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rather than solely seeking fame and fortune, Kermit sees it as an opportunity to entertain and “make millions of people happy.”
well, I’ve got a dream, too. But it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy. That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with. And, well … I’ve found a whole bunch of friends who have the same dream. And it kind of makes us like a family.
“If you can figure out how they were able to show Kermit pedaling across the screen,” wrote Ebert, “then you are less a romantic than I am: I prefer to believe he did it himself.”
“He didn’t look at things that he’d finished and grimace. He enjoyed what he made.… I mean, he knew he was good.”
“he was mesmerized by the beauty, the serenity and the nurturing power of Nature.”
“[Jim’s] genius,” said Stevenson later, “is that he can sit through days of meetings getting completely different views from people—because he brought people in there to have different views, right?—and then at the end, he’d synthesize the whole thing.”
It was his worldview and philosophy that had driven the project—“Fraggle Rock was a true depiction of Jim’s feelings of peace and harmony,”
“I think it would be better,” said Jim plainly—a response Oz never forgot. “To Jim, that was the most important thing. The quality would be better … all he wanted was to work. He just wanted good stuff, that’s all.”
if the gadgetry got in the way of the puppeteer, the performance would suffer. “You have all of these techniques, but at the heart of all the mechanics is an actor performing a role, trying to get the subtlety of the movement,” Jim explained. “That’s the key thing, and all the technology can merely help and expand and give you more dimension.”
came to respect the power Jim could convey simply through his presence and respectful silence. “Jim didn’t tell you what to do,” said Oz. “He just was. And by him being what he was, he led and he taught. But by not answering, sometimes you answered your own question, and you could do more than you thought you could.”
The Dark Crystal had never been about profit and loss; it was about vision and inspiration, and the fact that audiences didn’t or couldn’t appreciate it hurt him terribly. “I felt sad for Jim,” said Oz. “I helped him with Dark Crystal, and I learned an incredible amount, but it wasn’t my vision. I just felt bad for him.”
“The most impressive thing is that it was done at all. It came from Jim’s head and it actually happened. Yeah, it didn’t go over quite the way Jim wanted. But he’s a phoenix,” said Oz, “he rose again.”
The most important thing, however, is to love what you’re doing and to go after those visions, no matter where they lead.”
As if modeling himself on the UrSkeks in The Dark Crystal, he was at last merging his two separate selves—Work Jim and Home Jim—into a single Jim Henson.
What a gross interpretation! He’s cutting off not merging. He’s been refusing to merge - and now he’s acknowledging that, but it’s hardly a blending of work and home Jim. More a slaughter of home Jim.
“There’s a sense of our characters caring for each other and having respect for each other,” agreed Jim. “A positive feeling. A positive view of life. That’s a key to everything we do.… Sometimes we’re too heavy in terms of ourselves and trying to carry an idea, and telling kids what life is about. I often have to tell myself that, too.”
an architectural embodiment of Jim’s unique design aesthetic: art noveau, with a dash of whimsy.
Jim was amazing, because he never said, ‘Hey, you can’t leave me! I gave you all this stuff and you learned so much from me.’ Instead, he said, ‘Of course you’ve got to go do that.’ He was always amazing that way.”
“Jim is undoubtedly the most unflappable guy I’ve ever encountered in any profession,”
calm spirit made the whole film a pleasure to work on, not just for me, but for the entire cast and crew.”
Kenworthy worried “it would have almost been nepotism to have offered him the job.” Jim stroked his beard thoughtfully. “We should all be so lucky as we go through life working only with friends,” he said. Stephenson was hired immediately.
“Everyone is magic,” the Trash Heap oracle tells Gobo. “The silly creatures are sometimes just too silly to remember that.… You go to him and you say this … ‘You cannot leave the magic.’ ”
“Jim wanted to make a difference,” said Jerry Juhl later. “He knew that television shows do not bring peace to the world, but he wasn’t so cynical to say we can’t think about it. There was a kind of idealism there that could seem naive and childlike, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t come true.”
