Henson, Jim

in full James Maury Henson

born Sept. 24, 1936, Greenville, Miss., U.S.

died May 16, 1990, New York, N.Y.

U.S. puppeteer and producer.

He created a puppet show for a television station while in college and developed the first Muppets (melding marionettes and puppets). In the 1960s he made TV commercials. When PBS featured the Muppets on Sesame Street (from 1969), Henson achieved nationwide notice. He premiered The Muppet Show on television in 1976 and gained audiences in over 100 countries. He also produced and directed The Muppet Movie (1979) and its sequels.

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▪ American puppeteer

byname of  James Maury Henson  

born Sept. 24, 1936, Greenville, Miss., U.S.

died May 16, 1990, New York, N.Y.

      American puppeteer and filmmaker, creator of the Muppets of television and motion pictures. He coined the term Muppets as a meld of marionettes and puppets; his characters and those of his assistants included such familiar figures as Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, and the Cookie Monster.

      Though born in Mississippi, Henson grew up in Hyattsville, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C., to which his father, a federal agronomist, had been assigned. As he entered college (the University of Maryland), Henson and his future wife, Jane Nebel, created a puppet show on a Washington television station and kept the job throughout their school years, developing the first Muppets (including Kermit) on a five-minute television program called Sam and Friends. After graduation (A.B., 1960), Henson, along with his assistants, did television commercials and brief spots on various television shows. After the Children's Television Workshop's program Sesame Street began appearing on television in 1969, featuring the Muppets, Henson and his humanoid animals achieved extraordinary nationwide popularity.

      The Muppet Show, which premiered in 1976 and was produced in England, gained an international audience (it was shown in some 100 countries) and was soon followed by the motion pictures The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984). Henson also codirected The Dark Crystal (1981), directed Labyrinth (1986), and assisted on The Witches (1990), all animated films using puppetlike figures that were not Muppets. In 1981 a Muppets comic strip was syndicated, and Muppet Magazine, a quarterly publication for children, began appearing in 1982. An animated morning cartoon program on television, Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, premiered in 1984, one year after the program Fraggle Rock began appearing on cable television channels. Prior to his death in 1990, Henson was in negotiations with the Disney Company to sell the rights to the Muppets. The deal was finalized in 2004 and transferred the trademarks and copyrights of most of the iconic characters to Disney.

      Except in certain movie sequences using special effects, Henson's Muppets, made of sculptured foam rubber, plastic, and various fabrics, were either hand puppets or fully costumed persons (as in the case of Big Bird and Snuffleupagus). For the hand puppets, each head or arm was worked by one hand, so that if there was to be a head and two arms, there must be the hands of two Muppeteers. Complicated characterizations on rare occasions even required three Muppeteers. The voice of the Muppet was the voice of the person (or primary person) operating it.

      Henson also was an experimental filmmaker. Time Piece (1965), a short film that he wrote, directed, and starred in, was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1967 Henson released two more short films, The Wheels That Go and Ripples, as well as the industrial film The Paperwork Explosion, developed for the computer company IBM (International Business Machines Corporation). He later wrote the television documentary Youth '68: Everything's Changing…or Maybe It Isn't (1968), an attempt to articulate the culture of rebellion emerging in the younger generation. It juxtaposed interviews with musicians, their fans, and a series of censorious adults. Henson also wrote and directed the television film The Cube (1969), the surreal tale of a man unable to escape from an alternate reality.

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