Raised on Muppets

Gen X owes Jim Henson everything

Jim Henson is part of my personal Holy Trinity, along with Douglas Adams and Mr. Rogers. He designed my adult life as much as anything else I can name. Since this could otherwise get emotionally sloppy, I present a list of fragments:

1. I was born the same year as Sesame Street. Along with The Electric Company, it taught me to read, and created my worldview. (I will fight to the death for PBS.)

2. Because of Sesame Street—a specific era of Sesame Street, before the Reagan 1980s descended—I believe in cities, in diversity, in Stevie Wonder accelerandos, in lone children Snoopy-dancing on fire escapes, in front stoops. I believe in books. I believe that life is not a zero-sum game, that there is room for everyone. Jim Henson and Sesame Street turned me into a progressive human being. They also pointed me at moving to and living in a city, around people who don’t look like me.
   
   I am not alone in this. More than a decade ago, I saw  Jim Henson’s Fantastic World, a traveling exhibit of Henson memorabilia, muppets, and movie props. I went with my husband, who is barely Gen X and who did not watch Sesame Street as a child, and with my parents, who definitely didn’t. I walked in, saw a Kermit puppet, and along with every other Gen Xer there—there were many of us—lost my damn mind. Total strangers pointed wordlessly together at Muppet artifacts, eyes brimming, brainstems hacked by Henson, our early-1970s childhoods awake and on the wall, smiling back at us. We all owe him so much.
   

3. This is a good documentary and you should watch it.

4. This is a good biography and you should read it.

   

   Consider buying it from The Harvard Bookstore vs. that other place

5. There is a particular Sesame Street sketch from the 1970s that I am fairly certain is at least partly responsible for first-wave internet, back when web design had just kicked off. Remember 1990s tech companies? They were a mess, but fun, anarchic and subversive, just like this. We did things our own way. It was a party.

6. When I was in third grade, which would have made me about eight years old, a friend whose family had Children’s Television Workshop connections invited Richard Hunt (one of the original Sesame Street puppeteers) to our classroom. He brought Kermit, and Scooter, and Grover. Every kid was just riveted.
   
   He was nice, but also I could tell—maybe everyone could tell?—that there was also a certain sharp energy under the surface. He was an artist and a comic, the word “puppeteer” wasn’t really enough to describe him. I’m not sure it adequately describes any of the Muppet puppeteers.
   
   Hunt was lost to AIDS two years after Jim Henson died, sadly.

   Fun trivia: the friend whose family knew Hunt was the basis of the Scooter character, or so he was told by Hunt. This video says otherwise, but maybe Hunt was pulling from multiple sources.
   

7. Frank Oz had (has?) a Twitter account, which surprised me, since he of all the Muppet leadership seems like someone who isn’t very extroverted. He’s Bert, not Ernie. He’s a director and voice actor, now, mostly.
   
   I have to wonder what he and the other Muppets people do with the steady beam of adoration they get from people like me, due to the things they did way back in their early career. It’s like they’re permanently everyone’s warm, fun uncle. It’s a lot of expectation to labor under.
   
   Anyway, here’s Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson endlessly razzing Henson in a set of outtakes from Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas. Oz provided working vocals for this scene. I believe he was overdubbed in the final version of the movie. 

8. Jim Henson is quoted as saying something along the lines of “if you don’t know how to end a sketch, do it with an explosion.” IBM paid him to make this; if you scrub backward from where I anchored my video link, you’ll see that he roasts his own client to a crisp. I fervently wish for this level of total career success.