Entertainers have a unique hold on the public imagination. They nourish dreams; they enter, electronically, millions of homes. Some of them do more than beguile or amuse. Sammy Davis Jr. and Jim Henson, who died last week, had little in common. One was a brash, flashy extrovert who never spent a day in school; the other a shy, behind-the-scenes type who showed that his offbeat puppets could educate children. But their passing is a reminder that both, besides dispersing fun and pleasure, significantly altered the world they inherited.
They are only stockings plumped up with felt, foam and Ping-Pong balls. But in the psyche of two generations of American kids, they are enduring companions, surrogates and mentors. Since a bumbling 8 ft. 2 in.-tall canary popped up on the sidewalks of Sesame Street 21 years ago, the Muppets (the name is an amalgam of marionette and puppet) have taught letters, numbers, feelings and fantasy to millions of toddlers. When puppeteer and Muppet creator Jim Henson died last week of pneumonia at 53, the nation lost a quiet comic genius, one of childhood's best friends.
Like Walt Disney, Henson mined a vein of the American character with his warm and witty bestiary. The Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and that enduring odd couple, Bert and Ernie, transformed children's TV from a boobish baby-sitter to a creative classroom. And now that the first Muppets watchers are grown up, the creatures live on as adult archetypes: everybody knows a Big Bird or a Grover. Henson's own alter ego was Kermit the Frog, a wistful version of the Little Tramp, who knew that it wasn't easy being green.
Raised in suburban Washington, James Maury Henson got a laugh the first time he appeared with a puppet on his arm. The lanky University of Maryland art major starred on a five-minute local TV show and did a passel of commercials. He shrewdly adapted his technique to the small screen: his puppeteers watched monitors in order to play effectively to the cameras. Henson drove to graduation in a Rolls-Royce.
Gentle but intense, a workaholic who rarely raised his voice (unless Kermit was angry), Henson once said, "I like to create different worlds with puppets." He made a galaxy. Besides the Sesame Street characters, he created The Muppet Show (1976-81), the prime-time offering that became the most widely seen TV program in the world. Some 235 million viewers in 100 countries tuned in to see Fozzie Bear and the egotistical antics of Miss Piggy. Three Muppet feature films were smashes, but the fantasy films The Dark Crystal, made with fellow puppeteer Frank Oz, and Labyrinth fared badly.
Henson's sudden death has thrown a cloud over his empire. He made a new rainbow connection last year when he agreed to sell rights to the Muppets to the Walt Disney Co. for $100 million. Without his imagination and involvement, that deal will probably be restructured. And Sesame Street's producers have decided that fun-loving Ernie, whose voice and verve were Henson's own, will be retired from the show. Both the Muppet and the Muppeteer will be sorely missed by the child in each of us.
By J.D. Reed.