Muppets and other Puppets at the Orlando History Centre

If you live in Central Florida or plan to visit sometime in the next few months, be sure to pay a visit to the Orlando History Centre, which is hosting a bunch of fantastic puppetry between now and then end of April. It all kicks off next week with the grand opening of Jim Henson’s Fantastic World with Heather Henson next Thursday, followed by Look Both Ways, a special behind-the-scenes presentation by Jane Henson exploring the creation of the Muppets (this, alas, is already sold out).

There's lots more planned for the coming months, including:

• Muppets, Music & Magic: Jim Henson’s Legacy - A remounting of the original program that ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music several years ago
• The Dark Crystal Redux: Klakk smaithh Skwee Kreh - A exhibit of 12 works by photographer John Lawrence Jones that attempt to capture the world of the Dark Crystal (March 14 - May 10).
• Muppets 101 - Heather Henson hosts a special screening of rare Muppet material that includes early TV appearances, commercials, and guest spots on The Dick Cavett Show.
  
• Puppetry in Central Florida - An exhibit that explores the history of puppetry in Central Florida (March 14 - May 10).
  
• Family puppetry workshops (selected weekends, February - April)

Many of these events require advanced registration and are likely to sell out. Visit www.thehistorycenter.org for more information and reservations.

Learning from Ernie and Bert

You can learn a lot about puppetry watching classic Ernie and Bert videos.

Last week Tom pointed to a classic Sesame Street segment as an example of what to do with a puppet when you have no lines. As he points out, pay close attention to the puppets' eye line, the positioning of their heads and how their emotions are communicated to the audience through their body language.

Honestly, if you want to study great puppetry you can't do much better than watching the old Ernie and Bert sketches with Jim Henson and Frank Oz. Most of them are available to watch online at SesameStreet.org and they are phenomenal resource for anyone wanting to learn or improve their puppetry.

Here Come The Puppets

I'm crazy-busy the next few days, but here's something really good to tide you over until I'm back...a series of in-depth blog posts about Here Come The Puppets on the Midnight Diaries. Here Come The Puppets was a PBS special about puppetry that was taped in 1980 and hosted by Jim Henson.

Go have a look, you won't be sorry!

Special thanks to Mathieu for discovering this great link!

Frank Oz on the Muppetcast

I'm a bit late mentioning this, but Steve Swanson scored a real coup on this past week's episode of the Muppetcast...as part of a special tribute to Jim Henson - last week was the 18th anniversary of Jim's death - he landed an interview Frank Oz about his life and career with the Muppets. It's a great listen, so be sure not to miss it.

Remembering Jim Henson

Eighteen years after his sudden tragic death, people around the world still miss Jim Henson.

I wasn't able to post yesterday so I am a day late with this, but it's become a tradition on web to remember and pay tribute to Jim Henson every year on May 16th, the anniversary of his death in 1990. Over at Puppeteers Unite, Tom Stewart put together a really nice little video tribute to Jim. You can watch it here. I also really liked the tribute to Jim on the blog of puppeteer Kathleen David.

It seems like the more time passes the more people miss Jim and the contribution he made to the world. He was taken from this earth much too soon, but when you consider the new Muppet and Fraggle Rock movies going in to production, a Ventriloquist headlining Vegas, puppets on Broadway and a whole new generation of puppeteers' podcasts popping up everywhere on the internet you realize that through both the people he trained directly and those that grew up entertained and inspired by his work, this incredible man's artistic legacy continues to grow year after year.

We should all be lucky enough to have such a wonderful testament to our life's work.

Jim Henson Interview

Jim Henson during a 1980s interview talking about his work and new technological developments in film and television.

Here's an interview with Jim Henson from the 1980s that I saw for the first time today. I don't know when it was filmed, but it's obviously post-Dark Crystal. Especially interesting is when Jim discusses high definition video and his hopes to shoot movies in hi-def one day soon. Although he was a little too optimistic about when the technology would arrive - it took about 20 years rather than the year or so suggested in the interview - there's no questioning that Jim Henson was a man way ahead of his time.

