DAVID ADAMS looks at the birth of The Muppets…
|
THE MUPPETS ARE BACK: The latest film, ‘The Muppets’, saw many of Henson’s original team reunited. |
The Muppets were back on the big screen late last year, so we thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look back at where it all began for Kermit, Miss Piggy and friends.
The Muppets’ origins go back as far as the 1950s when creator Jim Henson was still attending high school and created puppets for a Saturday morning TV show.
He went on to university with the intention of being a commercial artist and it was while still a freshman that he was asked to create a five minute puppet show, called Sam and Friends, for a TV station in Washington DC near where he lived.
Henson did so and some of the characters which first appeared there became the forerunners for the Muppets, including Kermit the Frog.
The show, which ran for six years, was a success but it was still 20 years before Henson – who spent the time working with puppets in commercials, on talk shows, and in various children’s projects – was able to fully realise his dream of creating The Muppets.
It was the early Sixties that, having relocated to New York City, Henson teamed up with puppeteer Frank Oz in a partnership that was to span the next three decades. In 1969, Henson started work on Sesame Street and performed characters including Ernie (of Bert and Ernie) and Kermit – appearing as a roving reporter.
It was while he was working on Sesame Street that Henson also produced a series of TV movie specials – retellings of classic fairytales – called Tales From Muppetland. In the mid-Seventies he, Oz and their team also appeared on Saturday Night Live with a series of muppet sketches aimed at an adult audience.
In 1976, his plans for a weekly TV series on the Muppets rejected in the US, he moved to England and began filming The Muppet Show. Henson himself performed many of the characters including Kermit, Rowlf the Dog, Dr Teeth, the Swedish Chef and Waldorf, one half of the duo of Statler and Waldorf.
Feature films followed on from the success of the TV series – The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984). The TV series came to and end in the early Eighties to allow Henson to concentrate on film-making (his other films include The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth as well as TV series like Fraggle Rock and the Muppet Babies).
Henson continued to work on Muppet-related projects until his death in 1990 – six of the key Muppets sang at his funeral. Since his death the Muppets, which in 2004 were sold to the Walt Disney Company (with the exception of the Sesame Street characters and Fraggles), have gone on to appear in several TV specials, a short lived TV series called Muppets Tonight, and, of coiurse, last year’s film The Muppets. There’s also a ride at Disney’s Californian Adventure Park – Muppet*Vision 3D.
FOR MORE:
• For the latest news on The Muppets and more, see www.muppetcentral.com.
• For more on the latest film, see the official website, http://home.disney.com.au/disneyfilms/muppets.html
• For a history of The Muppets and some fascinating facts, see www.neatorama.com/2011/11/23/a-short-look-at-the-muppets-long-history/
• Wikipedia has extensive entries on both The Muppets – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muppets – and on Jim Henson – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Henson.
If you have a word you’d like to know the origins of, simply send an email to [email protected].
