Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

grackle. It was the sort of deliciously sharp-sounding nonsensical word that Jim loved—a meaningless word that just sounded like it meant something.

child’s use of imagination and fantasy blends into his use of creativity,” Jim explained later. The trick, he said, was to “try out whole new directions. There are many ways of doing something. Look for what no one has tried before.”

would demonstrate many times throughout his life, sometimes the cleverest solutions to a problem were also the simplest—and usually lying in plain sight, provided you could see a thing differently.

Jim would discover, there was a kind of magic, a wonderful kind of freedom, involved in letting a character at the end of your arm give voice to sentiments one might not feel comfortable expressing while wearing the guise of, as Jim called them, “ordinary people.”

was the end for McCarthy, but for television, it was a beginning—a new and unexpected flexing of muscles. Simply by broadcasting the hearings live, television had created An Event. It was Jim’s first real experience with the power of television not only as entertainment, but as informer and educator. Jim would never forget the power of the glowing image on the small screen as an agent for change.

“In the early days of the Muppets, we had two

endings,” Jim said. “Either one creature ate the other, or both of them blew up.… I’ve

Jim’s Wilkins commercials also caught the attention of other coffee companies across the eastern seaboard, who wanted the Muppets selling their coffee, too.

Television parodies were always fun for Jim—he particularly enjoyed lampooning game shows, a habit that would continue on Sesame Street.

My ending was a bit arty, whereas Jim liked things to be blown up or eaten!”

“This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail.”

What was very basic to his work is that he was really in love with life. He was really intrigued with how all these little pieces of life worked and

One of his thoughts was “to have a character that the child could live through,” a Muppet who was representative of the audience. “Big Bird, in theory, is himself a child,” said Jim, “and we wanted to make this great big silly awkward creature that would make the same kind of dumb mistakes that kids make.”

“Oscar is there because we didn’t want a bland kiddie show,” said Stone. “We didn’t want to let it get too

“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.” As

They remember what you are, Jim had said. The Muppets, then, were Jim’s conversation with millions of children, spoken directly to them in a language they could understand: complete and utter silliness and abandon.

A Muppet Family Christmas stands as one of Jim’s finest, and most underappreciated, productions. As the characters from the various Muppet universes encounter each other, many for the first time, the hour-long episode is full of remarkable moments:

Simply, Jim Henson’s greatest legacy will always be Jim himself: the way he was, and the way he encouraged and inspired others to be—the simple grace and soft-spoken dignity he brought to the world (and expected, sometimes fruitlessly, of others), as well as his faith in a greater good that he believed he and his fellow inhabitants of the globe were capable

Even in business, “he could integrate play into the process,” said Dave Goelz. “As a parent, one of my goals is to see whether I can raise my children to survive in the world without losing that childlike innocence, trust, optimism,

curiosity and decency.