Jim Henson: The Biography (66 page)

As Jim saw it,
The Jim Henson Hour
would be “
in the same grand tradition” as
The Wonderful World of Disney
, a weekly anthology in which Disney appeared on camera to introduce an assortment of features, from cartoons and nature films to short movies and behind-the-scenes documentaries. “Each week,” Jim explained, “we’ll tell a different story: some with puppets, some with people,
and most with a mix of
the two.” For
The Jim Henson Hour
, Jim was proposing four different themed shows, shown in a regular rotation. The first week of each month, then, would be devoted exclusively to
The Storyteller
, allowing Jim to put the show on a regular monthly schedule as part of his own series. And since he would now have an hour to fill, Jim could produce hour-long installments of
The Storyteller
—something he was longing to do, as current episodes were only thirty minutes—slowing down and spreading out “to allow ourselves to take advantage of the rich imagery” of folktales.

For the second week of each month, Jim was hoping to salvage the remains of
Inner Tube
and reshape them into something called
Lead-Free TV
. The concept was still relatively the same—a cast of new Muppets and a guest star interacting across television channels—but for Jim, it was still more about playing with the new technology. “
In the many years we’ve been on television, the capabilities of TV itself have changed dramatically,” he pointed out enthusiastically. “Using state-of-the-art technology we can create settings that exist only as electronic information.” With new technology at his disposal, Jim envisioned
Lead-Free TV
as “
The Muppet Show
of the future!”

The third week of each month would be devoted to “Picture-book Specials”—spotlighting more homespun fare like
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
or
The Tale of the Bunny Picnic
—while the fourth episode in the monthly cycle would be “The Next Wave,” shows that would have
“unlimited potential,” Jim said, “because we will allow ourselves to do almost anything.” Jim already had plenty of ideas for his “Next Wave” specials, including a celebration of the upcoming twentieth anniversary of
Sesame Street
, a Miss Piggy special, and a behind-the-scenes documentary on the Muppets. “We’re tremendously excited about these shows,” he enthused.

O
n September 25, 1987—the day after his fifty-first birthday, and only a little more than a month after discussing the idea with Tartikoff—Jim stepped before the cameras to tape his host segments for the pitch reel for
The Jim Henson Hour
. Dressed casually in a
black-and-white-patterned jacket over a collared shirt, Jim looked remarkably at ease as he strolled onto a set designed and constructed to resemble an idealized version of the Muppet workshop. It was a perfect setup. “
I thought that was a wonderful way of doing
The Jim Henson Hour
because that’s the way it happens,” said Muppet performer Kevin Clash. “What I love and always have loved about … Jim Henson started in this workshop.… That’s the way that you do it. That says
Jim
to me.” It was perhaps no wonder that Jim looked so comfortable; this was home, in the workshop—or at least a reasonable facsimile—and Jim played his role as a cheerful and thoughtful host enthusiastically. “
Imagination is what this show is all about,” he said warmly, bantering with Gonzo, Animal, Miss Piggy, and Kermit (“you, as usual, have your hand in almost everything here,” joked Kermit) and grinning broadly as he played at the controls of a computer and teased an animatronic gryphon. “We think it’s an hour families will want to spend together watching quality television,” he concluded. “What more can I say?”

As he sent the pitch reel off for editing, Jim reported that its filming had gone
“quite well.” He found it was fun to play with the Muppet gang again—and with Frank Oz back performing Animal and Miss Piggy, even for a moment, it was almost like old times, when Jim could play with the guys and not worry so much about running a company. Juhl, too, after writing almost exclusively for
Fraggle Rock
for the last four years, discovered he enjoyed writing for the familiar characters again. Feeling nostalgic, Juhl had written what Jim considered a “lovely” Christmas show, in which the casts from the three major Muppet productions—
The Muppet Show
,
Sesame Street
, and
Fraggle Rock
—gathered at Fozzie’s mother’s house for the holidays. The resulting special,
A Muppet Family Christmas
, would be one of Jim’s favorites.

Taped quickly in late September and early October at Glen Warren Productions in Ontario,
A Muppet Family Christmas
was a true homecoming. Not only was Oz back (“
He doesn’t do a lot of puppeteering anymore,” said Jim. “So this was very much a reunion.”), but so were
Muppet Show
alumni Peter Harris and Martin Baker, as well as Caroll Spinney, just starting his twentieth consecutive season on
Sesame Street
, whom Jim greeted with a warm, “Hello, Muppets
West!” With Juhl’s lovingly written script, Harris’s tight direction, and top-notch performances from every Muppet performer,
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: Ernie and Bert bantering with Doc; Kermit and Robin entering a Fraggle hole and learning how the Fraggles give presents; Rowlf speaking “dog” with Sprocket (“Woof woof! Yeah! Bark bark!”). Jim even makes a cameo in the closing moments, watching over the Christmas celebration from the kitchen with Sprocket. “Well, they certainly seem to be having a good time out there, Sprocket,” Jim says. “I like it when they have a good time.”

Viewers and critics had a good time, too. When it aired that December,
A Muppet Family Christmas
was warmly received by reviewers and easily won its time slot. The Muppets, who hadn’t appeared in an entirely new production since 1984’s
The Muppets Take Manhattan
, were back in the news again—and as Jim cheerfully made the rounds with the press, he seemed genuinely stunned to find his characters were not just enjoyed, but
“cherished”—and moving with a seeming life of their own toward an iconic status. “There’s a nice, naive quality to this family of characters,” Jim explained helpfully, speaking so softly that one reporter’s voice-activated tape recorder kept shutting off. “
I think people relate to their childlike quality, because everybody has that in themselves.”

To the delight of the press, Jim also announced that he was at work on another Muppet movie, which he hoped to start shooting in early 1989. For much of the year, he had been mulling over various proposals and brainstorming with Juhl and other Muppet writers. Some ideas sparked his interest—for a while, he seriously considered
“taking them [the Muppets] on an archeological adventure to discover their roots”—while others were dismissed outright, including a suggestion that Miss Piggy might get pregnant. Jim had blanched at that one, calling it a little too “specific and explicit.” But Jerry Juhl had recently handed in a movie treatment that Jim
loved
—and which had been inspired, in part, by a private conversation in which Oz had groused to Jim and Juhl about the growing costs of projects
at Henson Associates. If they were going to make another Muppet film, Oz said testily, they would have to “
figure out a way to do a really low-budget kind of thing.” That was all Juhl needed. Hunching over his Macintosh computer in his home office in California, he quickly pounded out a treatment for a film called
The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made
.

In Juhl’s first treatment, Kermit allows Gonzo to write and direct a bad adventure movie called
Into the Jaws of the Demons of Death—
with “
this cheesy, terrible plot,” as Juhl put it, “that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, about something being stolen that led to a chase around the world.” In his enthusiasm, Gonzo spends his entire budget on an impressive opening credits sequence, then has no money left for the rest of the film. As the movie proceeds, the film quality gets worse and worse, eventually eroding into black-and-white Super 8 film, then a slide show, and finally just storyboards—until Gonzo sells out to corporate sponsors and finishes the movie in a beautiful, high-definition, widescreen format.

Jim was delighted with the treatment, and put Juhl to work writing a full script, which he turned in as Jim was wrapping up
A Muppet Family Christmas
in Ontario. Jim, Juhl, and Oz passed the script back and forth, and even Oz—always prickly about the treatment of the characters—thought it was an exciting project. “
It’s going to be the kind of movie the audience wants the Muppets to do,” he told Jim. “Just a little crazy and a whole lot of fun.” As it was written,
The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made
actually wouldn’t be cheap to make—Juhl’s script called for erupting volcanoes and exploding islands, and for Meryl Streep to play Miss Piggy’s stand-in—but the idea was funny and Jim thought he could manage things on a budget of $8 million. He and Juhl would keep playing with it.

T
hat autumn, Jim fl ew to Los Angeles to make an appearance with Kermit on a Dolly Parton television special on October 21—but more important, he would be meeting the next day with Tartikoff and NBC executives to make the pitch for
The Jim Henson Hour
. Besides the pitch reel, Jim brought with him a densely written proposal—unlike many of his proposals, this one had no illustrations—behind a cover
with a sharply designed J
IM
H
ENSON
H
OUR
logo, featuring Jim’s signature prominently tilted across the page in bright Kermit green. Jim leapt into his pitch with gusto, touting
The Jim Henson Hour
as “
a rich and mysterious, wonderfully imaginative hour … for the whole family to enjoy,” and which put “the best of everything” he did in one complete package. The executives listened intently, and Tartikoff promised to get back to Jim soon.

What Jim was hoping he had conveyed to the network, perhaps more than anything else, was just how much he still loved and believed in television. While he had branched out into movies over the last decade, television was still his artistic and creative oasis. It was the medium he knew and understood the best—and it was a medium he still thought could do much for the common good. “
We should be creating a kind of basis for TV which will be good for us and for kids,” Jim said. “There’s too much negative thinking in the world. Why don’t we try dealing with the happier side instead?”

He would expand on those views a month later in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd gathered in Los Angeles to honor him as an inductee to the Television Hall of Fame. Jim had “
mixed feelings” about being singled out for the award, which honored “persons who have made outstanding contributions in the arts, sciences or management of television.” “
I like working collaboratively with people,” he once said. “I have a terrific group of people who work with me, and think of the work that we do as ‘our’ work.” Nonetheless, he knew the award was “certainly an honor”—plus he was being recognized alongside several performers he admired, including Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, and the late Ernie Kovacs. Jim gamely accepted his Hall of Fame award on November 15, but his speech that evening said much about how he regarded his work, his colleagues, and his responsibilities to the common good:

Finally, in the third week of December 1987 came the news Jim had been waiting for: NBC had agreed to produce a half season of weekly episodes of
The Jim Henson Hour
, to begin airing in January 1989, a little over a year away. “
It’s very exciting,” wrote Jim in a memo to the entire Henson Associates staff, “but a bit scary because there is so much to do.” Beneath the enthusiasm, however, was a slight annoyance: as a condition of its approval, NBC had insisted on major changes to the show’s format. While Tartikoff had told Jim from the outset that he could rotate among the four themed hours one after another, just as Jim had proposed, NBC executives had pushed back against that approach. Instead of a comprehensive, themed hour, the network insisted on two fifteen-minute sections for the first half hour—made up of Muppet moments, short
Lead-Free TV
bits, or other skits—while the second half hour would be one long piece, such as an installment of
The Storyteller
or another original feature.

There were still some visible remnants of the original proposal; once a month, Jim could produce an hour-long special, such as a
Storyteller
or one of his “Next Wave” projects, like the
Sesame Street
twentieth-anniversary show he was still hoping to produce, or a proposed hour-long musical special featuring the Electric Mayhem in Mexico. For the most part, however, NBC had taken the unique ingredients Jim had provided in his original proposal and asked him to blend them together into a garbled chop suey. Jim tried to put the best face on it, eventually explaining publicly that it had been a mutual decision. “
We were working on
Storyteller
and coming up with a concept for a very electronic variety show,” Jim told the
Austin American-Statesman
later. “And we also had a series of specials we were putting together. So, we came to NBC with this concept of putting all these things into one show. We thought it’d be nice to kind of
pull it all together.” Nothing about that statement was necessarily untrue, but it didn’t accurately reflect Jim’s more cohesive starting point.