Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (4 page)

To address this concern, CTW took a pedagogical approach. Initially, they made sure its toys were educational and, crucially,
perceived
that way. Karen Falk, the Archivist for the Jim Henson Company, explains that CTW’s press release “justified” the toys by “citing the education benefits of their products”:

CTW Marketing Director Jeanette Neff said that they did not want to be seen as [] “… exploiting this most precious and innocent of audiences, the children.” Having already tested easily defended books and records, they entered the toy market as a means of [] “… extending the educational effect of the show.” She also emphasized that [] “… all revenues from these and future commercial efforts are plowed back into Workshop educational projects.”
^[44]

Feeling the need to “justify” what could be seen as “exploiting” children, CTW’s first forays included books, records, a Spell-A-Phone, and hand puppets, which as Henson knew—from experience—encouraged the imagination. Of course, the toys had to be fun, too, but not look
too
- or
only
-fun. It was a fine line to walk. Christopher Cerf, the first head of the
Sesame
toy division, wrote in a press release: “We believe that only if our books and playthings are amusing will they be purchased and used enough to have educational value.”
^[45]
The superfluity of toys, Cerf explained, were an important part of the learning process—a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

The spin on the
Sesame
toys probably had more to do with CTW’s curriculum department than it did with Henson, but in 1976, he would release a line of toys independently—in connection with the premier of
The Muppet Show
. Unlike CTW, he didn’t market his toys as “learning machines.” Jim Henson addressed the problem of toys his own way.

In 1976, for the first time, a child would be able to give Kermit the Frog a hug. According to Falk, “Kermit was considered a guest on [
Sesame Street
] and thus unavailable for consumers to take home. Fisher-Price was happy to exploit the pent-up demand and immediately began making products featuring Kermit.”
^[46]
A key word here is
exploit
. When Disney later agreed to buy the Muppet trademarks, one 1990 editorial noticed that Wall Street analysts explained Disney’s motives “using the word exploit only
twice.”
^[47]
If it was
only
twice, it must have been a good day on Wall Street. The fact is, when discussing business, it’s perfectly natural to exploit
resources
and
markets
, unless of course what’s being exploited is children and their innocent love and trust in us.

However, Henson dealt with the grossness of toy-making exactly the way an artist would. An artist can turn anything into art—even a commodity. Jim Henson did not simply take Fisher-Price’s money—
kids’
money—and run. In fact, he didn’t let Fisher-Price design the toys at all.
Falk writes, “Jim’s staff did the initial design work and prototypes (rather than leaving it to the licensee’s research and development area).”
^[48]
Henson approved every licensed product personally.
^[49]
Even though he disliked making child-only fare and would likely rather be creating a Broadway play or a nightclub, Henson gave his very
limited
time to design toys—so that they would be more than a simple economic exploitation. That
time
was a gift.

Fisher-Price’s ad manager, Jerry Houle,
^[50]
would eventually become the licensing director at Henson’s company. He described going into his first meetings with Henson:

The first thing I did was to study the industry to develop a strategy about how licensing would work and present it to Jim. His response was simple and elegant. He said, ‘We don’t need the money, just make me beautiful products.’
^[51]

For Henson, toys didn’t need to be overtly
educational
, but they had to be gorgeous. Art, any artist knows, is inherently affirming, wondrous, and nourishing for the creative mind. It educates us without a curriculum.
Muppet Show
merchandise included snow globes, albums, dolls, notebooks, calendars, and teapots. They were not “teaching tools” or “learning machines,” but they expressed
something
. If art
works
, it speaks to you about life. For Henson, that was enough—enough to make a toy no longer gross, no longer a commodity, but something
more
.

