Jim Henson: The Biography (16 page)

One of the most ambitious and weirdly odd pieces was a lip-synch performance to Marlene Dietrich’s “Time on My Hands,” performed by a new puppet Jim called Limbo the Floating Face. Limbo, as Jim described it, was “a very flexible face”—mostly just a mouth and eyes—performed by tugging on an elaborate rigging of nearly invisible fish line at the bottom of a frame that caused the foam rubber mouth to open and close and the eyes to widen or crinkle shut. It was a complicated puppet, and Jim was proud of it, calling it “
revolutionary.” The Hamburg crowd greeted the performance warmly, though with some confusion—but Jim was pleased with it and would perform variations on the piece for the next decade, unveiling it on talk shows and, in an ambitious computer-animated form, on
Sesame Street
.

The USDA was thrilled with Jim and Jerry’s performance, hailing it as “
a spectacular feat of entertainment,” and Jim must have been pleased as his plane touched down in New York at the end of November. For the most part, the performances had been a departure from his more familiar style of Muppets, but the crowd had responded favorably. With some more work, he could start introducing these more experimental forms of puppetry in front of American audiences.

First, however, it was time to close up shop on
Sam and Friends. Sam
would make his exit quite literally with a bang, as the final episode—broadcast at 11:25 on Friday, December 15, 1961—would conclude with what was becoming a Muppet kind of ending, with the
Sam and Friends
set exploding and falling to pieces around the cast.

There was an uproar from
Sam
’s fans over its demise, but Jim
was too busy to notice. In February 1962, he and Jerry Juhl headed for Europe again, this time to take part in a “Green Week” show in Berlin, hosted by the U.S. Information Agency. Jim chose to perform many of the same skits he and Juhl had used in the Hamburg show, with one major addition: he was determined, after the lukewarm reception of the “Drill Team” piece in Hamburg, to come up with a mechanical puppet performance that worked.

He succeeded, for the most part, because the new performance was so funny. Lampooning “
the average European impression of the average American tourist,” Jim’s new mechanical puppets were based on the stereotype of the ugly American, featuring a cigar-chomping loudmouth in a Hawaiian shirt who demands he be sold one of the Alps so he can build a hotel, and an abrasive, gum-smacking woman who patronizingly advises audiences to always learn a few words in a foreign language “to make the natives feel more at home.” The audience loved it, and Jim went home satisfied with his early experiment in animatronics—a field he would come to redefine decades later in his highly successful and always innovative Creature Shop.

I
n June 1962, Jim and his team—including Jane, Jerry Juhl, and Bobby Payne—traveled by train to Atlanta, Georgia, to tape a half-hour pilot Jim and Juhl had written, called
Tales of the Tinkerdee. Tinkerdee
was Jim’s opportunity to work with the conceits of folklore and fairy tales, still of great interest to him since his visit to Europe, and to put to work—in a pared-down manner—some of the “overcomplicated” storytelling elements of the unrealized
Hansel and Gretel
project. Instead of adapting an existing story, however,
Tinkerdee
allowed Jim to create his own magical kingdom, populate it with his own characters, and tell a story in his own unique madcap style without the need to be deferential to source material. It would also be a chance to introduce a number of live hand Muppets, the first Jim would use in an American production following their successful Hamburg debut.

The plot of
Tinkerdee
revolves around King Goshposh and his plans to throw a birthday party for his daughter, Princess Gwendolinda,
and the parallel efforts of Taminella Grinderfall, “the witchiest witch of all,” to crash the party, conk the princess on the head, and make off with the gifts. With the help of Charlie the Ogre, Taminella uses a variety of disguises to infiltrate the castle, where she is finally caught and imprisoned by the king. “
It was really just half-an-hour of one-line jokes,” said Juhl later. “We’d done those kind of gags before, on
Sam and Friends
 … but this was the first time we’d stretched them to fill thirty minutes.”

Stretched
was a rather unfair assessment, for
Tinkerdee
is a gallopingly fast-paced piece. At no time does the camera linger or the pace sag, and with only six speaking characters, Jim makes all their moments count. Jim’s King Goshposh is the kind of clueless authority figure Jim loved to play, dispensing nuggets of dopey advice while gnawing on a cigar (in a masterful bit of puppet design and craftsmanship, the cigar seeped real smoke). Jim himself even makes a cameo appearance, of sorts, as Taminella’s dimwitted sidekick, Charlie the Ogre, visible only from the waist down, his bare legs spattered with mud.

Serving as
Tinkerdee
’s narrator and Greek chorus is Kermit, dressed as a minstrel and strumming a lute. “
You’d see him on little grassy knolls singing the narration we had written in the form of quatrains and god-awful puns and hideous rhymes,” said Juhl. More significantly, with his crenulated minstrel collar on, Kermit suddenly looks every inch a frog—or close enough so that from here on out it would be a no-brainer to definitively call him one. “We frogified him,” Jim said later, only slightly lamenting the loss of the abstraction. “He just slowly became a frog.”

Despite the more nimble live hand Muppets, rock-solid performances, and some laugh-out-loud moments (typically, Jim couldn’t resist ending the episode with a pie in the face),
Tales of the Tinkerdee
failed to pique the interest of any TV network. Perhaps the humor was too similar to
Rocky and Bullwinkle
—an admitted influence—for executives to fully appreciate its originality. More likely, the networks simply didn’t share Jim’s confidence that the Muppets could hold their own for thirty minutes—or, barring that, attract a demographically desirable audience. While Jim had never billed himself as a kids’ act, network suits simply couldn’t see puppets
as anything but entertainment for children, in spite of Jim’s hard work to the contrary. Just as
The Flintstones
—or, later,
The Simpsons
—would demonstrate that cartoons could transcend a stereotypically young audience and hold their own with adult viewers, so, too, would Jim have to decisively prove that the Muppets could attract and hold a decidedly more grown-up audience.

