Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (47 page)

The results were good by the standards of
Saturday morning cartoons, but not by the high standards of the rest of the
Muppet productions.
Muppet Babies
won Daytime Emmys consistently for its first four
years, and yet it was too cutesy for parents to enjoy. It pandered. Jeffrey
Scott’s scripts are like the candy-cigarette version of Muppets. They encourage
imagination—Henson’s message—but the animation is in the dated, comic-book
style of the eighties, the same as
G.I. Joe
or
Transformers
. It has the disposable feeling of a Happy Meal.

As executive
producer, Henson
tried
to oversee the quality of the show. He set the
mission and tone of the show with his notes. He made suggestions for
possible storylines. He met with the animation companies before making a
selection. His partner, Marvel Studios, kept Henson abreast of the casting
progress, and he flew to LA to approve and fine-tune the ultimate lineup.
^[78]
Of course, Henson decided to do the series “for the right reasons,” because he
wanted to reach out to children where they were—watching cartoons on
Saturday—with a different kind of message, one about the coexistence of
different perspectives and being open-minded. Yet
Muppet Babies
does not
have the stamp of timeless quality of Henson’s other works. While many parents
today buy vintage
Sesame Street
and
Fraggle Rock
DVDs to show
their kids, age hasn’t been kind to the
Muppet Babies
cartoon.

 Henson didn’t want his company to grow any
bigger, to sacrifice any more quality. Selling his assets to Disney would allow
him to downsize. Steve Whitmire explained:

[Jim Henson] said, “… What I’d like to do is reduce
the size of our company and get back to being just a small production company
and just do our work.” I think he was tired of the big corporate aspect of
everything.… Having the company grow into this big corporate thing. He
just wanted to cut back and get back to just creating stuff. I think the idea
was Disney would look after the publishing and licensing and the legal side of
the business, and he would be able to just do work and direct and perform and
that sort of thing. So that was his goal.
^[79]

And yet, as much as Henson did not want to be a big company,
he did want to be Disneylike in one aspect—creating his own theme park
attractions. Archivist Karen Falk describes Henson’s ambitious concepts:

A food ride where the cars shaped like carrots and
beets would travel into a mouth, get chewed in some fashion, enter the bloodstream
and end up in a cell. There was the Five Senses Ride that went into the nose,
eyes, ears and mouth, perhaps connecting with the food ride, allowing riders to
send messages to the brain. Another ride might highlight different regions of
the country and include an aural component where the visitor could hear
regional accents. Jim thought about people traveling through time, seeing life
on earth develop before them, or using his Muppet Show characters as guides on
a trip through theater history, providing Nerf tomatoes to throw in the
Shakespearean section.
^[80]

Henson essentially wanted the job of an
imaginer—the ability to dream big. His joining with Disney would allow him to
test the limits of possibility with the “interactive, cinematic
Jim Henson’s
Muppet*Vision 3D
” attraction, which now runs at both Disney World and
Disneyland.
^[81]

And according to one Disney expert, Henson might
have left an even bigger impact on Disneyland. Plans were drawn up for a
publicity stunt where Mickey, Donald, and the gang were to go on vacation for a
year, leaving the park in the hands of Kermit’s weirdos. Jim Hill wrote:

Once Mickey had turned over
the keys to this theme park over to Kermit in January of 1991 (in what was sure
to have been a well-attended photo-op), the Muppets were to have … well,
Muppetized the place. This was to have involved ripping up the
much-photographed Mickey-shaped planter in front of the Main Street U.S.A.
train station and then temporarily replacing it with a Kermit-shaped one. Not
to mention throwing a crudely-painted canvas sign over the Disneyland entrance
marquee so that this theme park would then be identified as Muppetland.

But the pièce de résistance of Lindquist’s
Muppets-take-over-Disneyland publicity stunt—the part of Jack’s promotional
sketch that was almost certain to garner worldwide press coverage—involved
several hundred gallons of Kermit-the-Frog green paint. You see, what Jack
wanted to do (just for the year of 1991, mind you) was paint all 147 feet of
the Matterhorn green.
^[82]
  

While Henson wanted a small company, he also
wanted Disney’s one-of-a-kind playground and the funding that made it possible.
In this light, the Disney deal seemed like a perfect arrangement. On the other
hand, mergers can be tricky.

