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Jim Henson

“I think what he was probably most known for was the silly and funny, clean and innocent and childlike and naïve and pure and that’s not all Jim was.” -Jane Nebel Henson

The elfinlike creature looks around in wide-eyed wonder at the surreal landscape through which he travels. Lit by the blaze of three suns overhead, it is a world never seen before.

For the creature is a Gelfling lad named Jen, off on a do-or-die adventure to save his remarkable realm from the corrupt rule of the Skeksis, a race of richly robed reptilians who lounge in the musty magnificence of an ancient castle. Meanwhile, the souce of their power, a shattered crystal, lies deep within, guarded by the beetle-backed Garthim, armored warriors of destruction.

These bizarre, dreamlike creatures and their story, calling up memories of ancient Celtic and Nordic myths, make up the newest offering from the imagination of Jim Henson.

For twenty-five years, Jim Henson (Co-producer/Co-director/Performer) has shared his imagination with the world. Out of it have sprung some of today's best-known, best-loved fantasy characters.

With "The Dark Crystal," he set himself an extra-ordinary challenge: to create a separate universe, with its own landscapes, life forms, mythology, and magic, and make it somehow palpably real.

The result is not only a startlingly different motion picture but a new story-telling technology.

Henson's contributions to "The Dark Crystal" underscore his versatility. He wrote the original story for the Universal Pictures release, which he co-produced with Gary Kurtz and co-directed with Frank Oz. He also performes two of the film's major roles -- the elfinlike young hero, Jen, and the Ritual-Master of the evil Skeksis, a reptilian race whose corruption threatens the world with eternal disharmony.

It is a world desperate for the redeeming power of love - which is, of course, where Henson shines. His remarkable career was launched so successfully not only because he freed his puppets from the ancient frame of the proscenium arch, but also because, from the first, his characters were witty, bizarre, aimed at adult sensibilities - and lovable.

They were crude hand puppets, but they had style. And a promise of star quality. Dubbed Sam and Friends, they bowed in 1957 on a local television station in Washington, D.C., where Mississippi-born Henson was reared. (As he recalls, he spent his childhood there increasingly fascinated with television, and took up puppetry as a way to break into its ranks.)

The Sam and Friends star was a prototype of Kermit the Frog, which Henson, then a high school senior, created from a sleeve of his mother's old green coat and a couple of Ping Pong balls. The show ran only five minutes late at night, but it lasted eight years and became a local institution.

It also brought Henson an Emmy and a performing partner -- fellow University of Maryland art student Jane Nebel, who would later become his wife.

Moving to New York after graduation, Henson and his Muppets made appearances on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, which in turn led to a three-year engagement for Rowlf the Dog - on The Jimmy Dean Show. While thus gaining national recognition on television, Henson started a company that did animation for commercials and industrial films as well.

A series of witty commercials, made with the early Muppets, including Kermit, brought Henson early success. A ten-minute short film, "Timepiece," won a 1964 Academy Award nomination among other honors, while "Youth '68," made for NBC, was cited by Variety as one of the year's best films.

At this point Henson's team included three key members: Jerry Juhl, who eventually became head writer for The Muppet Show; Frank Oz, a preeminent puppeteer who brought to life such charismatic characters as Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Cookie Monster (and, outside the Henson orbit, Yoda of "The Empire Strikes Back"); and the late Donald Sahlin, who, with Henson for almost a decade, contributed enormously to the appearance of the Muppets.

A new plateau was reached when Sesame Street was launched by the Children's Television Workshop in 1969. Such outlandish, amiable Muppet creatures as Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, and Big Bird were regular features of the show. They taught, entertained, and captured the hearts of America's children.'

Six years later Henson teamed up with Lord Lew Grade's organization to produce The Muppet Show. Enormously successful, the weekly half-hour television show attracted an audience of 235 million people in more than one hundred countries . . . and led to Henson's first feature film, "The Muppet Movie." One of 1981's top grossers, it inspired fans to campaign for an Academy Award Best Actress nomination -- if not the Oscar itself -- for the Divine Swine, Miss Piggy.

Since then Henson and his Muppets -- whom Time magazine called "almost certainly the most popular entertainment produced on Earth" -- have also starred in a second film, "The Great Muppet Caper," while continuing their unprecedented reign on television. (They also produced the television show "The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show.")

In the midst of these myriad activities, Henson conceived the idea of "The Dark Crystal" when he saw an illustration in a Lewis Carroll children's storybook -- a handsomely dressed crocodile in an ornate bathroom -- and imagined a fantasy world, threatened by decadent forces. "They were in a rich-looking bathroom, and it was the juxtaposition of this reptilian thing in this fine atmosphere that intrigued me." He put a team of artists, designers,a nd filmmakers, includinng Brian Froud, Britain's foremost illustrator of fantasy subjects, to work on the concept.

But it took an unplanned break in his schedule -- a blizzard that stranded him for three days in a hotel at Kennedy International Airport -- for him to find the time to write the original story.

He then pioneered the innovative technology that brought "The Dark Crystal" to life. Henson took five years to develop his idea, between time-outs for the Muppet films and television shows.

That new technologies had to be developed, along with new mythologies, before "The Dark Crystal" could begin to take shape was a foregone conclusion. It was what Henson had always aspired for.

As he puts it, "Creating a reality that can't really exist -- that's fun. To me, it loosens up what films are."

For Henson, however, the first accolades merely pointed up where his true interests lay. He freely admits that is was not puppetry that first captured his fascination during boyhood but television itself, and it was to test his vision of the medium's unlimited scope that he learned puppetry, on the theory that it was the most direct way to break into television's ranks.

As he puts it, "I think the area I really know is how to use puppets in terms of pictures and films. What I have to contribute to the world is my knowledge of how to weld the two. "There are some things you cannot do with the characters, so it becomes a game you play with the audience, trying to create a total world while only showing them a small part of it.

"What we're doing is working with a kind of unreality and trying to do it in a way that's believable."

When the idea for "The Dark Crystal" came to him, Henson realized the technology needed would be much more sophisticated than that required by the Muppets and, consequently, much harder to learn.

"The Muppets were simple, really," he says, "designed to be used in simple ways. 'The Dark Crystal' characters are designed to create much more the feeling of life . . . real living, breathing creatures.

"Great advances have been made in the construction of the creatures. New techniques in foam latex and cable manipulation have been developed. Some of our characters are controlled by radio, some are live performers on stilts, some are in costumes so huge they carry video monitors inside to control their own movements.

"But in the end," says Henson, "it is not the special effects or the mechanics that counts. It's the characters and their story, the life they have and the way they live and move, that fascinate me."

And it is the magic with which he brings them to life that fascinates his legion of fans.

Henson then created Fraggle Rock, a new concept in children's television. The series aired on cable in 1983.

When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave the world a little bit better for my having been here.

-Jim Henson

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