Jim Henson introduces a pioneering reality TV concept called Handmade Video.
There's a long list of things that Jim Henson developed, revolutionized and experimented with, everything from puppetry on television, to multimedia nightclubs, animatronics, fantasy film, digital puppetry and, apparently, reality TV too. Handmade Video was a demo/pilot shot in 1990 shortly before Jim's death built around three guys traveling around America taping themselves using a Hi8 camera. While there's nothing particularly special or remarkable about that idea today, seventeen years ago the idea that you could send three guys out with a consumer video camera and shoot a TV show was pretty new and radical. Handmade Video predates MTV's The Real World by two years and was made a full decade before shows like Survivor broke reality TV in to the mainstream.
Jim introduces the Handmade Video demo with short speech that predicts the revolutionized world of video that we live in today:
"These days we've got a thing called a Handicam, it's this small and gives you a picture that you can actually broadcast. I think in the years to come what we're going to see is the television people and the filmmakers, they're going to be coming out of a time of watching MTV and using Handicams and I think we're going to see a whole new and different kind of television."- Jim Henson
It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that "new and different kind of television" including all the media that's become commonplace today - reality TV, podcasting, vlogs, and YouTube. Pretty visionary, don't you think?