MERGER PROBLEMS
CULTURE CLASH—WHAT WENT WRONG

In
The Muppets at Disneyland
, a 1990 TV special,
Kermit meets Mickey, and it doesn’t go smoothly. Kermit’s gang runs loose in
the park without tickets. A security guard played by Charles Grodin says, “I’ll
pay anything to capture the Muppets.” Confinement is a theme. Rowlf is netted
by a dog catcher right after he says, “I don’t know what to do with all this
incredible freedom.” Fozzie is forced to panhandle: “A little money for some
funny.” Money is another theme, since the Muppets haven’t paid admission. “Kermit
usually handles all that stuff for us,” they say. Scooter explains that a new
character was brought in to be “cute” so the rest of the cast didn’t have to.
Rizzo irreverently reminds the Disneyland guards that rodents
are
allowed in the park with a wisecrack: “Oh yeah, does your boss
Mickey
know that?”

This is not unlike the real difficulties of the
merger. According to Cooney, “Everyone [in the Henson Company] said it’s been
awful. It was clear that they’ve been having a severe culture clash.”
^[83]
One Henson writer, Mark Saltzman, said, “I was surprised about [the] Disney
[merger] because Disney is a corporate entity and Jim and the Muppets have a
very fuzzy, Grateful Dead kind of sensibility.”
^[84]
The Washington Post
said, “[T]he inner circle has always operated in an
informal manner that contrasts sharply with Disney’s closely structured style.… In Hollywood, the Disney name is synonymous with rigid, aggressive
corporate control. The Henson atelier is informal and respect for the artist is
the first rule.”
^[85]

Newsweek
wrote:

Disney has a reputation for vigorously defending
copyrights on its own characters. Lawyers point to its suit two years ago
against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for using Snow White in
the opening number of the Oscars show. Said one copyright lawyer, “Disney
writes the book on being tough. They’ll sue anybody and anything.”
^[86]

The
Washington
Post
cited “one of
Henson’s representatives” as saying, “You’d have to call Michael Eisner and
say, ‘This is where it’s gone with your overzealous robots.… If it
continues this way, the deal won’t close.”
^[87]

One point of conflict between Henson and Eisner
was
Sesame Street
. Since the licensing rights had become the source of
independence for the nonprofit Children’s Television Workshop, Henson felt he
owed it to Cooney, CTW’s chairman, to keep it separate. Eisner, on the other
hand, wanted to buy Big Bird and wouldn’t take no for an answer. According to
Cooney, after Henson had expressed his annoyance, Eisner invited her and Henson
to a “peace lunch” during which he was “his most charming self,” and then he
pressed the issue, which “stopped Jim cold”:

Jim turned to Michael and said, “You did it again!”

Michael said, “I did what?”

Jim said, “You mentioned
Sesame Street
.”

Michael said, “Jim, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

But the damage was done at that moment, … and it
remained a real issue with Jim deep down.
^[88]

Sesame Street
licensing revenues were more than a cash
cow for Henson and Cooney; they ensured creative freedom. If Disney owned Big
Bird, his cuteness level and educational message would be subject to Disney’s
shareholders.

Disney also made the typical business demand
that products be made faster and cheaper to maximize profits.
The Washington
Post
reported:

A source close to the Henson studio says Disney
offended Muppeteers by suggesting that they could quickly train personnel to
operate the Muppet characters. “I don’t think they understood that it took Jim
years to get a single puppeteer up to speed,” says Cooney.
^[89]

Former Henson employee Jim Hill remembered this was a “major
sticking point” in the negotiations:

The story around the
Henson studio back then was that Disney wanted a stable of several puppeteers
per character. This would enable them to churn out product whenever and however
they deemed necessary. The Muppeteers, however, believed these characters were
individual to themselves and that multiple puppeteers would disintegrate the characters’
personalities. There couldn’t be more than one Kermit or more than one Miss
Piggy. This small-town approach to entertainment didn’t fit in with Disney’s
big plans for the Muppet characters.

