was like two eyes and a mouth, and there were like these invisible wires and

Speaker 7 background images. And it was definitely a little more on that surreal tip.
Right. The Henson surreal tip.
Yeah. Not kid-oriented necessarily.

Speaker 7 But he got into the movies with the Muppet movie. Which was a big hit.

Speaker 2 It's so good.

Speaker 7 It still holds up, man. It's still so great.

Speaker 2 If you want to know more about that that movie and just some of the cool facts from it, go again, listen to the Muppet episode. Yeah.
As a matter of fact, pause this.

Speaker 2 Go listen to the Muppet episode and then come back to this one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It'll probably enhance your experience. Agreed.
Or listen to them both at the same time.

Speaker 7 But he followed the Muppet in 1982, he made The Dark Crystal,

Speaker 7 which was Puppets, and it was based on

Speaker 7 some drawings by fantasy artist Brian Froude. And

Speaker 7 there were no humans. It was all puppets.
And I don't think it holds up as well, but it still looks pretty good.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, I think it actually is probably better received now than it was originally. Yeah.
I think critics appreciated it, but it didn't do so well at the box office.

Speaker 2 But now it's become like kind of a cult classic for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And one of the reasons why

Speaker 2 it didn't do that well at the box office is because audiences didn't quite know what to make of it.

Speaker 2 They heard Frank Oz, who co-directed co-directed it, Jim Henson, and Puppets, and I think they went expecting the Muppet movie. This is 1982.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they got the dark crystal instead, which is really dark. A lot of the theme is, you know, good versus evil, and the evil in it is really, really evil.

Speaker 2 And the stuff that happens to some of the puppets is, including really cute puppets, is really horrifying. And I read this awesome quote by Frank Oz.

Speaker 2 And basically, he says, like, Jim thought it was okay to scare kids. As a matter of fact, he thought it wasn't healthy for kids to never be scared.
So, like, he purposefully was trying to scare kids.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he wanted to take the tradition back to grim fairy tales, which were very, very dark and graphic.

Speaker 7 That's a good point.

Speaker 2 That's what he was going for with the Dark Crystal.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think it was ahead of its time for sure. Yeah.
If you look at some of these, like some of the CGI movies today,

Speaker 7 I think that Dark Crystal was a precursor to a lot of those. Right.

Speaker 7 Then he went on to make the movie The Labyrinth. With Bowie, right? Yeah, David Bowie and a very

Speaker 7 young Jennifer Connolly. No, that was legend.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 7 Good movie.

Speaker 7 But this was written by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame and then rewritten a bunch by a bunch of other people, including... executive producer George Lucas.

Speaker 7 Labyrinth was okay. Not bad.
Again, not a huge hit for Henson, though, as far as movies go. But he was still out there exploring these cool, fantastical worlds and fantasy worlds.

Speaker 2 And he still had a lot of cred

Speaker 2 even in the late 80s.

Speaker 2 If you think about it, his heyday was the late 70s, early 80s with the Muppet show, the Muppet movies.

Speaker 2 And then after that, it was like, yeah, I'll try this with Jim Henson. I'll try this with Jim Henson.

Speaker 2 And even still,

Speaker 2 he was on a pretty great streak. And at the end of the 80s, he had two TV shows on the Jim Henson hour

Speaker 7 and storyteller the storyteller yeah the Jim Henson hour he was always pushing the boundaries the storyteller looking back now or I'm sorry Jim Henson hour looking back was really different from what you were getting at the time because it was it was all over the map you had certain shows that were like

Speaker 7 you know, four or five sketches in one, and then three of the episodes were full-on one-hour little mini-movies. Oh, really? Yeah, from beginning to.

Speaker 2 It's like Louie.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 That's a good point, actually.

Speaker 7 One of the little mini movies was called Dog City, which was great. It was narrated by Rolf, and I remember watching this.
It was like a film noir gangster thing with puppet dogs.

Speaker 7 And the main character, Ace U, was

Speaker 7 the guy who did Elmo, Kevin Clash, did the character of Ace U.

Speaker 7 And that was fantastic. I think Dog City went on to be a TV show in its own right, too, for a little while.
But it was really good.

Speaker 7 I I mean, it's total like gangster crime film noir, but it's you know, Rolf the Dog and the gang.

Speaker 2 I love Rolf. It's really cool.

Speaker 2 The storyteller, I hadn't seen before. I was, I guess, aware of, but I don't know why I wasn't watching it because it would have been like right there for me.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because I would have been 12 in 1988. But I watched one today and it was really good.
It's like human-puppet interaction. Yeah.
Which is

Speaker 2 and it's just seamless.

Speaker 2 Like there's one of the things from studying this that I've realized is like we take for granted and expect our puppet-human interactions to be so seamless that we don't even realize that we're looking at puppets right then.

Speaker 2 And the reason why we expect that is because of Jim Henson and the people he worked with and inspired to work so hard at creating that illusion.

Speaker 7 Well, yeah, the illusion that these are living, breathing things.

Speaker 7 He would go, I remember

Speaker 7 Kermit as guest on talk shows. He wouldn't go out as Jim Henson.

Speaker 7 He would go out as, I mean, he did those appearances as well, but Kermit the Frog would be a guest on the tonight show with Johnny Carson. Or host.
Or

Speaker 7 guest host The Tonight Show. And Larry King.
Yeah, and it was all a part of this

Speaker 7 goal of making these real people.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 7 Or real living things, not people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, apparently somebody who was working with Jim Henson was, I guess, a director of the Muppet Show, would be giving Jim notes on Kermit, and Jim would just respond like let Kermit respond that would freak and the director said eventually you're just sitting there you turn and you address Kermit like he'd just force you into like interacting with the puppet even like during a notes session yeah and probably without feeling silly or stupid or anything right you know it probably seemed like a totally normal thing to do eventually once he forced you to do it uh he also pioneered the uh henson performance control system and won an academy award for that and that was a a remote control system that helped puppeteers out.

