Since the recent release of the documentary Jim Henson: Idea Man, many have been looking back at the Muppets creator with fresh eyes. In his 53 years of life, Henson was constantly innovating in puppetry, pushing its boundaries as a medium, and producing shows that still feel timeless today.
Having grown into a genuine larger-than-life figure, it’s easy to forget that, in his early years, he had to find his own voice, just like any other artist. In the same way that young puppeteers are inspired by Henson now, Henson looked up to his own creative role models, borrowing and emulating them on his way to Muppet fame.
Unlike his right-hand man Frank Oz, who grew up in a family of puppeteers, young Jim Henson was not a puppet guy. “I don’t recall ever seeing a puppet show when I was a kid,” Henson said in an unaired 1979 interview with Orson Welles. “No, and I never played with puppets — I never had any to play with.”
Henson was always transparent about his original motivations for pursuing puppetry: He wanted to work in television. In a 1985 interview, he jokingly agreed that were the local TV station looking for a weatherman and not a puppeteer, “It would be now, my 30th anniversary as a weatherman.”
That’s not to say that he wasn’t artistically inclined: Henson’s childhood ambition was to make comics. His earliest published cartoon appeared in the Christian Science Monitor when he was 13, according to Imagination Illustrated (an annotated collection of his notes and sketches). Henson also penned cartoons, illustrations, and covers for his high school and college newspapers. That early enthusiasm for comic strips later played out in the personalities of his puppets.
Pogo
According to Jim Henson’s Designs and Doodles, Henson’s favorite comic was Walt Kelly’s Pogo. The cartoon followed the titular Pogo Possum, an easygoing everyman, and his adventures and interactions with the other inhabitants of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. Henson’s Pogo fixation bleeds through in his shows’ satirical wit, and his ability to speak to children without sounding childish.
Pogo was also the inspiration for Kermit’s role in the Muppets. As an exhausted wrangler of large, eccentric characters and personalities, Kermit mirrored not only Henson’s own experience as a director but also Pogo’s dynamic with the other occupants of the swamp.
“Kermit is the Pogo,” Henson said in Jim Henson: The Biography. “You have one normal person who represents the way people ordinarily think. And everything else, slightly crazier comedy characters are all around that person.”
Pogo also inspired Henson artistically: his first character designs resembled Kelly’s art, and Kermit’s banjo-playing origins are almost certainly rooted in Pogo’s Georgia swamp setting.
Pogo aside, most of Henson’s primary influences were television shows, puppet and human alike. After a rural childhood in the remote town of Leland, Mississippi, he spent his adolescence fascinated by television. For him, TV provided a heretofore unseen look at the outside world, allowing people from all over to experience events together in real time.
Ernie Kovacs
One of Henson’s favorite live-action personalities was Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs’ surreal, madcap comedy and frenetic, experimental editing is reflected in Henson’s early short film Time Piece, as well as many of the atmospheric Sesame Street shorts Henson produced. Henson also drew from Kovacs’ penchant for visual gags and object personification — he even added an homage to Kovacs’ famous “Nairobi Trio” bit in his 1969 adaptation of Cinderella.
Burr Tillstrom and the Kuklapolitans
In the 1940s and ’50s, when Howdy Doody ruled the new frontier of television, puppet shows were not rare. One of the most popular puppet acts at the time was Burr Tillstrom’s Kukla, Fran and Ollie, a 30-minute improvised show that featured interactions between a human host — comedienne Fran Allison — and the Kuklapolitan Players, a theater troupe of Punch-and-Judy-esque puppets. Conceived by puppeteer Tillstrom, KFO was broadcast live every weekday from Chicago from 1947 until 1957, and the Kuklapolitan Players continued to host festivals and perform on Broadway for decades after that.
Tillstrom was both a friend and inspiration to Henson. The casual human-puppet interaction of KFO shows up in a majority of Henson’s Muppet Show-related works, and both the Muppets and the Kuklapolitans are troupes of eccentric puppet entertainers whose plots often revolve around putting together a show.
Henson also carried over the chatty camaraderie of Tillstrom’s cast. There’s a warmth to the interactions between Fran and the Kuklapolitan Players that clearly connected with the audience and played a significant role in the show’s lasting presence. Similarly, Henson prided himself on the warmth of his Muppets and their human qualities, which resonated with audiences of all ages.
Henson acknowledged this aspect of the Muppets in a 1977 interview with Canadian news program W5: “The nice thing about the puppets is that they have dimension, and they are sort of cuddly and warm. We end up with a kind of warmth, I love it when people hug the characters, or the characters hug each other. There’s kind of a warm, touching thing that can happen there.”
Bil and Cora Baird
Tillstrom wasn’t the only famed puppeteer Henson looked up to — around the time Henson began to take an interest in the craft, Bil and Cora Baird, a husband and wife duo of marionette masters, were also doing spots for various talk shows and advertisements.
Bil Baird had been working with marionettes since he was a teenager, and he and his wife Cora produced one of the most prolific puppetry portfolios ever seen. The couple provided marionettes for The Sound of Music and had a Western satire on TV called The Life of Snarky Parker. Henson enjoyed Snarky Parker but liked the Bairds’ talk show appearances even more.
The couple performed frequently on programs like The Ed Sullivan Show and CBS’s The Morning Show. These performances mostly involved puppets lip-synching to popular songs, interspersed with quick skits. Henson borrowed this format when he began doing his own five-minute puppet spot, Sam and Friends, on local television in Washington, D.C. Henson’s transitional skits soon overtook the lip-synching element, but the path carved by Bil and Cora Baird had been an important start.