… The other angle
to this roadblock was an amazing piece of information I learned from my
co-workers. I was told, and I don’t know if this is still the case, that the
Muppeteers [under Henson] received
royalties from all merchandise sold relating to their characters.
^[90]

Disney wanted to take away both the Muppet
performers’ creative ownership of their characters and their financial
ownership of toy royalties; this is clearly not an “artist-first” business
philosophy. One editorialist in the
St. Petersburg Times
pointed out
that when a “Disney stock analyst” for Merrill Lynch described the merger, he
managed to use the word “exploit” only twice. The editorial pointed out that
Eisner earned $40.2 million that year. Nothing leads us to believe Henson or
Cooney took anywhere near that kind of salary. The corporate ladder breeds a
very different kind of approach to taking care of one’s creative “assets.”

Peggy Charren, president of Action for
Children’s Television, explained another difference, this time philosophical:
“None of the Disney characters worry about the way the world works like the
Muppets do.”
^[91]
The editorial goes on to
imagine that Donald Duck never pondered why his skin was the color it was, as
Kermit has. It is unlikely that a merger like this can end happily without a
good deal of struggle.

Pixar’s negotiations with Michael Eisner’s
Disney were similarly troubled. When Pixar was negotiating with Eisner, Steve
Jobs broke off talks altogether with Disney until Eisner was replaced.
Ironically, the same man who put Eisner in power, Roy E. Disney, staged a coup
again in 2004. He wrote a letter to Eisner blaming him for many of the
company’s mistakes:

You have had a very successful first 10-plus years at
the company … but since Frank [Well’s] untimely death in 1994, the Company
has lost its focus, its creative energy, and its heritage.… The perception
by all of our stakeholders—consumers, investors, employees, distributors and
suppliers—[is] that the company is rapacious, soul-less, and always looking for
the “quick buck” rather than long-term value which is leading to a loss of
public trust.
^[92]

Roy Junior wanted the old Disney back. Though new leadership
had indeed “saved” the company financially, it had bankrupted its spirit. Roy
then told Jobs, “When the wicked witch is dead, we’ll be together again,”
^[93]
and indeed, when Roy succeeded in making Bob Iger the new CEO, Pixar joined
Disney.       

Time will tell how the Pixar–Disney merger
fares, but their past has certainly been a bumpy road simply because they were
two different companies with two different cultures. We saw the trouble Woody,
Buzz Lightyear, and the rest of Andy’s toys had trying to fit into a big
daycare business like Sunnyside. Written after tense negotiations between Pixar
and Disney,
Toy Story
3
was a film about culture clash, but it
ends happily when the charming but despotic Lotso has been ousted and a
“groovy” Ken doll is put in charge. Perhaps Pixar will succeed because they
knew what they were getting into with their merger. Lasseter had even been
fired from Disney in the early eighties after his experiments with digital
animation. Just before the merger, Pixar’s Chief Technical Officer, Ed Catmull,
told his employees, “Our number-one priority [is] protecting the culture that
we’[ve] built and the way our people work together. A real creative community
is a rare thing.”
^[94]

WE WILL LIVE FOREVER
ON THE IMMORTALITY OF KERMIT

Unexpectedly to fans and family alike, Jim Henson died on
May 16, 1990, at the age of fifty-three of a particularly aggressive infection.
Too ill to work for the first time in his life, Henson died at New York
Hospital surrounded by his wife and children. According to Steve Whitmire, many
collaborators also congregated in a waiting room:

Frank [Oz], [manager] David Lazer, [designer] Michael
Frith, [puppeteer] Kathy Mullen, [puppeteer] Jerry Nelson, [daughters] Lisa,
Cheryl, Heather, and Jane .… The doctor took Frank aside, then he came
over and he kind of broke up a little, but he said, “well, at” whatever time it
was, which I don’t remember, “Jim passed away.” And that’s all he said.
^[95]