‘Puppeteer’ Really Doesn’t Cover It When Describing the Man Behind the Muppets, Jim Henson

‘Jim Henson: Idea Man’Streaming on Disney+There’s one salient fact about Jim Henson that even most of us longtime Muppet mavens were unfamiliar with prior to Brian Jay Jones’s 2013 biography — and which now becomes the most important point of Ron Howard’s excellent new documentary about the man and his muppets. The chief idea behind “Idea Man” is this: If you asked most folks to describe the late Muppet master in a single word, they would probably say “puppeteer.” Yet that’s not the way Henson thought of himself; as many of his close friends and offspring report in Mr. Howard’s film, Henson’s original motivation was to tell stories and create characters for the new medium of television, and puppets were a means to that end. There’s no mention in the documentary of Henson (1936-’90) having even attended a puppet show as a child growing up first in Mississippi and then at Washington, D.C. Indeed, he seems to have never even thought about puppets as a creative medium until he was about 18, when he learned that a local TV station was seeking a puppeteer for a Saturday morning children’s show. Within a year, he had begun to develop a striking new concept using puppets — traditionally considered a children’s medium — for prime-time and late-night shows for adults. There had been puppets on TV even when Henson was a teeanger, from Howdy Doody to Burr Tillstrom’s Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. By the time Henson started, the smart money was that cheap, made-for-TV cartoons like those of Bill Hanna & Joseph Barbera would soon replace live puppetry as the chief staple of kid shows; Walt Disney himself said cartoons would take over from puppets the same way Westerns were taking over from the detective shows that proliferated in the earliest days of the medium.“So many things that Jim did that forwarded puppetry,” Henson’s closest collaborator, Frank Oz (nee Oznowicz), tells us near the start of Mr. Howard’s film. “What Jim did is that he took the first proscenium away and made the TV set the stage. Not only that, he went for the close up — most shows at that time didn’t have close ups of puppets.” Before Henson, most puppets on TV, like Kukla and Ollie, were shot on a miniature stage with an arch, as if the cameras were merely filming an existing puppet show. The Muppets, contrastingly, existed in their own universe: On “Sesame Street,” they were part of the real world, and on “The Muppet Show,” there were clearly worlds within worlds. Here we see Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and the others on stage in their roles as entertainers as well as backstage, in what is supposedly the real-life world of an anthropomorphic, felt-constructed animal. In both spaces, Kermit serves as the straight man, providing a contrast to the outsized desires of everyone else: Fozzie’s ambition to win everyone’s hearts through humor, Piggy wanting to be adored by everybody. Like many great artists, Henson addressed the past and the future at the same time; having come to fame via variety shows like “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Hollywood Palace,” Henson would go on to create what was recognized in its time as the last great variety show.Alas, Mr. Howard’s film doesn’t mention Jack Burns, the veteran standup comic who served as head writer for the first season of “The Muppet Show” (1967-81) as well as the original “Muppet Movie” (1979) and who, in Mr. Jones’s account, did so much to establish the wildly successful program’s American vaudeville/British music hall format. The major other notable omissions are songwriters, Joe Raposo and the team of Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, whose music is a key component of the Muppet success story; we hear their songs, “Bein’ Green” and “The Rainbow Connection,” but not their names.Still, Mr. Howard’s film does an overall excellent job of summarizing Henson’s brief life and vast accomplishments in less than two hours; like so many documentaries today, it’s edited in a breathlessly quick and choppy fashion, following the tradition that Henson did much to establish in his independent short film “Time Piece” (1965), which anticipates the short-attention-span-theater editing style that did so much to make “Sesame Street” such a big and enduring hit. The film opens with a powerful montage of Hensonian thoughts, images, and words, intercut to a soundtrack of Charles Mingus’s “II B.S.” (1963). It divides its 108 minutes between Henson’s four surviving children and his co-workers, like Fran Brill and Dave Goelz, though there’s more attention given to his professional life and achievements. As the late Jon Stone, a key writer and producer on “Sesame Street,” says in Mr. Jones’s book, Henson would have been restless if he had lived to 109.Like many other great creators, he was forever in search of the next thing — which is why “Idea Man” is a better title than “Jim Henson: Puppet Master” or “TV Mogul.” “Everything my dad did was experimental,” as Henson’s only son, Brian, observes. “That’s the way he approached everything.” It’s a wonder he was able to stay on one project long enough to remain on multiple early seasons of “Sesame Street,” a full-five season (roughly 120 episodes) of “The Muppet Show,” and three Muppet theatrical films. Near the end, a Muppet magician speaks, in Henson’s voice, and says, “It’s a standard Muppet finale. If you don’t know how to end it, go out with a…” — and here an explosion takes the place of the word “bang.” While there are plenty of big bangs along the way, “Idea Man” essentially ends poignantly with the words of Mr. Oz, who, of all the interviewees here, probably knew and worked with Henson the longest: “If Jim was here [today] … I’d just have to thank him.”

‘Puppeteer’ Really Doesn’t Cover It When Describing the Man Behind the Muppets, Jim Henson

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