James Maury Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was an American puppeteer, creative producer, filmmaker and director who achieved worldwide notability as the creator of the Muppets. Henson was also well known for creating Fraggle Rock (1983–1987) and as the director of The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986), as well as creating the Muppets for Sesame Street (1969–present).
Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised in both Leland, Mississippi, and University Park, Maryland, Henson began developing puppets in high school. He created Sam and Friends (1955–1961), a short-form comedy television program on WRC-TV, while he was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, in collaboration with fellow student Jane Nebel. Henson and Nebel co-founded Muppets, Inc. – now The Jim Henson Company – in 1958, and married less than a year later in 1959. Henson graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics.
In 1969, Henson joined the children's television program Sesame Street (1969–present) where he helped to develop Muppet characters for the series. He and his creative team also appeared on the first season of the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (1975–present). He produced the sketch comedy television series The Muppet Show (1976–1981) during this period. Henson revolutionized the way puppetry is captured and presented in video media, and he won fame for his characters – particularly Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog, and the characters on Sesame Street. During the later years of his life, he founded the Jim Henson Foundation and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. He won the Emmy Award twice for his involvement in The Storyteller (1987–1988) and The Jim Henson Hour (1989).
Henson died in New York City from toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. At the time of his death, he was in negotiations to sell his company to The Walt Disney Company, but talks fell through after his death. He was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, and was named a Disney Legend in 2011.
James Maury Henson was born on September 24, 1936, in Greenville, Mississippi, the younger of two children of Betty Marcella (née Brown, 1904–1972) and Paul Ransom Henson Sr. (1904–1956), an agronomist for the United States Department of Agriculture. Paul died in a car crash on April 15, 1956. He was raised as a Christian Scientist and spent his early childhood in nearby Leland, Mississippi, before moving with his family to University Park, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s and later to Bethesda, Maryland. He remembered the arrival of the family's first television as "the biggest event of his adolescence", being heavily influenced by radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the early television puppets of Burr Tillstrom on Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Bil and Cora Baird. He remained a Christian Scientist at least into his twenties, when he taught Sunday school, but he wrote to a Christian Science church in the early 1970s to inform them that he was no longer a practicing member.
Henson attended a variety of grade schools in his youth, including Hyattsville High School until it was closed in 1951. He completed his high school career at the newly opened Northwestern High School, where he joined the puppetry club.
Henson enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park, the following fall as a studio arts major, thinking that he might become a commercial artist. As a freshman at the university, Jim took a newly offered puppetry class mostly populated with seniors, including his future wife Jane Nebel. He was graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in home economics.
Henson began working at WTOP-TV (now WUSA-TV) in the late spring of 1954, at age 17, hired to "manipulate marionettes" on a Saturday morning children's show called The Junior Morning Show, until the show was cancelled only three weeks later. This first break into the television industry was short-lived, but his talent landed him and his puppets an opportunity to continue working at WTOP-TV, lip syncing on Roy Meachum's Saturday show.
Henson's employment at WTOP-TV lasted only until August, when Saturday was also cancelled. Meachum then referred Jim to the local NBC-affiliate station WRC-TV, where Henson continued performing his puppets with Jane's help. The two were eventually offered a nightly segment for which they created Sam and Friends, a three-to-five-minute puppet show that afforded Henson much more freedom to develop his own creative work. The characters on Sam and Friends were forerunners of the Muppets, and the show included a prototype of Henson's most famous character, Kermit. He remained at WRC until Sam and Friends aired its last episode on December 15, 1961.
In the show, Henson began experimenting with techniques that changed the way in which puppetry was used on television, foregoing the convention of pointing the camera at a stationary puppet theatre proscenium and instead using the image created by the TV camera and lens to dynamically engage with his characters. He believed that television puppets needed to have "life and sensitivity". Rather than carving wooden puppets Henson built characters from softer, flexible materials like foam rubber; his first iteration of Kermit was made from a halved table tennis ball and fabric from an old coat belonging to his mother, with denim from a pair of jeans forming the sleeve for the puppeteer's arm.
Though Henson told people that "Muppet" was a portmanteau of "marionette" and "puppet", many early Muppets were actually hand puppets, rod puppets, or some combination of the two. Direct control over the puppet's mouth, in combination with the softer construction materials, allowed the puppeteer to express a wider range of emotions and to more accurately move the puppet's mouth along with the character's dialogue or while lip syncing to music. Commenting on his puppet design philosophy, Henson said,"A lot of people build very stiff puppets—you can barely move the things—and you can get very little expression out of a character that you can barely move. Your hand has a lot of flexibility to it, and what you want to do is to build a puppet that can reflect all that flexibility."Sam and Friends was a financial success, but Henson began to have doubts about going into a career performing with puppets once he graduated. He spent six weeks in Europe during the summer of 1958, originally with the intent to study painting, but was surprised to learn that puppets were considered just as serious an art form as painting or sculpture. After returning to the United States he and Jane made their partnership official, creating Muppets, Inc. in November of that same year, then marrying each other in 1959.
Television and Muppets: 1961–1969
Henson spent much of the next two decades working in commercials, talk shows, and children's projects before realizing his dream of the Muppets as "entertainment for everybody". The popularity of his work on Sam and Friends in the late 1950s led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. He appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Steve Allen Show, The Jack Paar Program, and The Ed Sullivan Show. (Sullivan introduced him as "Jim Newsom and his Puppets" on September 11, 1966.) These television broadcasts greatly increased his exposure, leading to hundreds of commercial appearances by Henson characters throughout the 1960s.
Among the most popular of Henson's commercials was a series for the local Wilkins Coffee company in Washington, D.C., created for a campaign managed by advertising manager Helen Ver Standig. Most of the Wilkins advertisements followed a similar formula: two Muppets, in this case named Wilkins and Wontkins (usually both voiced by Henson), would appear. Wilkins would extol the product while Wontkins would express his hatred for it, prompting physical retaliation from Wilkins; Wontkins might be shot with a cannon, struck in the head with a hammer or baseball bat, or have a pie thrown in his face. The Jim Henson Company has posted a short selection of them. Henson later explained, "Till then, advertising agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh."