Street Gang (57 page)

“I called Cheryl Henson and read her the note over the phone. Cheryl said, ‘Well, we won!’ And I said, ‘No, you didn’t. This is not a hello letter. It’s a good-bye letter.’ And I was right. Disney walked away from the deal, but they started showcasing the Muppets in Disney World, anyway, without paying any fees. It was outrageous, but Michael thought he could get all that was on the table for nothing.”

A vitriolic and vicious lawsuit ensued, pitting Henson’s company against the corporate giant. In this case, the mouse was the cat.

The Hensons contended that Disney was guilty of trademark and copyright infringement, and an “outright theft of Jim Henson’s legacy.”

In a counterclaim, Disney insisted it had “an implied license” to use the Muppets, suggesting that Jim Henson’s handshake with Eisner represented an ironclad agreement, and that Henson’s work on
Muppet*Vision 3D,
¹⁰
a wide-screen, 70-millimeter movie experience to be housed in a ninety-million-dollar complex being built at the new Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, now called Disney’s Hollywood Studios, was a tacit acknowledgment that the Muppets were part of the Disney brand.

Disney settled the copyright suit on April 30, 1991. The lead-in to Victoria F. Zonna’s report in the
Los Angeles Times
reflected the shock of seeing the powerful Disney company humbled. “Mickey Mouse ate a big serving of crow Tuesday as Walt Disney Co. settled its copyright dispute with the heirs of Muppets creator Jim Henson by apologizing to Henson’s family and buying a license for a pair of Muppets attractions at Disney World in Florida.”

Disney had insisted on a ten-to-twelve-year license to allow the Muppets to perform in the stage show and to unlimited showings of the 3D film. They ultimately agreed to eighteen months for exclusive use in theme parks east of the Mississippi, with an option to renew.

 

Richard Hunt was driving over the George Washington Bridge with his older sister Kate one night in the late 1980s, his hands on the wheel of an old Checker cab that had been painted black, Hunt’s idea of a dream vehicle.

“It was pouring rain as we were heading into New Jersey and onto the Palisades Parkway when Richard told me about his illness,” Kate said. “I was the first person in the family with whom he shared the news.” Almost as suddenly as Hunt blurted out that he was HIV positive, the car “went into a spin and we ended up on the guard rail of the highway. Richard simply said, ‘Well, I guess I wasn’t supposed to die
today
,’ ” she recalled.

Hunt developed full-blown AIDS and surived for five years, outliving a partner who had died in his arms of the disease. After spending his final days at the Cabrini Hospice in Manhattan, Hunt succumbed on January 7, 1992; he was forty. Most of his ashes were taken to a home he owned on Cape Cod.

A memorial service was held February 2 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the same holy space where twenty-one months earlier he had eulogized Jim Henson. On that day Hunt and his Muppet colleagues Jerry Nelson, Kevin Clash, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, and Frank Oz had performed magnificently, providing a fitting finale. With only piano accompaniment, they’d sung a medley of Henson’s favorite melodies, from the well-worn (“You Are My Sunshine”) to the semiobscure (Randy New-man’s “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear”). The performance spanned the decades, touching mostly gently on
The Muppet Show
and the Muppet films that followed.

“
The Muppet Show
years were Richard’s happiest times,” his sister said. Certainly, Hunt reached his artistic apogee in London during the five seasons of
The Muppet Show,
where he brought to life Beeker, the petrified lab assistant; Janice, the stringy blond Valley Girl lead guitarist from the Electric Mayhem Band; Sweetums, the yellow-eyed, twin-toothed ogre who had no need for hair plugs; and Scooter, who opened every episode with a knock on the guest star’s dressing room door. “Fifteen seconds to curtain, Miss Minnelli.”

Scooter reflected more of Hunt’s soul than any other character, in his desire to please and provide, and his eagerness to set things right backstage. “My brother overcame a difficult childhood,” Kate Hunt said. “He had a father who drank too much and parents who yelled at each other all of the time. There was very little money. I’d say Richard’s comedy gift came from a place of pain. He knew from the time he was young that he would have to be successful to take care of his family, and he did that to a fault.”

Hunt’s generosity is the trait friends and colleagues cite most often as his defining characteristic. He was as generous of spirit as he was with the folding money in his wallet.

He was in many ways unforgettable, even for the likes of Forgetful Jones.

 

Joan Cooney characterized Lewis Freedman as “the grandfather of
Sesame Street
” upon his death at age sixty-six in the early summer of 1992.

At the fateful dinner party in 1966, it was Freedman who turned the conversation to television’s untapped potential. And it was Freedman, along with Cooney, who arrived at Carnegie Corporation with a sketchy idea for a television program that would teach as it entertained preschoolers.

Among Freedman’s successes across forty-five years as a television producer and programming executive was a series of sixty-second historical sketches that ran on CBS during the yearlong celebration of the nation’s two hundredth birthday. Those “Bicentennial Minutes,” narrated by Walter Cronkite, won an Emmy, a Peabody, and high praise from fifth-grade teachers across the continent.

 

For the longest time,
Sesame Street
remained the undisputed heavyweight champion of preschool television. But in the immortal words of Bud Brown, Joan Cooney’s effusive social studies teacher, change is the only constant. By the early 1990s,
Sesame Street
might have been overripe and a bit too sure of itself. How could it
not
have been, after twenty-plus seasons of ratings dominance and so great a surfeit of Emmys that CTW could have used them as doorstops?

But half a continent away from Manhattan, in unremarkable Allen, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, a tiny entrepreneurial start-up company was about to introduce its own paradigm to the world of preschool television and the culture at large. The idea for it came, as did
Sesame Street,
from a university-trained teacher. In the 1980s, former-teacher-turned-stay-at-home mom Sheryl Leach was dismayed at the narrow range of choices available at the video store for her two-year-old son, Patrick. Nothing seemed to hold his attention. While driving on the freeway one day, Leach had her eureka moment: why not bypass the store-bought, packaged tapes and whip up a homemade one? If it can work with baking brownies, why not videos?

How hard could it be?
she wondered?
¹¹

That accounts for most of the prehistory of Barney, except to add that Leach’s father-in-law owned a video studio and put up a million dollars to finance production of three Barney tapes. The stories in those initial episodes weren’t written so much as they were typed, and the production values were just a cut above cable-access.

Barney was initially envisioned as a teddy bear, but he developed into a pudgy purple six-foot-tall dinosaur, sprouting tiny arms and yellow toe-nails and affecting a singsong vocal delivery that proved a siren song to small children. Most adults ran for cover while their children stared at the screen in rapt wonder.

Distribution of Barney tapes started out with his creators selling them one-by-one to teachers at Texas preschools and day-care centers. Word soon grew, and Barney began appearing at video outlets near and far. To adult eyes the features seemed amateurish and low budget; to children, born video illiterate, they seemed magical. Perhaps it was the bright Playskool hues of the show, or the familiar nursery rhyme tunes plucked for free from the public domain, or the ring of well-scrubbed children chirping away, or the simple directness of Barney himself, a plush toy come to life whose most complicated conviction was “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy fam-a-lee.” Whatever it was, it proved an elixir for the sippy-cup crowd.

Barney’s big break came one Super Bowl Sunday, not with an appearance at a domed stadium (that would come later) but in the home of then four-year-old Leora Rifkin, daughter of a programming executive at Connecticut Public Television. In a manner not entirely different from Lloyd Morrisett’s observing daughter Sarah so many years before, Larry Rifkin stood amazed while Leora played and replayed a Barney tape. He phoned the Lyons Group, the company name listed on the video packaging, and soon afterward a deal was struck to produce thirty half-hour episodes of
Barney & Friends
for PBS. The national exposure turned Barney into what the
Boston Globe
once described as Toyrannasaurus Rex, a merchandising behemoth.
Business Week
predicted in 1993 that Barney would move three hundred million dollars in toys and millions more in a bonanza of books, baubles, and bedsheets, more than two hundred licensed products in all.
¹²

Barney enjoyed gargantuan commercial success but throughout his purple reign on PBS, he has been a piñata for the television press. The
Washington Post
once described the show as “so saccharine it can send adults into hypoglycemic shock.” The
New York Times,
in a review headlined “Of Dinosaurs Why Must This One Thrive?” said, “Next to Barney and his friends, Sandy Duncan is a flesh-eating succubus.”
¹³

