Jim Henson: American Puppeteer

May 6, 2020
Henson, Jim: Kermit the FrogThe original Kermit the Frog (centre) puppet was among the Jim Henson creations donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2010.Mark Wilson—Getty Images/Thinkstock

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica have written a series of mini-biographies. Here is an excerpt from Editiors’ profile of Jim Henson. To learn more about her/him and others, please click here.

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Jim Henson, by name of James Maury Henson, (born September 24, 1936, Greenville, Mississippi, U.S.—died May 16, 1990, New York, New York), American puppeteer and filmmaker, creator of the Muppets of television and motion pictures. He coined the term Muppets as a meld of marionettes and puppets. His characters and those of his assistants included such familiar figures as Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, and the Cookie Monster.Though born in Mississippi, Henson grew up in Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., to which his father, a federal agronomist, had been assigned. As he entered college (the University of Maryland), Henson and his future wife, Jane Nebel, created a puppet show on a Washington television station and kept the job throughout their school years, developing the first Muppets (including Kermit) on a five-minute television program called Sam and Friends. After graduation (A.B., 1960), Henson, along with his assistants, did television commercials and brief spots on various television shows. After the Children’s Television Workshop’s program Sesame Street began appearing on television in 1969, featuring the Muppets, Henson and his humanoid animals achieved extraordinary nationwide popularity.The Muppet Show, which premiered in 1976 and was produced in England, gained an international audience (it was shown in some 100 countries) and was soon followed by the motion pictures The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984). Henson also codirected The Dark Crystal (1981), directed Labyrinth (1986), and assisted on The Witches (1990), all animated films using puppetlike figures that were not Muppets. In 1981 a Muppets comic strip was syndicated. Muppet Magazine, a quarterly publication for children, appeared in 1983–89. Other television ventures featuring the Muppets included Fraggle Rock (1983–87), a puppet show about subterranean creatures, and Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies (1984–91), an animated morning cartoon program.

Prior to his death in 1990, Henson was in negotiations with the Disney Company to sell the rights to the Muppets. The deal was finalized in 2004 and transferred the trademarks and copyrights of most of the iconic characters to Disney. Later projects included the feature film Muppets Most Wanted (2014) and The Muppets (2015–16), a television series purporting to document the behind-the-scenes antics of Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, and their cohort.

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Except in certain movie sequences using special effects, Henson’s Muppets, made of sculptured foam rubber, plastic, and various fabrics, were either hand puppets or fully costumed persons (as in the case of Big Bird and Snuffleupagus). For the hand puppets, each head or arm was worked by one hand so that if there was to be a head and two arms, there must be the hands of two Muppeteers. Complicated characterizations on rare occasions even required three Muppeteers. The voice of the Muppet was the voice of the person (or primary person) operating it.

Henson also was an experimental filmmaker. Time Piece (1965), a short film that he wrote, directed, and starred in, was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1967 Henson released two more short films, The Wheels That Go and Ripples, as well as the industrial film The Paperwork Explosion, developed for the computer company IBM. He later wrote the television documentary Youth ’68: Everything’s Changing…or Maybe It Isn’t (1968), an attempt to articulate the culture of rebellion emerging in the younger generation. It juxtaposed interviews with musicians, their fans, and a series of censorious adults. Henson also wrote and directed the television film The Cube (1969), the surreal tale of a man unable to escape from an alternate reality.

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