Muppeteer Steve Whitmire once explained Henson’s
visceral
sense of taste:

When we were doing Fraggle Rock, Jim was in Toronto, and I went out to lunch one day. I went across the street and someone had made these Muppet hot pads for your oven. And it was this knitted Ernie head. It was pretty terrible. And it was $10, so I bought it. I took it back and I said “I got you something over lunch,” and Jim smiled and I handed it over to him, and the look on his face! It was really devastating to him. And he said “Do I have to take that??” And he was serious, so I said, “No of course not!” And I realized, he never had a problem, he almost let people rip him off if it was good. When people made things that he didn’t feel were up to par, then it upset him.… [H]e wanted it to be at least complimentary.
^[52]

The
Red Book
is Henson’s career journal, a careful record of his company’s milestones and accomplishments, which The Jim Henson Company Archives has posted online. The first mention of
Sesame
merchandise in this journal is dated September 20–24, 1971. This is the week when Henson did what he told Brillstein he would never do—sell out.

Let us visually recreate Henson’s entry, “Recording Alphabet album at night.”
^[53]
Now firstly, puppeteer Jerry Nelson said that “Jim loved to sing, as did we all,”
^[54]
so picture that. He probably recorded the album at night because he was quite busy, but as he told Big Bird puppeteer Caroll Spinney when he hired him, he and Frank Oz would “get into a project and work all day, all night, all the next day, and sometimes the next night too. Do you like to work like that?”
^[55]
Henson
liked
to work hard. And then picture that, in the seventies, Henson reportedly had a fridge in his office stocked with soda, beer, and cider.
^[56]
Lastly, something recalled by Jerry Juhl:

One of the images that I think we all have of Jim that we’ve seen repeatedly is Jim standing in the studio with his hand in the air and a puppet and he’s laughing uncontrollably. Everything has come to a complete stop, and that kind of infectious enthusiasm kind of spread through all casts and crews.
^[57]

Now, with all that we know, let us picture September 1971’s “Recording Alphabet album at night.” Joe Raposo’s “J” song—a real
earworm
—paints the mood with a tongue-twister: “Hey Jim, he’s tall and slim! He’s got a jar of jam! Let’s join with him!” This record album, made of plastic, may have been just
merchandise
, but one can imagine it as more of a joy or a party than a late night at the office, perhaps with a few of those beers from the fridge, really belting it out with Frank and the gang, and laughing to the point of tears when the last note goes hilariously off. Jim Henson countered merchandizing’s grossness by using it as an excuse to make more art.

And most importantly, Henson put the profits back into his art. This echoes CTW’s stance: “all revenues from these and future commercial efforts are plowed back into Workshop educational projects.”
^[58]
And though Disney was much quicker to merchandize than Henson, Disney biographer Neal Gabler writes that he “continued to reinvest most of the profits back into the studio.” As Hyde notes, it is a “necessary” phase for an artist existing in both a gift economy and a market economy: “If he is successful in the marketplace, he converts market wealth into gift wealth: he contributes his earnings to the support of his art.
^[59]

Larry Mirkin recalled:

One time Jim and I were flying from Toronto to New York. I can’t remember how it came up but we had this conversation about money which I think conveys well Jim’s attitude about it, or at least my perception of Jim’s attitude. He said, “How much money does someone need? $100,000 a year? $200,000? After whatever that number is, why do you need more?” As he pointed out, the question becomes: when you have more than whatever that “necessary personal number” (my phrase), what should you do with it? Jim usually decided to put it into the work if he had projects or ideas he really wanted to explore or develop. Now, I don’t mean for a second that he was frivolous about this. He knew where every penny was being spent, but he had a Big Picture attitude that went far beyond the idea of “maximizing shareholder value.” He was talking about deeper values, things (tangible and intangible) that last longer than money.
^[60]

For Henson, any work that bore his characters was an extension of himself—whether it was a show or a toy. He put greater effort into these toys than was required, and yet, this is not to say they were
pure
art, by any stretch of the imagination. About
The Muppet
Alphabet Album
, Henson said, “I thought it would be great if we could just give a child something to remember—a handle, or a few clues that would make learning to read just a little easier and a bit more fun.”
^[61]
This observation—that people need a “handle”—was a key lesson for Henson in many ways.

PURE ART DON’T SELL
FIND A HANDLE

Because Henson fought so hard against toys in 1970, you might not expect that he’d actually licensed a line of toys four years earlier. Since this was two years before the idea for
Sesame Street
, there was no internal conflict. He was not even a children’s entertainer in his mind, and in 1966, he was certainly no
educator
. He was a thirty-year-old artist with a family to support. It was also, like most of his actions in the 1960s, an experiment.