He was not without supporters, however. The
National Review
harrumphed that the Barney backlash was pablum fed by the liberal press and swallowed whole by baby boom parents “appalled at Barney’s uplift.” It described the series as “wholesome without relief . . . [U]nlike
Sesame Street,
set in a scene of urban decay, Barney entertains from a suburban schoolyard, swept clean of graffiti and trash. None of Barney’s friends lives in a garbage can, and none grunts hip-hop. The pace is slow and lingering, a technique at odds with
Sesame Street
’s barrage of spastic, quick-cut graphics that prep the kids for the countless hours of MTV awaiting them in adolescence. And instead of
Sesame Street
’s multicultural insinuations, Barney’s message revolves around the importance of brushing teeth, exercising, and even—this is how deep it goes—chewing with one’s mouth closed.”
¹⁴

Regardless of whether Barney was an abomination or a fascination (Barney made
People
’s list of 25 Most Intriguing People of 1992), the show took a big bite out of
Sesame Street’
s ratings. David Britt, installed as Joan Cooney’s successor as CEO in 1990, took heed. He assembled a SWAT team of executives to shake up
Sesame Street
, summoning Emily Swenson, executive vice president and chief operating officer; Marjorie Kahlins, group vice president for programming and production; Dr. Valeria Lovelace, research director for
Sesame Street
; and Franklin Getchell, vice president for programming and production.

As an agent of change, Getchell had a reputation for rampaging self-promotion and arrogance, at least among
Sesame Street
’s writers and producers. His track record as an executive producer included both success (the well-regarded science series
3-2-1 Contact
) and failure (the quirky HBO series
Encyclopedia
). After
Encyclopedia
was canceled, Getchell had hoped to land a job as a producer for
Sesame Street.
Unimpressed with his producing credentials,
Sesame
offered a spot on the writing staff, though he would first have to write an audition script, like anyone else. When Getchell turned it in, it was summarily rejected.

A few weeks after he was turned down by
Sesame
’s producers, however, Getchell became their boss, when Britt promoted him to replace Alfred Hyslop, who had reigned as vice president for programming and production (1980-88).

In his memoir, Jon Stone recalled the reaction around the studio: utter disbelief.

Stone, who had long since stepped down as executive producer to be more hands-on in the studio, heard the tom-toms beating, as did his successor, Dulcy Singer, who clashed with no one until Getchell came along. “Getchell was determined to put his own personal brand on the program,” Stone wrote. “He made it abundantly clear to Dulcy and me that there were going to be big changes, that those changes were going to be his, and that he would not tolerate insubordination.”

Increasingly, management perceived Stone and Singer as resistant to change, and they knew it. “They thought we were comfortable old sticks-in-the-mud who were opposed to any change whatsoever. It was an entirely absurd assumption: what was discerned as resistance to all change was in fact resistance to ill-conceived, unresearched, damaging change. We were never asked about modification. We were told.”

David Britt’s reading of the situation was that “Jon was being pressured to do things differently, for good reason. Research demonstrated that our viewing audience was growing younger and younger, yet the show was still being written and produced for older preschoolers. We actually didn’t press him as hard as we should have, considering the change that was so evident to us. Jon couldn’t give himself any distance from it, and things got ugly.”

In part to blunt Barney’s cut into ratings and in part to reinvigorate
Sesame Street
for its twenty-fifth anniversary season, Britt’s management team, with the blessing and encouragement of Joan Cooney, came up with an urban renewal plan they called Around the Corner.

With an investment north of two million dollars, the executives planned an expansion of the landmark set design to include a never-before-seen cul-de-sac around the corner from the brownstone stoop at 123 Sesame Street. A group of new characters—human and Muppet—would populate a neighborhood that would be painted and lit considerably brighter than the original facades. A focal point would be the Furry Arms Hotel, operated by dim-witted Muppets Ingrid and Humphrey. A grande dame puppet named Sherry Netherland would reside there. At the end of each broadcast, an announcer would plug the hotel, saying “Guests of
Sesame Street
stay at the elegant Furry Arms, whether they want to or not.” Nearby would be a dance studio, a home-based day-care center, and a playground, a new array of spaces that seemed less like Harlem and more like any gentrified up-and-coming neighborhood in America.