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Hey all. I bid for and won the Summer 1990 issue of "Disney News" off eBay. It is the one with Jim Henson and Kermit on the cover. And just for the heck of it, I decided to post the cover story about the Disney-Henson merger for those who have not seen it. So enjoy.
MUPPETS TEAM UP WITH MICKEY
By John McClintock
While Disney News was on press, Jim Henson tragically passed away. All in the Disney family mourn the death of this talented man. We feel privileged that we were able to dedicate this cover story to the imagination and vision of Jim Henson.
Michael Eisner was pleased – and amused. “Just about every newspaper in the country featured our joining with the Muppets as if it were a merger of GM and Ford Motor Company,” he told a recent gathering of Disney Company stockholders. He might have been thinking of the reporter who, when Muppet creator Jim Henson decided to join with Disney last August, declared it was “a deal so natural it’s more like a marriage than a merger.”
On Henson’s side, there’s no question that the Muppet master is happy to have Kermit the Frog and Mickey Mouse on the same team at last. As a design student in college, he once considered applying for a job in the animation department at the Disney Studios. “I’ve loved Disney, the whole Disney image, for years,” he says. “I grew up on the Disney movies. Every new animated feature was a major event in my upbringing. And the Parks have always been among my favorite places. The idea of designing for them is a wonderful thing to me.”
Jim Henson’s own remarkable achievements in the field of family entertainment have occasionally earned him comparisons with Walt Disney. Beginning with home-crafted puppets on a Washington, D.C., TV show in the mid-‘50s. Henson went on to create some of the most memorable – not to mention some of the most offbeat – fantasy characters in television history, from the whimsical Kermit and his cronies to the magical and mysterious Storyteller.
On the big screen, Jim Henson Productions has presented a trio of comedy adventures with the Muppets in various familiar locales – Hollywood, London, Manhattan – and created entire new worlds of imagination for “The Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth.” The Henson “Creature Shop” in London has contributed to the fantasy environments of such non-Henson motion pictures as “Dreamchild,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” and the recent hit “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Given the combined creative track records of The Walt Disney Company and Jim Henson Productions, the question on everyone’s mind since the announcement of the “merger” has been, “What will these two do once they get together?” This summer, the first answers to that question have begun to appear at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida as the Muppets, long familiar from their television and motion picture appearances, have started performing live on the stages and streets of the Disney-MGM Studios.
It’s the product of what Jim Henson is already describing as “a very easy, comfortable working relationship.”
“We haven’t had any problem,” he said during a break in shooting “The Muppets at Walt Disney World,” a special episode for “The Magical World of Disney” on NBC. “I think Jeffrey (Katzenberg of Walt Disney Pictures) and Michael (Eisner) both want the Muppets to be what they are and not try to duplicate exactly what Disney’s been doing in the past.”
The Muppets are jumping into the Disney-MGM Studios with both feet – or flippers, or whatever – this summer, so Studio visitors have plenty of opportunities to see them in this new environment. Kermit is joined by the grande dame of Muppetdom, Miss Piggy, when he makes a guest appearance in the popular “Hollywood/Hollywood!” stage show at the Theater of the Stars on the Studio’s Hollywood Boulevard. Never one to shrink from the spotlight, Miss Piggy gives her impression of a few of Hollywood’s legendary ladies in “Hollywood/Hollywood!” making a bid for her own place among the screen goddesses.
One of the great attractions at the Disney-MGM Studios is the opportunity to watch movies and television shows being made. This experience now has a new dimension as a Muppet film crew sets right in front of the Studio’s Chinese Theater for “The Muppets on Location.” Walt Disney World performers and the celebrated “streetmosphere” characters of the Disney-MGM Studios join Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie Bear, the Great Gonzo, and “Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem” (the Muppet house band) to give spectators a preview of a Muppet work-in-progress.
In another show, presented on a specially built stage in the courtyard adjoining the Animation Tour, Kermit and his friends are officially welcomed to the Disney Theme Parks. “Here Comes the Muppets” combines the high-energy showmanship which marks all of Disney’s live stage presentations with the Muppets’ own offbeat humor and that added touch of video magic that has become a Jim Henson trademark. The live Kermit joins forces with an animated Mickey Mouse and some surprise guests in the kind of TV/puppet mix that has made the Muppets famous throughout the world. “I think it’s kind of neat,” Henson modestly says of the show.
Muppet creativity has proceeded unabated ever since Jim Henson first transformed his mother’s old green coat into Kermit the Frog some 35 years ago. In the mid-‘60s, Muppet regular Rowlf the Dog co-starred on “The Jimmy Dean Show,” and the adult appeal of Henson’s characters was confirmed through frequent guest appearances on programs like “The Tonight Show.”
Next came “Sesame Street” whose Muppet characters, owned by Children’s Television Workshop, are the only Henson creations not included in the Disney agreement. Muppets were cast in the historic first season of “Saturday Night Live,” and Henson continued expanding the boundaries of TV whimsy and invention with “The Muppet Show,” “Fraggle Rock,” “The Storyteller,” “The Ghost of Faffner Hall,” and the recent “Jim Henson Hour.” In the ‘80s, Jim Henson Productions even ventured into animation, with the hit cartoon series “Muppet Babies.”
