The Muppets has been a beloved institution for decades.
But how much do you really know about those fuzzy puppets? It's time to play the music
and light the lights for an in-depth look at Jim Henson's beloved creations.
Jim Henson and his Muppets started appearing on TV in the very early years of the medium itself.
In 1955, Henson was hired by a Washington, D.C. TV station to make Sam and Friends, a five-minute
series that aired locally just before The Tonight Show. It ran for six years and centered on a
simple, humanoid puppet named Sam, along with other characters including a vaguely lizard-like
character named Kermit, who was not yet a frog. Henson, who started working on the series when
he was just 18 years old, performed almost all the characters, although he was assisted
by Jerry Juhl and Jane Nebel. Juhl would go on to be a major puppeteer for the Muppets for decades;
Nebel and Henson married in 1959, staying together until his passing in 1990.
Sam and Friends led to many offers to make commercials, which funded
the Hensons' increasingly sophisticated puppeteering operations. In 1963, the first
major "Muppet" - the word is a portmanteau of "marionette" and "puppet" - got the Hensons their
first national attention: Rowlf the Dog. Operated and voiced by Jim Henson, he was the breakout star
of The Jimmy Dean Show, a primetime variety series hosted by the country music singer and
sausage pitchman. From then on, Henson's Muppets were a fixture of TV variety and talk shows.
Contrary to popular belief, those big whites of a Muppet's eyes are not halved table tennis balls.
Back in the '70s they were made out of the cut-up parts of a spherical, nesting doll-like toy called
Wacky Stax. Henson and his cohorts discovered that they were the ideal Muppet eye base,
so much so that when the company that made Wacky Stax pulled the toy off the market
for lack of sales, Henson reportedly bought out their entire unsold stock.
Another unusual physical feature of Muppets is that they are almost all left handed. That's
because most puppeteers are right-handed, and they use that dominant right hand to control
the expressive Muppet areas of the head and the mouth. The left hand is thus utilized to control
the less-used and less-important Muppet arms. One notable exception: veteran Muppeteer Louise Gold.
She's left-handed, so all of her Muppets have been designed to have
a head and mouth controlled by her left hand, and arms controlled by her right.
In 1969, Henson wrote a proposal for a weekly Muppets series,
sensibly titled The Muppet Show. It took five years before ABC agreed to
tape a pilot and air it as a special called The Muppets Valentine Show.
Critics loved it, but ABC didn't pick it up. Undaunted, Henson pitched another version of
the show the following year, introducing new characters like Sam the Eagle, Dr. Teeth and the
Electric Mayhem, and the Swedish Chef. Wryly retitled The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence,
the special was a hit in 1975 - but not a big enough hit for ABC to order more episodes.
Following yet another pitch by Henson, CBS almost ordered The Muppet Show later that
year - but again, the network ultimately passed. It wasn't until 1976 that The Muppet Show finally
made it to television in 1976—British television. Lord Lew Grade, head of the ATV network, agreed
to take on The Muppet Show, syndicating it to local stations across the U.S. for five seasons.
A year before The Muppet Show debuted in syndication,
Henson finally had some luck getting the Muppets on network TV through a brand new,
offbeat variety show called NBC Saturday Night - now known as Saturday Night Live.
For SNL, Henson's team created brand-new monstrous creatures for a weekly segment
called "The Land of Gorch." But almost nobody involved with "The Land of Gorch" enjoyed it.
Actors resented losing precious airtime to puppets, while Writers Guild rules
prevented Henson's team from scripting the segment, meaning that it lacked that
special Muppet magic. After just one season, "The Land of Gorch" was mercifully gone.
"Are you guys talking about making love to me?"
"You guys are just puppets, right? I mean, you don't even exist below the waist."
The beloved Miss Piggy has only been around since 1974 — just two years before the debut
of The Muppet Show. She was the creation of a Muppet maker named Bonnie Erickson,
who also built Muppet Show hecklers Statler and Waldorf as well as Zoot, the blue saxophone player
in the Electric Mayhem. Her inspiration for Miss Piggy: popular 1940s and '50s jazz singer
Peggy Lee, probably best known for the sultry song "Fever," who was often billed as Miss Peggy Lee.
Erickson told Smithsonian,
"My mother used to live in North Dakota where Peggy Lee sang on the
local radio station before she became a famous jazz singer.
Peggy Lee was a very independent woman, and Piggy certainly is the same."
Longtime Miss Piggy operator and voice performer Frank Oz came up with a backstory
for the character. In a 1979 interview with The New York Times, Oz revealed:
"She grew up in a small town in Iowa; her father died when she was young, and her mother wasn't
that nice to her. She had to enter beauty contests to survive, as many single women do.
She has a lot of vulnerability which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar."
Jim Henson was a man of many talents. Not only did he create many different Muppets,
particularly Kermit the Frog and Ernie from Sesame Street, but he operated them
and provided their voices, too—including their singing voices. In fact, two of the most famous
Muppet-performed songs, both sung by Henson, even hit the pop chart in the 1970s.
In September 1970, "Rubber Duckie," credited to "Ernie (Jim Henson)," peaked at No. 16 on
the Billboard Hot 100. And in November 1979, the powerful "Rainbow Connection," which opened The
Muppet Movie, hit No. 25. That song has since become a modern classic, covered by artists as
disparate as Sarah McLachlan, Willie Nelson, Kenny Loggins, and Weezer—yet it somehow lost the Oscar
for Best Original Song to "It Goes Like it Goes," a tune from the Sally Field drama Norma Rae.