In less than a year, Jim would make his point—and the Muppets would become a national phenomenon. But it would be a dog, not a frog, who would lead the way.

Frank Oz, Jim, and Jerry Juhl wrestle with Muppet monster Big V
. (
photo credit 5.1
)

I
N
J
UNE
1962,
AROUND THE TIME
J
IM WAS COMPLETING WORK ON THE
Tinkerdee
pilot in Atlanta, the Puppeteers of America—this time holding its annual festival in Oxford, Ohio—announced that it had elected Jim Henson as president of the organization. That made Jim, at twenty-five, the
youngest performer to hold the position. Considering both his youth and the fact that he had been a member of the organization for only a little more than two years, Jim’s election as its leader says much about his increasing importance and influence on puppetry.

To Jerry Juhl and other puppeteers who understood how far Jim
had advanced their craft beyond traditional puppetry, Jim’s ascension within their ranks was no surprise. “
For puppeteers, [watching the Muppets] was just absolutely startling,” Juhl said. “[They were] puppets that didn’t look like puppets had ever looked. It was just phenomenal.… It was the mobility of the faces, and the total abstraction of them.”

While puppeteers may have appreciated how different and sophisticated the Muppets were, television executives didn’t. The lack of interest in
Tinkerdee
, while disappointing, was, Jim thought, typical of those who didn’t understand the craft. “
When you try to sell anyone on puppets, it’s the old problem,” he told the
New York Post
. “They automatically say, ‘Puppets are for kids.’ ”

While network executives may not have been willing to green-light a regular Muppet television show, booking agents were still more than happy to have the Muppets appear on variety and talk shows. In late spring, the Muppets were asked to be regulars on
Mad, Mad World
, a new sketch show satirizing news and current events, and co-written by Larry Gelbart, whose
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
had just opened on Broadway. On paper, it seemed it couldn’t miss, and Jim and Jerry Juhl gamely performed the Limbo bit, as well as “Visual Thinking.” But the show sagged when the Muppets weren’t on-screen, bogging down in stale political humor and
faux
man-on-the-street interviews.
Mad, Mad World
wouldn’t survive beyond the pilot episode.

A better opportunity began in the fall, when the Muppets began appearing regularly on the
Today
show, with Jim and Jerry Juhl making the trip from Washington to New York at a pace of about once a week to be ready for the 7:00
A
.
M
. broadcast. Apart from the more familiar sketches—there was “Visual Thinking,” as well as variations on the “Chef’s Salad” piece—Jim was anxious to introduce skits featuring characters from
Tinkerdee
. He was proud of the advances he had made with live hand puppets, and considered the Taminella Grinderfall Muppet a genuine breakthrough. “
We have a witch who is delightful,” Jim said of Taminella. “The gestures and expressions she can get are wonderful. I consider her probably our best character to date.” So pleased was Jim with the live hand performances, in fact, that he would take the first available opportunity to perform one for a commercial.

I
n late 1962, Jim was approached by Ralph Freeman, an ad man for the James Lovick & Company advertising agency of Toronto, about putting together a series of Purina Dog Chow commercials for Canadian television. While Purina wanted its ads to have the same edge as the Wilkins coffee commercials, it didn’t want the ads to feature Wilkins and Wontkins. Instead, Freeman helpfully passed along several ideas from Purina, most featuring two dogs bantering about Purina Dog Chow. Jim likely groaned at the material from Purina—here was someone trying to tell him how to be funny again—but agreed to produce seven commercials for Purina, and set to work designing new characters for the ads.

In his sketchbook, Jim drew several different kinds of dogs, finally deciding that the two he liked best were a small dog with a pointy nose and fluffy ears, and a larger one with a round head, wide mouth, floppy ears, and wide eyes. The smaller dog, in a nod to the Sherlock Holmes story, Jim decided to name Baskerville. As for the other, Jim had written up a list of possible names—Barkley, Woofington, Howlington, Boundwell—but most of those were a mouthful. A better name, it seemed, was signed at the bottom of each letter Jim received from his contact at the Lovick advertising agency: Ralph Freeman.
Ralph it would be, then—or Rowlf, as Jim would later spell it—much to the delight of the Lovick firm.

For the first time, Jim decided not to build his Muppet himself, handing the character sketches off instead to Burr Tillstrom’s master puppet builder, thirty-four-year-old Don Sahlin, whom Jim had met at the Puppeteers of America convention in Detroit in 1960. Using Jim’s sketches, Sahlin drew his own design for Rowlf, noting the height and relative scales of the puppet, then set to work building the puppet. Sahlin—a talented marionettist and puppeteer who had also created special effects for films like
Tom Thumb
and
The Time Machine
—had a remarkable ability to translate Jim’s sketches into three dimensions, a bit of artistic symbiosis Jim appreciated. “
I would generally do a little scribble on a scrap of paper, which Don would regard with a certain reverence as being the ‘essence’ which he was working toward,” said Jim. “Don had a very simple way of working—reducing all nonessential things and honing in on what was important.”