Movies - Jim Henson

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Jim Henson

	Movies - Jim Henson

James Maury Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was one of the most important puppeteers in modern American television history. He was also a filmmaker, television producer, and the founder of The Jim Henson Company, the Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

He was the creator of The Muppets and the leading force behind their long creative run. Henson brought an engaging cast of characters, innovative ideas, and a sense of timing and humor to millions of people. He is also widely acknowledged for the ongoing vision of faith, friendship, magic, and love which was infused in nearly all of his work.

Early work

Born in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1936, Henson moved with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s. In 1954, while attending Northwestern High School, he began working for WTOP-TV creating puppets for a Saturday morning children's show. The next year he created Sam and Friends, a five-minute puppet show for WRC-TV, while attending the University of Maryland, College Park. Sam and Friends were already recognizable Muppets, and the show included a primitive version of what would become Henson's signature character, Kermit the Frog. Already he was experimenting with the techniques that would change the way puppetry was used on television, notably using the frame defined by the camera shot to allow the puppeteer to work from off-camera.

1960s

The success of Sam and Friends led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. To this day, Muppets appear as "guests" on shows such as The Tonight Show and Hollywood Squares, with particularly memorable appearances by Kermit and Miss Piggy on 60 Minutes and Cookie Monster on Martha Stewart Living. Henson himself appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show. The greatly increased exposure led to hundreds of commercial appearances (mostly for Wilkins Coffee) by Henson characters through the 1960s.

Being puppets, they have been able to get away with a greater level of slapstick violence than might be acceptable with human actors. A good example is one of the early coffee ads. A Muppet is poised behind a cannon seen in profile. Another Muppet is in front of the barrel end of the cannon. The first Muppet says, "How do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?" The second Muppet responds gruffly, "Never heard of it!" The first Muppet fires the cannon and blows the second Muppet away... then turns the cannon directly toward the viewer, and ends the ad with, "Now, how do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?"

In 1963, Henson and his wife Jane, also a puppeteer, moved to New York City, where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. would reside for some time. Henson devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog, the first Muppet to make a regular appearance on a network show, The Jimmy Dean Show. At that time Henson's long-time partner Frank Oz also came on board with the new company.

From 1964 to 1968, Henson began exploring film-making and produced a series of experimental films. His nine-minute experimental film Time Piece was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1966. The NBC TV movie The Cube
from 1969 is another experimental film that Jim Henson had produced.

In 1968, Joan Ganz Cooney and the team at the Children's Television Workshop began work on Sesame Street, a visionary children's program for public television. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on the titular street. These included Oscar the Grouch, Ernie and Bert, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird. Kermit was also included as a roving Television News Reporter. Around this time, a frill was added around Kermit's neck to make him more frog-like. The collar was also used to cover the joint where the neck met the body of the Muppet. At first the puppetry was separated from the realistic segments on the street, but after a poor test screening in Philadelphia, the show was revamped to integrate the two and place much greater emphasis on Henson's work.

1970s

Henson, Oz, and his team targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live
, set mostly in the Land of Gorch. Eleven sketches aired between October 1975 and January 1976, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September. The SNL writers never got comfortable writing for the characters.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Jim Henson ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Jim Henson; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Movies - Jim Henson

Early work

1960s

1970s

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay