Go Shorty, It's Your Birthday

Wednesday 9/24/08

12:27 a.m.

Today we celebrate the life of one of the most creative and inspiring men who ever puppeteered on this earth, Jim Henson.

James Maury "Jim" Henson was the most widely known puppeteer in American television history, who created some of the most memorable shows of our time - The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street. He also was the mastermind behind several of the greatest films in cinematic history The Mupppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Muppets Take Manhattan, The Dark Crystal, and my all-time favorite movie to feature a rock legend in spandex with the biggest bulge to ever be shown on screen (other than Marky Mark in Boogie Nights), Labyrinth.

Jim grew up in the state where only the coolest people in the world are from, Mississippi.* He later moved to DC, where he was raised a Christian Scientist. This is not the same as Scientology for all of you morons who think it is. C.S. teaches that the reality of God denies the reality of sin, sickness, death and the material world. Accounts of miraculous healing are common within the church, and adherents often refuse traditional medical treatments. Uh, yeah. I'll stick to my Jainism.

Jim's life was forever changed when his family purchased their first television set.

He began creating puppets while attending high school and later took a puppeteering class at the University of Maryland. He first worked on the show Sam and Friends.



Despite the success of the show, which ran for six years, Henson spent much of the next two decades working in commercials, talk shows, and children's projects before being able to realize his dream of the Muppets as "entertainment for everybody". The popularity of his work on Sam and Friends in the late fifties led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. Henson himself appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show. This greatly increased exposure led to hundreds of commercial appearances by Henson characters through the sixties.

In 1963, Henson and his wife moved to New York City, where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. would reside for some time. When Jane quit muppeteering to raise their children, Henson hired writer Jerry Juhl in 1961 and puppeteer Frank Oz in 1963 to replace her; Henson later credited both with developing much of the humor and character of his Muppets. Henson and Oz, particularly, developed a close friendship and a performing partnership that lasted 27 years; their teamwork is particularly evident in their portrayals of the characters of, respectively, Bert and Ernie and Kermit and Fozzie Bear.





Henson's sixties talk show appearances culminated when he devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog. Rowlf became the first Muppet to make regular appearances on a network show, The Jimmy Dean Show.



From 1964 to 1968, Henson began exploring film-making and produced a series of experimental films. His nine-minute Time Piece was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Oscar for Short Film in 1966. Jim Henson also produced another experimental film, The NBC-TV movie The Cube, in 1969.



Next up: Sesame Street.


(these are my favorite characters of all time)

While this was great entertainment for the younger audience, Henson also wanted to appeal to the adults. Henson, Oz, and his team created a series of sketches on the first season of the groundbreaking comedy series Saturday Night Live. Around the time of his characters' final appearances on SNL, Henson began developing two projects featuring the Muppets.

Following his television work, Henson made his move to the big screen. Below are some of my favorite movie moments:







On May 4, 1990, Henson made an appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show. At the time, he mentioned to his publicist that he was tired and had a sore throat, but felt that it would go away.



On May 12, 1990, Henson traveled to Ahoskie, North Carolina with his daughter Cheryl to visit his father and stepmother. The next day, feeling tired and sick, he consulted a physician in North Carolina, who could find no evidence of pneumonia by physical examination and prescribed no treatment except aspirin. Henson returned to New York on an earlier flight and canceled a Muppet recording session scheduled for May 14.

Henson's wife Jane, from whom he was separated, came to visit and sat with him talking throughout the evening. By 2 a.m. on May 15, 1990 he was having trouble breathing and began coughing up blood. He suggested to Jane that he might be dying, but did not want to bother going to the hospital. She later told People Magazine that it was likely due to his desire not to be a bother to people. Henson's being raised a Christian Socialist is often speculated as the reason that he was reluctant to receive medical treatment.

At 4 a.m., he finally agreed to go to New York Hospital, at which point his body was rapidly shutting down. By the time he was admitted at 4:58 a.m., he could no longer breathe on his own and had abscesses in his lungs. He was placed on a mechanical ventilator to help him breathe, but his condition deteriorated rapidly into septic shock despite aggressive treatment with multiple antibiotics. Only twenty hours later, on May 16, 1990, at 12:58 a.m., Henson died from organ failure at the age of 53.

Two separate memorial services were held for Henson, one in New York City at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and one in London, England at St. Paul's Cathedral. As per Henson's wishes, no one in attendance wore black, and a Dixieland jazz band finished the service by performing "When The Saints Go Marching In". Harry Belafonte sang "Turn the World Around," a song he had debuted on The Muppet Show, as each member of the audience waved, with a puppeteer's rod, an individual, brightly-colored foam butterfly. Later, Big Bird (performed by Carroll Spinney) walked out onto the stage and sang Kermit the Frog's signature song, "Bein' Green".



In the final minutes of the two-and-a-half hour service, six of the core Muppet performers sang, in their characters' voices, a medley of Jim Henson's favorite songs, culminating in a performance of "Just One Person" that began with Richard Hunt singing alone, as Scooter. "As each verse progressed," Henson employee Chris Barry recalled, "each Muppeteer joined in with their own Muppets until the stage was filled with all the Muppet performers and their beloved characters."



The funeral was later described by LIFE as "an epic and almost unbearably moving event." The image of a growing number of performers singing "Just One Person" was recreated for the 1990 television special The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson and inspired screenwriter Richard Curtis, who attended the London service, to write the growing-orchestra wedding scene of his 2003 film Love Actually.

After the funeral service, Jim was cremated. His ashes were scattered near Santa Fe, New Mexico at his ranch.

*Miss Middleton, Jimmy Buffett, Bo Diddley, Brett Farve, William Faulkner, Faith Hill, James Earl Jones, B. B. King, Willie Morris, Walter Payton, Elvis Presley, Jerry Rice, Conway Twitty, Muddy Waters, Tennessee Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Parker Posey, Cool Papa Bell, little bitch's dad - Archie Manning, Deuce McAlister, Clinton Portis, Jerry Clower, John McCain Sr. - EWWWW, Afroman, R.L. Burnside, Sam Cooke, Willie Dixon, Nate Dogg, Robert Johnson, Sonny Landreth, Pops Staples, Ike Turner, Cat Cora and the coolest of the cool - Britney Spears and Lance Bass.

Source: Wikipedia.com