INNER TOOB: TVXOHOF SEPTEMBER 2024

Sunday, September 29, 2024

TVXOHOF SEPTEMBER 2024 - JIM HENSON

Boy! Am I late with this one! But not totally late....

Every September, the Television Crossover Hall of Fame celebrates somebody (a few times, something) – usually behind the scenes – who made significant contributions to the expansion of the Television Universe. And this year, our inductee had been born in September.

JIM HENSON

From Wikipedia:
James Maury Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was an American puppeteer, animator, actor, and filmmaker who achieved worldwide notability as the creator of the Muppets. Henson was also well known for creating 'Fraggle Rock' (1983–1987) and as the director of "The Dark Crystal" (1982) and "Labyrinth" (1986).

Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised in both Leland, Mississippi, and University Park, Maryland, Henson began developing puppets in high school. He created 'Sam and Friends' (1955–1961), a short-form comedy television program on WRC-TV, while he was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, in collaboration with classmate Jane Nebel. Henson and Nebel co-founded Muppets, Inc. – now The Jim Henson Company – in 1958, and married less than a year later in 1959. Henson graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics.

In 1969, Henson joined the children's educational television program 'Sesame Street' (1969–present) where he helped to develop Muppet characters for the series. He and his creative team also appeared on the first season of the sketch comedy show 'Saturday Night Live' (1975–present). He produced the sketch comedy television series 'The Muppet Show' (1976–1981) during this period. Henson revolutionized the way puppetry is captured and presented in video media, and he won fame for his characters – particularly Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog, and the characters on 'Sesame Street'. During the later years of his life, he founded the Jim Henson Foundation and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. He won the Emmy Award twice for his involvement in 'The StoryTeller (1987–1988) and 'The Jim Henson Hour' (1989).

Henson died in New York City at age 53 from toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. He was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, and was named a Disney Legend in 2011.

I might have felt embarrassed about having taken so long in honoring his impact on the TV Universe, had I not seen that mention of the posthumous star on the Walk of Fame. How could his genius be unrecognized for so long? And I was guilty of the same.

So hopefully, at least for my part, this makes up for it.

It’s not just that Henson created puppets who appeared on a lot of television shows. There were his contemporaries, Bil Baird and Burr Tillstrom (and Shari Lewis, who preceded Henson into the TVXOHOF.) And it wasn’t because his puppets interacted with real human beings; there must have been at least one hundred children’s TV shows which did the same thing. (‘Captain Kangaroo’ and ‘The Hap Richards Show’ were the cornerstones of my childhood fascination with puppets.)

It was because Henson and his team made Earth Prime-Time a world in which those puppets were not only alive like the humans, but they had lives off-screen. They had families; they had romantic relationships; and sometimes… they would kill. As young as I was, and as enraptured as I was by seeing them, I never lost the understanding that other TV puppets were still just puppets. Not so with the Muppets.

With ‘Sam and Friends’, Henson began in a puppet world, but that expanded with the commercials for Wilkins’ Coffee (that’s where the killing started, which is what some of you sick bastids were waiting for.) But the concept of Muppets being alive exploded with my favorite, Rowlf, who made weekly appearances on ‘The Jimmy Dean Show’. Earlier, we saw other puppets interacting with the show’s hosts as equals and while I would never dispute the legitimacy of any of those early kid show hosts as celebrities, Rowlf with Jimmy Dean gave it mega-star wattage. Eventually Rowlf was getting more fan mail than Dean!

So cute as it is seeing Muppets interacting with little children, it’s their relationship to the celebrities which helped spread the concept of living Muppets further when those League of Themselves celebrity televersions went on other shows. With each appearance, it created another degree of separation for various Muppets. Plus all of those Muppets, acknowledged as living beings in Toobworld, appeared on other shows – talk shows, game shows, in commercials….

And Henson made that possible.

Here are some key points in Henson’s domination of Toobworld: