—From “Muppets on His Hands” by Don Freeman, from the November 1979, issue of The Saturday Evening Post
Jim Henson remembers that his parents were totally supportive when he became involved with puppetry. “My mother had a very good sense of humor and my father was excellent at carpentry. I was a quiet kid, introspective, articulate, always involved with art, a fairly good student but a terrible athlete — always the last one chosen in a ballgame and always put, protesting, in right field.”
In 1955, he was offered a five-minute show of his own that aired just before the evening news on a Washington, D.C., station. It was called Sam and Friends, and it was the beginning of the Muppets.
He created a puppet he chose to call Kermit — named for an old school chum in Mississippi — from an overcoat that had belonged to his mother and eyes made from two Ping-Pong balls, and then he experimented with other characters. “We tried some really way-out things,” Henson says, “and since nobody threatened censorship or complained, I was convinced that no one else at the station ever watched the program.
Clearly, he was wrong in regard to the viewers. In 1958, the show won an Emmy award as the best local entertainment program. “Until then, I hadn’t taken puppetry all that seriously. It just didn’t seem the sort of thing a grown man works at for a living.
“The Muppets definitely aren’t alive, but they do have a life of their own, much like characters in a book. They are fictional characters.
“Kermit the Frog is not really a frog. He’s called Kermit the Frog but he’s really just Kermit. He became something of a frog when he did a TV special back in 1967. I changed his body and made him a bit rounder, more froglike.
“Kermit’s an Everyman trying to get through life whole. He has a sense of sanity and there he is, surrounded by crazies. Kermit is the character through whose eyes the audience is viewing the show. He is the solid thing in the middle — flip, snarky, which is to say a bit smart-alecky in his own way, but he’s a nice guy. He operates from a point of consideration. There is a lot of warmth in Kermit.”
This article is featured in the January/February 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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