Last week I went to see Jim Henson's Commercials and Experiments at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. It was with high hopes because Henson has always been a hero of mine, having created several of my favorite movies and TV shows (Labyrinth, Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock, The Muppet Show & Muppet Babies) and involved in many other favorites, including Star Wars. For the first half of the film, I was certainly not disappointed. It began with an early episode of Sesame Street, which I have since discovered was not actually created by Henson himself, but by the Children's Television Workshop, who then asked Henson to create characters for it. The episode was enjoyable not only as a flashback but also because the puppets were cruder versions of favorites, like Oscar the Grouch (who was oddly orange) and the little blond Mary Louise type, who was present in a gender-bending bit where the puppets popped up with no features and asked Gordon to give them noses and eyes, etc, for whatever they felt like being today. What kind of show could get away with that these days?

There was also a bizarre live action skit with kids going "under, over and around" objects on what actually appears to be a junkyard rather than a real playground. God bless Sesame Street for keeping it real, representing lower income, inner city childhood. The kids crawl through a huge metal pipe and climb over wooden planks loosely stacked on a metal frame, with buckets of god knows what teetering on the edges. The whole crowd watching in the theater first gasped in disbelief, and then laughed as the kids innocently scrambled over. We all did that kind of stuff as kids and most of us survived, but it's hard to imagine a network showing that nowadays without getting sued.

After Sesame Street, we got a series of laugh-out-loud funny commercials that Jim Henson made with his company "Muppets Inc", which helped him earn a living before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Using prototype characters he created in college, from a five-minute puppet show called Sam and Friends which he originated for a local TV station (source), Henson's little creatures threatened each other with cannons and other random violence if they didn't buy the product. In one ad for a telephone company, a little girl puppet warned a grumpy boy puppet that people who didn't check the directory before making calls often exploded. And so he did. Another one for canned noodles featured a giant dragon bursting into a woman's kitchen and insisting she use the brand because it was cooked with dragon fire. If we still had ads like this, I would probably stop muting the commercials...

Due to the success of those ads, Henson made many guest appearances on talk shows and scored a regular feature with Rowlf the dog on The Jimmy Dean Show, bits of which were next to appear in the film. Then there was a funny skit made by Muppets Inc about what went on in the process of making a commercial for their clients, which presented Henson's team as the hip, irreverent creative bunch I always imagined them to be. Henson's appearance on the talk shows became increasingly hippied-out as well, and it was fun to see him go from black and white footage in a suit and tie to what appeared to be a velour jumpsuit and shaggy hair in another.

Here, however, the film started to drag a little, as we got to Henson's experimental films, which included psychedelic swirls from Youth 68 and confusing excerpts from Eastern philosophy-influenced The Cube. Henson's Academy Award nominated short film Time Piece was included in its entirety as an end to the night, and that was definitely a cool short, which contained animated moving pattern scenes that became a regular feature on Sesame Street.

In the end, the movie did leave me hanging a bit, (although not nearly as much as it did this one guy I heard sneering, "I wonder how much of that you can find on Youtube"! Sheesh), because the film ended before it got to The Muppet Show and the fantasy films in the 80s. There was also nothing about the fantastic Frank Oz or anyone else he worked with. But after reading the Wiki and Muppet Wiki, I was excited to discover that a movie on Henson's life is supposedly in the works! So hopefully we will get the whole story soon, including his childhood influences in Mississippi, his adventures as a young adult in Europe investigating puppetry, and his development of the fabric/foam puppet structure and animatronic control systems.

Although Henson and wife/first puppeteering partner Jane did eventually separate, they remained close the rest of Henson's life, and all five of their children still run the Jim Henson Company, occasionally coming up with gems like 2005's MirrorMask. And here are some exciting projects planned for 2009: Fraggle Rock: The Movie and The Power of the Dark Crystal. Can't wait!

Photo courtesy of Muppet Wikipedia