Apart from The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, the most successful Muppet-oriented TV show is Muppet
Babies, the puppet-free Saturday morning cartoon that ran on CBS from 1984 to 1991.
Jim Henson had long wanted to explore a show or movie based on the Muppets as babies or children,
but it took a sequence in The Muppets Take Manhattan for it to happen.
Toy companies lined up for the rights to sell Muppet baby merchandise.
It was clear the demand was there, and in the fall of 1984, the cartoon debuted. It was a smash hit,
and throughout its run it was often the highest-rated Saturday morning cartoon on TV.
Muppet Babies had its detractors, however—primarily Frank Oz, who felt
it diminished the characters. And a 1985 spinoff cartoon called Little Muppet Monsters disappeared
after just three episodes, showing there's a limit to how much cuteness one fanbase can handle.
Prior to the release of the 1996 film Muppet Treasure Island, the Muppets were served with
a lawsuit by Hormel, the company that makes Spam. Why? Well, it had nothing to do with Miss Piggy,
but rather with the film's new warthog character, who was named Spa'am [SPAA-amm] Hormel claimed
the character could damage sales of their infamous canned meat product.
Judges ultimately sided with Henson, arguing that Spam had been a punchline for a long time
with no harm done, with countless comedians and writers questioning the content of the product.
"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam, and spam."
The ruling read in part,
"One might think Hormel would welcome the association with a genuine source of pork."
That wasn't the only Muppet based lawsuit, though,
and the next one was much messier as it included Muppet on Muppet violence.
In 2018, Jim Henson's son Brian Henson came out with a film called The Happytime Murders,
a R-rated comedy about Muppet crime that co-starred Melissa McCarthy. The film's marketing
included the tagline "No Sesame. All Street." That in turn drew the ire of the Sesame Workshop,
the non-profit Muppet division that creates Sesame Street. They sued, claiming that the tagline,
"[...] deliberately confuses consumers into mistakenly believing that Sesame is associated
with, has allowed, or has even endorsed or produced the movie and tarnishes Sesame's brand."
Sesame Workshop lost the case when a judge ruled that the company couldn't
prove that its reputation had been damaged by The Happytime Murders,
a movie which ultimately bombed at the box office.
The Muppets returned to the big screen for the first time in more than a decade
with 2011's The Muppets. The script was co-written by its (human) star,
Muppets superfan Jason Segel, best known for Freaks and Geeks and How I Met Your Mother.
Segel took a suggestion from Freaks and Geeks producer Judd Apatow to get more
acting work by writing his own material, so he wrote the screenplay for the 2008 film
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which included a puppet musical version of Dracula.
To make the puppets, Segel and his collaborators sought out the Jim
Henson Company. At an early meeting, everyone in attendance got a puppet to goof around with,
but according to Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller,
"Jason was playing with the puppet the whole time during this business
meeting—it was looking at people, looking at him as he was talking."
Segel's enthusiasm so impressed Henson executives that they got
him a meeting with the Muppets' corporate parent,
Disney, where he straight-up pitched a brand new Muppet movie. The rest was box office history.
Steve Whitmire joined the Muppets in the '70s, operating puppets in The Muppet Movie and on
The Muppet Show, and finding his signature character during the '80s in Rizzo the Rat.
Whitmire took over Kermit the Frog after the death of Jim Henson in 1990,
and continued with the character until he was suddenly fired in 2016.
According to a statement from Muppets Studio, Whitmire's firing wasn't that sudden, though,
instead being the result of what they called, quote,
"Steve's repeated unacceptable business conduct over a period of many years."
Brian Henson elaborated, saying that among other things Whitemore would, quote,
"send emails and letters attacking everyone, attacking the writing and attacking the director."
Whitmire told The Hollywood Reporter that he simply felt he knew Kermit's
character better than just about anybody,
and that he argued passionately against things he felt were out of character, like a plot point
on the short-lived 2015 series The Muppets in which Kermit lied to his nephew, Robin.
"It was totally an idea of trying to do what was best for the Muppets."
While there have been dozens of Muppet-based shows and films,
there are nearly as many proposed projects that never saw the light of day,
going as far back as the 1960s, when they pitched a show called The Adventures of
Rowlf in Outer Space, in which Rowlf visits other planets via his homemade spaceship.
Other shows that failed to launch included Muppet High, which would have centered on the Muppets as
high school students in the 1950s; America's Next Muppet, a parody of the reality show America's
Next Top Model where Kermit and Piggy would judge aspirants who wanted to become the next star
Muppet; and Muppets Live Another Day, which was going to be a 1980s-set six-part scripted
series that took place after the events of the 1984 movie The Muppets Take Manhattan.
Disney announced Muppets Live Another Day at their D23 convention in 2019 to much fanfare. The plot:
Kermit gets the Muppets together to locate a vanished Rowlf. Broadway star, Frozen voice actor
Josh Gad signed up to write the show with Once Upon a Time heads Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis.
"Why are you wearing Muppet pants?"
Just a couple of weeks later, though, Gad announced that after more than a year of work on
Muppets Live Another Day, the series had exploded like one of Crazy Harry's devices. He tweeted,
"Sadly, Eddy Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, and I have decided to step away from
Muppets Live Another Day. Sometimes, creative differences are just that."
Instead, Disney pivoted to Muppets Now, which debuted on the Disney+ streaming service in 2020.
Just what comes next for the Muppets is anyone's guess.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Looper videos about your favorite characters are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.