Via Inside Hoggworks.

Great but Forgotten: The Land of Gorch

The Land of Gorch was a series of rarely-seen adult-oriented Muppet sketches that were created for the first season of Saturday Night Live.

Chuck Rothman has a great post on his Great But Forgotten blog about The Land of Gorch, the Muppet skits that were featured on the first season of Saturday Night Live. As Chuck points out, the Gorch sketches were an attempt by Jim Henson to break the Muppets out of the Sesame Street/kids' entertainment mold they got cast in to in the early 1970s. The Gorch sketches have never seen extensively rebroadcast (although they are available on DVD), and are probably some of Jim Henson's most rarely seen work.

Jim Henson Biopic in the works

A biopic of Muppet creator Jim Henson is preparing to go before the cameras this summer.

A report hit the web today that Empire Films is planning a biographical movie about Jim Henson called "Henson". According to the Muppet Newsflash, Empire plans to start production later this summer with a budget of $30-million and a release planned for sometime in 2009. No director or cast is attached to the project yet, but Empire is anticipating hiring "a major director, such as Penny Marshall" to helm the project with a "notable star cast in key roles".

Assuming he's a character in the script, they should totally cast David Cross to play Frank Oz. Speaking of which, would it be too weird to have Frank Oz directing this? Assuming he'd want to that is. There's no word yet on whether or not the filmmakers have sought or secured the co-operation of the Henson Company, Disney and/or Sesame Workshop, each of which owns bits and pieces of the trademarks and copyrights on The Muppet characters and Jim's other work. Disney's cooperation especially (they own Kermit the Frog) would seem to be prerequisite to doing a film like this properly.

Henson's Place

Over at Puppeteers Unite Tom has scored another great YouTube video find - the rarely seen documentary Henson's Place. It was produced in 1984 just as the Muppets were at the peak of their success and discusses Jim's early work, Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and Muppet movies and then-new endeavours like Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal.

You can watch it online in seven parts:

• Henson's Place Part 1
• Henson's Place Part 2
• Henson's Place Part 3
• Henson's Place Part 4
• Henson's Place Part 5
• Henson's Place Part 6
• Henson's Place Part 7
  

I had heard of this before and seen a few clips from it over the years, but this is the first time I'm aware of it being available to watch in it's entirety. I am guessing this is unauthorized so watch it quick before the YouTube police find it.

Jim Henson Puppetry Course Videos

Some rare videos from a course Jim Henson taught at the Institute International de la Marionnette in France in 1987 have recently been posted to YouTube.

Twenty years ago Jim Henson taught a Puppetry for Film and Television course at the Institute International de la Marionnette in Charleville Mezieres, France. About twenty puppeteers from around the world attended (I don't know the complete list of students, but they included notable puppeteers Gary Friedman and Rick Lyon). As part of the course the students produced a series of short films, which are now available on YouTube. The actual films include The Box, Making Muppets, and The Rehearsal. There is also some incredibly rare video of Jim training and working with puppeteers, which can be found here and here.

A big thanks goes to Gary over at Puppetry News for generously making these videos available to watch!

Classic Muppet Advertising - Sir Linit

Sir Linit and his spray come to the rescue of a Housewife's laundry in this classic 1960s Muppet ad.

Here's another fantastic vintage Henson commercial. This is one of four ads that Muppets, Inc. produced for Linit Fabric Finish in 1966. The ad features a talking spray-can knight named Sir Linit, performed by Jim Henson. Watch how carefully this is edited to allow the puppet to do different things. Today it would be pretty easy to do a commercial like this using green screen and puppeteer/wire removal techniques, but in the 1960s things were lower tech and required some innovation and carefully planned shots.

Link via Pidgeon Blog.

Jim Henson: Reality TV Show Pioneer?

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?