Edgar Bergen
The final of Henson’s early puppeteer icons was Edgar Bergen. Bergen and his two dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, were the blueprint for ventriloquism in American pop culture. Bergen’s work spans decades — he and McCarthy first appeared on the radio the same year Henson was born — and if Jim Henson’s Designs and Doodles is to be believed, Bergen’s shows were a staple in one medium or another throughout Henson’s childhood.
Henson invited both Edgar Bergen and his daughter, actress Candice Bergen, as guest stars on The Muppet Show, and he gave the elder Bergen a cameo in The Muppet Movie — his final film appearance before his death in 1978. Henson spoke at Edgar Bergen’s funeral and dedicated the movie to him entirely.
The archive website Jim Henson’s Red Book, which elaborates on excerpts from Henson’s private journals, notes that Henson sent a telegram to the Bergen family following Edgar’s death: “I will never forget our first time where all of us formed a circle around him and stood in awe and made him do Charlie and Mortimer,” Henson wrote. “How we loved his special magic through the years — and always will.”
Bergen’s family responded in kind by sending Henson a framed picture of Bergen and McCarthy after the funeral. Engraved in the frame was a simple message: “Dear Jim — Keep the Magic Alive.”
Of all his inspirations, the magic Henson derived from Bergen is perhaps the most crucial to the Muppet formula. Anyone near a Muppet, be it a child or a talk show host, tends to interact solely with the puppet and forget the puppeteer. This sense of total, individual personhood is one that Bergen imbued into his dummies seamlessly, and it’s a lesson Henson picked up early on. That is the “magic” referred to by the Bergens, and it’s one Henson kept alive.
Late Career Influences
Jim Henson had a constant need to move forward — he was always looking for the next project even before the last one had finished. This ambition is how Henson ended up creating a series of feature-length animatronic puppetry films throughout the 1980s, beginning with the movie The Dark Crystal and ending with the TV series Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.
Fresh off of five seasons of The Muppet Show and the success of The Muppet Movie, Henson was looking for something bigger. He’d already cleared two massive hurdles within a decade: making an adult puppet show and filming a puppet movie in a real, outside environment. His next phase would be building a new world entirely.
With The Dark Crystal, Henson wanted to create a live-action world entirely from scratch, using old fairy tales as inspiration. By the late 1970s, the movie industry as a whole was headed toward the fantasy genre, with films like Jabberwocky and Wizards slowly moving the needle. Henson, though, had begun thinking about fairy tales in the mid-1970s, when he’d seen a Leonard B. Lubin illustration of the Lewis Carroll story “The Pig-tale.” The drawing, which depicted grotesquely detailed alligators using a Victorian-era bathtub, stuck with him, and eventually inspired the antagonists of The Dark Crystal, the Skeksis.
Carroll’s works also influenced Labyrinth, if less directly. The story about a young girl navigating a magical and confusing alternate world, where none of the rules make sense and nothing is fair, clearly drew inspiration from Carroll in some capacity. Additionally, the guards’ playing-card motifs and the imagery of Sarah falling make it clear that Henson had Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in mind when creating the film.
According to the concept materials found in the official novelization of Labyrinth, Henson also drew inspiration from The Wizard of Oz. This remains in theme: A girl is transported to another world, which operates on classic fairy tale logic, and completes a quest. The Oz influence really shows through in the series of misfit friends Sarah makes on her way to retrieve her brother, earning each one’s loyalty, like Oz’s Dorothy Gale, through kindness and wit.
Perhaps the biggest inspiration for Henson in this era, though, was his muse-turned-creative partner, fantasy artist Brian Froud. Froud’s fantasy art provided the basis for the worlds of both The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. In the behind-the-scenes featurette The World of the Dark Crystal, Henson describes how influential Froud was to the film’s artistic process.
We’d began [sic] thinking about this [world], and about the same time we started thinking about it, I saw some of the work of Brian Froud, and I immediately loved it,” Henson said. “I thought it would be the sort of thing that was just right for this particular idea, and his concepts, visually, were the type of thing that we could translate into three dimensions.” He later added that he liked how Froud’s designs “were the sort of thing that could easily become a living, breathing creature.
Henson flew out to speak with Froud at his home in the U.K., and soon Froud was an official concept designer on The Dark Crystal. His work was darkly fantastic, often focused on large, looming, inscrutable creatures with a surplus of knobby limbs, draped in shades of green and brown. Froud’s art, while beautiful, was more ominous than the warm, bright colors that characterized Henson’s previous projects.
Surprisingly, that was exactly what Henson was looking for.
In a 2007 interview with SFGate, Frank Oz explained Henson’s push into the eerie side of fantastical: “What Jim wanted to do, and it was totally his vision, was to get back to the darkness of the original Grimm fairy tale. He thought it was fine to scare children. He didn’t think it was healthy for children to always feel safe.”
The Dark Crystal saw mediocre returns, and Labyrinth outright bombed, but Henson continued to pursue his fascination with fairy tales. Between Muppet sequels, Henson worked on the movie Dreamchild, about the real-life Lewis Carroll, and made The Storyteller, a series of dark fantasy vignettes that gave Henson space to play with innovative technology.
The Storyteller ended in 1988, and we’ll never know what further inspiration Henson may have found after his death in 1990. His final projects were Muppet*Vision 3-D, an interactive attraction for Disney Parks; and the beginning concept designs for the show Dinosaurs, which finished production without him and began airing in 1991.
Looking back, Henson’s time in the global spotlight seems incomprehensible — a five-season adult puppet variety show was a hard sell in 1975. Part of why the Muppets became such a phenomenon was Henson’s singular, uncompromising vision. Yet his success, and the ongoing cultural relevance of his Muppets, can also be seen as a continuation of the work of the artists, entertainers, and puppeteers who inspired him.
For such a quiet man, his distinctive creative voice was thunderous, and it’s still echoing, decades after his death.
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