Finding Henson- a journey across America

[cheady]

Greetings fellow Muppet enthusiasts.
My name is Chris Heady and I have a rather ambitious task set ahead of me. I'm about to embark on a journey across America and possibly the world to hunt down and archive all of the Henson puppets and artifacts. The purpose? To bring them together on a multi media website as a research tool for puppeteers and Muppet enthusiasts of the future.

I'm in the process of writing a proposal to the Jim Henson Legacy asking them for permission to archive their existing artifacts and puppets assuming that they haven't done so already. In August I hope to travel to Alabama to archive Hoggle on display at the Unclaimed Baggage Center. If you yourselves have any information as to the whereabouts of any Jim Henson puppet, (will be trying to get in contact with the Center for Puppetry Arts as well as the University of Maryland) please reply to this forum or feel free to send me a personal message.

Thank you.

 

[BobThePizzaBoy]

The Smithsonian Museum of American History has puppets of Oscar and Kermit and possibly Bert and Ernie.

 

[Nick22]

The Smithsonian Museum of American History has puppets of Oscar and Kermit and possibly Bert and Ernie.

i might go there next week and im MUNDO excited. especially for kermit and oscar. and the ruby slippers!

 

[MelissaY1]

Greetings fellow Muppet enthusiasts.
My name is Chris Heady and I have a rather ambitious task set ahead of me. I'm about to embark on a journey across America and possibly the world to hunt down and archive all of the Henson puppets and artifacts. The purpose? To bring them together on a multi media website as a research tool for puppeteers and Muppet enthusiasts of the future.

I'm in the process of writing a proposal to the Jim Henson Legacy asking them for permission to archive their existing artifacts and puppets assuming that they haven't done so already. In August I hope to travel to Alabama to archive Hoggle on display at the Unclaimed Baggage Center. If you yourselves have any information as to the whereabouts of any Jim Henson puppet, (will be trying to get in contact with the Center for Puppetry Arts as well as the University of Maryland) please reply to this forum or feel free to send me a personal message.

Thank you.

Actually the Jim Henson Company has a very extensive archive/database of their characters past and present. I know this because when I was interning for them in 1999, I took digital photos of the characters and helped work on the database with them at the time. They still use it to this day but is not available to the public. It's only an archival system they use within the company to track shipments of the characters to say location shoots/sets, etc.

 

[stephenjlizard]

@cheady I think what you're doing is a great idea, but I'm sure you're aware of the pretty vast online resources that already exist. Projects like the Muppet Wiki have been compiled over years' time by dozens, if not hundres, of fans. Even what I do with The MuppetCast, I consider that to be a drop of water in a huge pond of fan-created content. The fact that that pond is surrounded by a swamp in which a frog sat wtih a banjo doesn't hurt either

But I think you should go on the road for yourself. Travel out to a few places with little or no agenda of what you want to get out of it (Atlanta and the cPA is a good place to start), and see what you wind up experiencing. I know I've gotten a lot of personal fulfillment out of learning more about Jim, his philosophy on life, and what kinds of people that philosophy drew to him (and the characters that came out of him). Traveling to Atlanta, New Jersey, Canada, and the like and meeting the people who knew him - and encountering the mere objects that had such a positive impact on me as I grew up - has given me a certain perspective on life, creativity, and what my own work means to me. It's been very inwardly rewarding in a way that, in some ways, is hard to outwardly express.

Write a journal, start a blog, shoot some video to post online while you're on the road. Setting out to build an online museum shouldn't be your goal in my opinion. That's a monstrous undertaking. As far as I know, Jim didn't initially start out to build "The Muppets" empire that we know today. Keep it simple, right? Simple is good. Grand things come from simple ideas and small steps done well. That may not be what you want to hear, but that's how I would go about "Finding Henson".