An interesting lesson came out of this foray into toys. Though Ideal Toy Company agreed to make three of Henson’s puppets—Kermit, Rowlf, and Snerf—only two dolls ever made it to the store shelf. Kermit the Frog and Rowlf the Dog were manufactured, but left to obscurity was Snerf—the Whatever—an abstract creature resembling a pipe cleaner. Springy, wormlike Snerf appeared in some of Henson’s bits on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
. In that period, he was experimenting with trippy spectacles that made adults
think
. But these experiments only made it so far. In order to break out, Henson had to give the audience “a handle,” as he called it.

But licensing a Snerf wouldn’t have made Henson millions. He couldn’t license his creations the way they existed in 1966, as the abstractions in “Business, Business” or the dancing U-shaped tubes in “Java,” another skit. These early “Muppets” were truly Henson’s passion, his art in its purest form. But unfortunately, Snerf, as ingenious as he was, never made it past a prototype. The toy company, it seemed, knew what Henson didn’t. Whatevers, frackles, and snerfs don’t sell. Animals give people an easy handle. Dogs and frogs—that’s what kids like.

This is unfortunate, because Henson the artist actually preferred the purity of the Whatever. In the beginning, he told Judy Harris, Kermit
wasn’t
a frog.

[Henson:] I didn’t call him a frog.

[Interviewer:] Right, he was just Kermit the thing.

[Henson:] Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle I was working under.… I still like very much the abstract characters and some of those abstract characters I still feel are slightly more pure. If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of a sort of warmth and cool.… [I]n terms of going commercial and going broad audience, you want to reach the audience as much as possible, and you need those bridges.
^[62]

Although Henson spoke of the difference as merely interesting—with nice things about each—it would not be a stretch to say the “nice thing” about pure characters is the artistic game played with the audience—closer to approaching art—and the nice thing about the
handled
characters is their mass market appeal—the money and ratings they can generate. The
Sam and Friends
characters in the 1950s were neither cuddly nor cute, and they wouldn’t make great kids’ toys. In fact, with Rowlf known only as a guest on
The
Jimmy Dean Show
and Kermit being a character from pilots that had yet to be aired, even they couldn’t earn Henson a great deal. It wasn’t until these characters became known nationally (and internationally) on
Sesame Street
and
The Muppet Show
that their toys would blow up, as they say.

In order for Henson to get to do what he wanted,
he
had to change—he made his characters “warmer” than he as an artist would have wanted. Although I don’t think Henson ever chased merchandizing dollars, he
did
want to make a nationally broadcast Muppet show, and since TV executives wanted to program puppets only
for kids—
with potential toy-licensing splits
—
the more Kermit became froglike, the more likely it became that Henson’s shows would air.

Artists may find this lesson depressing, yet without this initial “handle,” Henson could never have made
The Dark Crystal
or
Fraggle Rock
, which were funded by Muppets money, green-lighted because of Muppets ratings, and ultimately reached closer to Henson’s desired “abstract” principle. Warming up his characters, what we might call “selling out,” allowed him to innovate, and he learned to accept that. In the sixties, Henson’s projects were experimental—a documentary, a nightclub, and expressionist films. In the seventies, he did what worked: fairy tales, holiday specials, and kids’ shows—TV by TV’s rules. Henson may have
wanted
to make abstract creatures, but animals
sell
. This is very definitely connected to the shift in funding from commercials—a second job with a clear boundary—to toys, where the market has more power to change the art to suit financial needs. Yet the world loves the Muppets, and it could be argued they are
better
for having been “warmed.” Jerry Seinfeld made the point that amateur comedians go out on stage thinking they’ll tell the audience what’s funny, but at some point, you learn that it is the audience that tells
you
what’s funny about you. Because in show business the “market” is often the “audience,” it is a blurry line between selling out and reaching many hearts with your gift. In my opinion, Henson was wiser in the seventies about what could be done with art on television, and though his work was perhaps not as
experimental
as it was in the sixties, it was, in a less pure form, more
watched
and more often green-lighted.