Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

“Many of the things I’ve done in my life have basically been self-taught,” Jim admitted later. “I had never worked with puppets … and even when I began on television, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sure this was a good thing, because I learned as I tackled each problem. I think if you study—if you learn too much of what others have done—you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.” There was little danger of Jim doing that—he was already too far ahead of everybody else. Still, for all his success and innovation, Jim was always respectful of the work of his predecessors in television. The differences in their approaches both to puppetry and the television medium, were, he thought, simply generational—a matter of when you learned the craft and what media were available when you began performing.