Speaker 7 So he was always pushing technical,

Speaker 7 visual, stylistic, thematic boundaries as far as he could.

Speaker 7 And they didn't always work. You know, the movies weren't, aside from the Muppet movie, they weren't the biggest hits.

Speaker 7 The TV show, a couple of, you know, neither one of those lasted very long.

Speaker 7 But I think he was just intent on doing something different. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He and he did too. And he died in 1990 of a staph infection.
Organ failure brought on by a staph infection. Did you know that?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think pneumonia had something to do with it, too, didn't it?

Speaker 2 Not that I saw. Oh, really? I saw organ failure caused by a Group A strep infection.
I'm sorry. Not staph.

Speaker 7 Very sad. And if you're ever in the mood for a good cry, watch the Jim Henson Memorial.
where Big Bird sings, It's Not Easy Being Green. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Tough stuff, people.

Speaker 7 His children, his legacy lives on through 1993. Jane, his wife,

Speaker 7 founded the Jim Henson Legacy to preserve his contributions, share them with the public. And like I said, he donated 500 puppets to the Center of Puppetry Arts.

Speaker 7 And there is also the Jim Henson Memorial and Muppet Museum

Speaker 7 and traveling exhibits. And his

Speaker 7 sons and daughters helped run his foundation. And some of them are puppets

Speaker 7 themselves and run the company.

Speaker 7 The company has changed hands a lot.

Speaker 7 I have sort of the boring history. When he was still alive, he was going to sell it to Disney for $150 million.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because apparently he believed in Disney's commitment to characters. So he thought that would be a good place for the Muppets to live.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and Disney went,

Speaker 7 he bought it.

Speaker 7 But he did not get that deal finished.

Speaker 7 But it turns out $150 million was chump change because in 2000 his children sold the entire company, including the Sesame Street characters, to a German media company for $680 million. Wow.

Speaker 7 And then I believe that company fell on hard times and they bought it back

Speaker 7 in 2003 for $84 million.

Speaker 2 Isn't that crazy? Wow, the Henson children are smart.

Speaker 7 And in between all that, there are various exchanges of percentages of stakes with other companies and rights of certain characters.

Speaker 7 It's a little dull to go over all of that, but needless to say, they made up pretty well. And eventually, Disney now does,

Speaker 7 they do own all the Muppet studio.

Speaker 2 They own the Muppets. Apparently, the Henson company sold the rights to the Sesame Street characters to Sesame Street, which is pretty cool.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And the Jim Henson Creature Shop still builds the Sesame Street Puppets and Muppets.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it says they sold the rights to the Muppets and Bear and the Big Blue House characters, which I'm not familiar with that one.

Speaker 2 Nor am I.

Speaker 7 But Disney Disney wanted, I guess that's sort of

Speaker 7 the player to be named later that's included in the baseball trade. Right.

Speaker 2 Man, I'm proud of the Henson kids.

Speaker 7 Yeah, they're great. And I hope we get tweeted about this one from them.

Speaker 7 They seem pretty great. Brian and Cheryl and the gang.
They seem like they're doing right by the dad. And there's other siblings, too.
And I think they're all involved. Super involved.

Speaker 7 And sadly, Jane passed away, I think, in 2013

Speaker 7 at the age of 78. I would have loved to have seen what kind of work he did later in his life.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. The fact that he died in 1990 still had like a couple of TV shows going.
He's 53 years old. Yeah, he had a lot of work left in him.

Speaker 2 If you want to know more about Jim Henson, go listen to our Muppets episode. And while you're looking that up, you can also search Jim Henson on the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com.

Speaker 2 And we'll bring up this great article. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 2 This is, I'm going to call this sophomore, smart sophomore.

Speaker 7 Hey guys, my name is Matt, and I'm a sophomore in high school.

Speaker 2 Smart sophomore. Smart sophomore.

Speaker 7 I'm a newer fan of the show, and I listen while I do everything. Just wanted to say the Dark Ages were only dark in Europe.

Speaker 7 The life expectancy in the Dark Ages is actually a little longer than before, but mostly because there were smaller wars. But things were certainly brighter in the Islamic world.

Speaker 7 In fact, people in the Middle East were really enlightened during this time. Within about 100 years, they conquered a lot of new land, including Spain.

Speaker 7 Also, the Arabic language grew to be the language of philosophy, medicine, and poetry, and Baghdad became the world's center of scholarship.

Speaker 7 They translated almost all of the famous Greek philosophers' work into Arabic.

Speaker 7 Muslims developed algebra to simplify inheritance laws, and they made important strides in trigonometry to help people find a way to Mecca. Architecture grew too.

Speaker 7 The great mosque in Spain only took roughly a year while medieval cathedrals took hundreds of years to build.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 7 So the Dark Ages weren't that dark, and the Enlightenment came earlier than most think. And that is from Matt.

Speaker 15 Thanks, Matt. That is enlightening stuff, my friend.

Speaker 2 Yeah, our numerals are Arabic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's true.

Speaker 7 We should hit on some more Middle Eastern topics.

Speaker 2 Let's do it, man. Yeah.

Speaker 2 In the meantime, if you want to suggest some Middle Eastern topics for us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at housetuffworks.com.

Speaker 2 And as always, hang out at our beautiful home on the web stuffyushouldknow.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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