Jim Henson

James Maury "Jim" Henson (September 24, 1936 - May 16, 1990) was the creator of the Muppets. He was also the performer behind many of the troupe's most famous characters, including Guy Smiley, Ernie, Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog, Dr. Teeth, Manah Manah, Waldorf, Link Hogthrob, the Swedish Chef, Convincing John, & Cantus the Minstrel.

Early Years
James Maury Henson was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1936, the younger of 2 boys, the older being his brother Paul. His parents were Betty Marcella (née Brown) & Paul Ransom Henson, an agronomist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 10 years later, in 1946, Paul Sr. moved the family to Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburb near Washington, D.C.. While growing up, he loved watching Disney films & movies with comic legends like Bob Hope & George Burns, & enjoyed listening to such radio acts as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. He would grow up to pay tribute to & work w/ many of these same legends. Henson graduated as a member of the National Honor Society from Northwestern Senior High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, on June 14, 1954.



Sesame Street
In 1969 Joan Ganz Cooney & the newly-formed Children's Television Workshop approached Henson about creating and performing puppets on a new show aimed at pre-schoolers. The show would become Sesame Street, & it introduced viewers to such memorable characters as Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Count von Count, Ernie & Bert, Cookie Monster, Grover, & eventually Elmo as well.

Jim Henson was initially reluctant to use his characters on an educational kids' series, for fear of being typecast as a children's entertainer. However, Joan Ganz Cooney, once remarked that while the show's creative team had a collective brilliance, Henson was the only "individual genius.": "He was our era's Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, W.C. Fields & Marx Brothers," Cooney said, "& indeed he drew from all of them to create a new art form that influenced popular culture around the world."

By the late-1970s/early 1980s, he became more involved w/ other projects, & he mainly just voiced his characters in inserts rather than in main street plots. However, he was still involved in related productions, voicing his characters in the first Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird, performing his characters' voices in various Sesame Street Live shows, & also performing in Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, Big Bird in China, Don't Eat the Pictures, The Sesame Street Special, & Sesame Street: 20 & Still Counting. In the last production mentioned, Henson also appeared as himself in two scenes. He was also interviewed on The Sesame Street Experiment & ''[http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sing!_Sesame_Street_Remembers_Joe_Raposo_and_His_Music Sing! Sesame Street Remembers Joe Raposo and His Music]''.

Jim Henson's last segments for the show were taped on November 21, 1989. Henson's later performances include a Sesame Street News Flash segment in which Kermit interviews a bird whose parents live in different trees, Kermit's song "I Wonder 'Bout the World Above Up There", & Ernie's song "Don't Throw That Trash on the Ground".

The Muppet Show
Henson always felt that puppetry should be for all ages, including adults, & he was frustrated that Sesame Street, even with its appeal to adults, was still children's programming. The Muppets were labeled "kiddie entertainment" by network executives. His agent Bernie Brillstein got him as an act on season 1 of the groundbreaking SNL w/ the Land of Gorch, but w/ the content not written by his staff & w/ certain cast members annoyed of sharing the show w/ puppets, Henson never felt right there. Fortunately, he received another break when Lord Lew Grade invited him to produce a proposed half-hour show in England. The resulting Muppet Show became 1 of the most successful TV shows of all time. In addition to Kermit as the host, the show featured characters that would quickly become household names, such as Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Rizzo the Rat, Statler and Waldorf, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, and Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem.

Performers who joined Henson's ever-growing team during this period include Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, & Louise Gold.

Henson created another innovation starting w/ The Muppet Show: from now on, all productions would be platformed up, so that humans could move about freely & interact convincingly w/ the puppets, while the puppeteers could remain easily hidden, & move about their environment w/ even greater fluidity than before.

In 1979, Jerry Juhl described Henson's unique working style in an article about the making of The Muppets Go Hollywood special: "The [production assistants] are running around screaming, 'How are we ever going to do all this?' & Jim is wandering around in the middle of it all, perfectly calm, perfectly content. You go to him & ask, 'How's it going?' & he says, 'Oh, fine. There were hardly any airplanes overhead when we filmed Miss Piggy by the pool.' He's just like Kermit -- if The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98."

The Muppet Show was so successful that it spawned 3 movies during Henson's lifetime (and more since): The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, & The Muppets Take Manhattan. Each film provided him w/ further opportunities to break technological barriers, including allowing Kermit to ride a bike.

Henson and Oz's friendship
After working together for so many years, every 1 of Henson's fellow Muppeteers eventually grew very close to him in no time at all. However, the man that it is quite clear Henson was always closest w/ was Frank Oz, cause of the incredible partnership & friendship that they shared. There have been countless occasions where Henson's characters were paired up w/ Oz's characters. While it was actually Richard Hunt who voiced Stater to Jim Henson's Waldorf, (the famous hecklers from The Muppet Show), the friendship that Henson and Oz shared was the best in the whole Muppet business. At his Memorial Service, 5 days after his death, Frank speaks of a a Christmas gift Jim gave him, which he called "Bert in Self-Contemplation". He starts to cry but manages to say "That's when I knew, he loved me & I loved him."

Henson's Legacy
In late 1989, Jim Henson made a radical change in his career. Wanting to become less of a businessman & focus more on the creative side of the production, he entered into talks w/ Michael Eisner to sell his company & characters (minus Sesame Street) to the Walt Disney Company. After Henson's sudden & untimely death, negotiations went awry, & Disney didn't acquire the Muppets till February 2004, which it now controls through the wholly owned subsidiary The Muppets Studio.

Jim became infected w/ an extremely rare bacterium called Group A streptococcus in May 1990 that was discovered too late for him to receive proper treatment. He died at 1:21 a.m. on Wednesday, May 16th, 1990, approximately 23 hours after checking himself into the emergency room at New York Hospital, not realizing how sick he really was. Steve Whitmire immediately took over as the voice of both Kermit, plus he took over for Ernie in 1993. However, following his sudden death, Dr. Teeth & Rowlf were kept completely silent until episode 2 of Muppets Tonight, on which Rowlf broke his silence thanks to the vocal help of Bill Barretta, who now voices Dr. Teeth, the Swedish Chef, along w/ Manah Manah.

According to FindAGrave.com, Henson was cremated, & his ashes were scattered at his ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jim Henson's Find A Grave Page.

Today, Jim Henson's legacy is carried on in different forms. Sesame Workshop (formerly the Children's Television Workshop) now owns all of the Sesame Street characters & continues to experiment with its format. As noted, the Walt Disney Company owns the Muppet characters & continues to use them in new productions. Fortunately, the Jim Henson Company itself, under the guidance of Henson's children Brian, Lisa, & Cheryl, John, & Heather, continues to release new material, including Creature Shop films and original content.