Jim Henson: The Biography

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.' - Jim

When I was young," wrote Jim, "my ambition was to be one of the people who makes a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave this world a little bit better for my being here." And he did.

When Jim left the planet so suddenly, all of us who loved him, worked with him, were inspired by him, gathered in New York City. We were like dandelion seeds clinging to the stem and to each other. And on May 16th, [the day Jim died] the wind began to blow. There’s no stem any more. We’re all floating on the breeze. And it’s scary and exhilarating, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But gradually, we’ll all drift to the ground and plant ourselves. And no matter what we grow into, it’ll be influenced by Jim. We’re Jim’s seeds. And it’s not only those of us who knew him. Everyone who was touched by his work is a Jim-seed.

When done right, it's possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.

Perhaps more important, it also showed that you could get away with being a little dangerous, provocative, or just plain deep if you did it with a smile on your face and remembered that entertainment always came first. When done right, it’s possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.

The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them,” Jim said later. “They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.

If The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98." (Jerry Juhl on the crazy workload of The Muppet Show)

One viewer - a Mr. Dionne from California... fired off an angry, rambling letter, complaining haughtily that "the most disciplined attention I could give [The Cube] was a belch from the grave of Marcus Aurelius, occasioned, I might add, by the dead weight of its own dust caving in on itself." Two weeks later came Jim's one-sentence response: Dear Mr. Dionne: What the fuck are you talking about? Yours truly, JIM HENSON

Jim Henson's body was gone, and yet that powerful presence-that undefinable 'something' that compelled men to seek his appreciation and approval, and that women found somehow irresistible-would always remain. Anyone who had ever smiled as Ernie tried to play a rhyming game with Bert, or laughed as Kermit had chased Fozzie off the stage, arms flailing, had felt it. Anyone who had ever wished they could explore a Fraggle hole, save the world with a crystal shard, or dance with a charismatic goblin king had been touched by it.

As I try to zero in on what’s important for the Muppets,” Jim said years later, “I think it’s a sense of innocence, naiveté—you know, the experience of a simple person meeting life.” The

This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail." (Jerry Juhl on being offered a job with Muppets, Inc.)

As each guest entered, they were handed a long wand—actually a puppeteer’s arm rod—with a bright foam butterfly attached at the end, one of the thousands put together by the Muppet Workshop over the last three days.

If you take a character and you call him a frog … you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of sort of warmth and cool.

Jim was shaken by the impending death of his grandfather—he had, after all, been partly named for him—but Jim would do as he always did in the face of grief: he would build and create. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness—Kermit was born.

It is our responsibility to keep telling these tales--to tell them in a way that they teach and entertain and give meaning to our lives,' he [Jim] said later. 'This is not merely an obligation, it's something we must do because we love doing it.

There’s no stem any more. We’re all floating on the breeze. And it’s scary and exhilarating, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But gradually, we’ll all drift to the ground and plant ourselves. And no matter what we grow into, it’ll be influenced by Jim. We’re Jim’s seeds. And it’s not only those of us who knew him. Everyone who was touched by his work is a Jim-seed.

Indeed, [Jimmy] Dean believed in Rowlf so completely that he would sometimes genuinely break up when Rowlf delivered one-liners, laughing so hard that he was unable to sing. "I treated Rowlf like he was real, but he WAS real to me," Dean said, "and I think that's one of the reasons he made such an impression on everyone.

Many television critics, writing of Kermit during that pivotal first season, thought Kermit was already one of Hollywood’s great straight men—“funny not because of what he does,” wrote one reviewer, “but because of what others do around him, and because of the aplomb with which he bears their doings.

The performance sparkled. With Jim giving a charming and entirely convincing performance—and Dean believing in Rowlf completely—there was a chemistry that “turned out to be the hit of the show,

Several years earlier, when Henson Associates’ insurance provider had notified Jim that it would no longer be paying all of Christine’s medical expenses, Jim had insisted that Henson Associates change insurance companies to ensure her costs would continue to be fully covered. Nelson had gone to Jim’s office and tearfully thanked him in person, nearly choking on emotion. “Jerry,” said Jim, smiling, “that’s what insurance companies are for.

I live kind of within myself as a person, so my outlet has always been the Muppets; therefore, I tend to do sort of wildly extroverted characters,” said Jim.