let's hear you sing the alphabet a b c d
you might not know this but you can
thank this guy for teaching you your
abcs my name is jim henson and i'm a
puppeteer
jim henson he was the most prolific
puppeteer of all time
my dad
never really wanted to be a children's
entertainer
but the whole industry was trying to say
jim stay there in preschool because
that's where you belong and he just
wouldn't take it jim henson brought
together an all-star team to create a
film that would showcase his creations
for an older audience
the film was called labyrinth think 80s
eyeliner and illusions
and it was the biggest box office
failure of jim's career
so why 30 years later is it a major cult
classic
[Music]
as a puppeteer you have to learn to
focus your whole performance through
your hand my dad jim henson he held
children's entertainment in high esteem
but that was exactly what was
making him bristle
was that people would look at his
muppets and they'd say that's so cute i
bet kids love that jim henson wanted you
to know his work wasn't just for kids
labyrinth is by far the biggest project
i've seen from you true enough it's one
of the biggest things we've tried to do
bringing in george lucas and terry jones
and david bowie
um
these very big heavy hitting
talent
was something he was excited about at
that point which he hadn't really done
before that the movie follows jennifer
conley's character sarah through an
enchanted labyrinth to rescue her
brother from the goblin king played by
david bowie
and she finds friends along the way
did you say hello no i said hello but
that's close enough one of them is named
hoggle i played haggle the plan was not
for me to voice the character so
you know it's one of the worst kind of
british accents ever done
i said where is it where is what the
door
jim's creature shop would innovate in
big ways most muppets had one or two
puppeteers behind them but in labyrinth
some characters had eight or nine
puppeteers working together to make one
character's seamless performance it was
so technically complicated that we all
had to think as one hoggle was a complex
character he had four puppeteers motors
in his face and an actress named sherry
weiser inside the outfit and she was
three foot two inches tall so sherry's
face is inside hollow's mouth
all painted black so that hopefully you
can't see her in there but she couldn't
see anything unless the mouth was open
and because of that that's why hago
makes all the crazy sounds that he makes
like he's always like oh god
he's always like talking to himself
but the truth is if he didn't do that
hollow would keep walking into
the work that the creature shop was able
to pull off impressed the entire
industry but that wasn't enough to make
it a success
i never really got to fully understand
why the movie
wasn't successful the budget of
labyrinth was 25 million and it only
ended up earning half of that in the box
office the movie was quickly pulled from
theaters it hit my dad real hard this
was jim's last feature film that he
directed before he died four years after
the film premiered but after his death a
cult-like following started to grow
around his fantasy 80s musical
interestingly i believe the movie made
more money every year than the year it
was released in the theaters so the
movie just got more and more and more
popular and successful my dad would have
gone i well i knew i knew that it would
that labyrinth was going to work
it of course it would eventually
so my question for you is are are
puppets just for kids
no
puppets are not just for kids
the puppets are for the kid in all of us
the audience has no
baggage when they're watching puppets
they can't
make all their assumptions by their
accent and
age and the color of their skin
which is really important because if you
can talk to an adult and get past all
the assumptions
and you can tell them
powerful stuff about themselves and they
won't get mad at you
[Music]
you