His longtime colleague Joan Ganz Cooney, president of Children’s Television Workshop, doesn’t hesitate to describe Jim Henson as “an authentic American genius,” adding, “I don’t use that term very often.” Cooney sums up the peculiar nature of Henson’s inspiration: “I think he is some combination of Disney, Chaplin, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers.”
However bizarre that brew might sound, it works. The list of awards and honors – Emmies, Peabodies, Grammies and more – earned by Jim Henson Productions runs to over 100 entries. That’s not even counting Record World Magazine’s 1977 citation of Animal, the Muppet drummer, as “Personality of the Year.”
Henson co-workers have occasionally been known to observe that there is a certain resemblance between their boss and Kermit the Frog, the even-tempered master of ceremonies. While physical similarities are scant – Henson is bearded, his eyes are of normal dimensions, and he need not concern himself with the uneasiness of being green – it’s easy enough to detect some of Kermit’s cheery, slightly nasal inflections when Henson speaks. He also uses his hands quite a bit, though never quite as frantically as Kermit is prone to do.
The real similarities are a matter of temperament. Henson himself has observed, “Kermit is easy-going and very normal. His role in ‘The Muppet Show’ was as the central character, the glue that held together all the crazier people that bounced off of him. That role is similar to mine.”
But the portrayal of Henson as the calm center in a storm of Muppet craziness tells only half the story. The Muppets broke new ground, not just because they explored some new and occasionally bizarre avenues of comedy, but because Henson explored the relationship of traditional puppetry and the camera. He developed puppets specifically for on-camera presentation. Even today, Muppet performers will watch television monitors while they work, in order to see the performance as the audience sees it.
Given this particular aspect of Henson’s work, one might wonder how easy it will be for Muppets to take to their feet and begin entertaining in the Disney Theme Parks. Henson seems unconcerned about that. “We’ve been doing an arena show for the past few years – we’ve had a Muppet Show on tour and we’ve had a ‘Sesame Street Live’ and we have ‘Muppet Babies’ now playing – so we’ve been doing costumed characters for quite a while. And now we’re working with the Disney costumed character department.”
In addition to working on the various Muppet shows now playing at the Disney-MGM Studios, Henson has been contemplating a whole array of film, television and Theme Park projects he wants to pursue with his new Disney partners. Many of them are still confidential, but plans for an as-yet-untitled program for The Disney Channel were announced recently. The show will employ a cast of all-new Muppets to introduce young people to environmental issues. In addition, principal photography on “Kermit the Frog Presents MuppetVision 3-D” (consider the possibilities!) has been completed. That motion picture, combining 3-D film technology, live special effects and new Audio-Animatronics figures, may premiere as early as 1991 as an attraction in “Muppet Studios,” a new “land” at the Disney-MGM Studios.
Disneyland Park in California will have its own version of “MuppetVision 3-D” by 1993, but Kermit and the gang will make their initial Disneyland appearance in early 1991, as soon as the Park has concluded its current yearlong 35th Anniversary celebration. There will be a Muppet stage show for Disneyland, and an all-new parade, tentatively titled “The Magnificent Muppet All-Star Motorcade.”
The first full-scale, Muppet-inspired, Audio-Animatronics show at a Disney Theme Park will open at the Disney-MGM Studios in 1993. “The Muppet Movie Ride” will offer a misinformed look at how movies are made, with the Muppets presenting their own interpretations of famous scenes from great films. When Henson announced his intention to join Disney last summer, one of the reasons given was a desire to make use of the Theme Park technologies pioneered by Walt Disney Imagineering. “This is a form of technology I’ve never been into before, and it’s as if these characters were designed to be Audio-Animatronics,” he now says enthusiastically. “When we try to do a live person or a cartoon character as an Audio-Animatronics figure, we’re changing medium, we’re trying to turn a person or a cartoon character into something plastic or fabric. But when we take puppets into Audio-Animatronics, we’re staying in the same medium. These characters were created in these three-dimensional forms, so we should be able to use them in Park attractions in a way that will still look very authentic.”
The fact that the Muppets are beginning to roam the streets of Disney Theme Parks raises an inevitable question: “Are Kermit and Mickey going to start appearing together, making movies and TV shows together, hanging out together?” Actually, Henson notes, as far as the costumed Disney and Muppet characters are concerned, the answer, for the time being, is “No.”
“I think there will undoubtedly be times when Disney characters and Muppet characters will interact, but that’s not what we’re trying to do first off,” he explains. “On ‘The Magical World of Disney’ special, Kermit talked to an animated Mickey, and that also happens in ‘Here Comes the Muppets.’ So far, it’s always been cartoon-to-live-puppet, that kind of interface. But we’ll see.”
Henson’s earliest interest in the entertainment field was focused on design in general, rather than puppetry in particular. When he joined the puppet club at his Washington, D.C. high school, it was to design scenery. As a theater arts student at University of Maryland, he continued to see his future largely in terms of graphic design. The success of “Sam and Friends,” the local TV show which, in 1958, earned Henson the first of his dozen-plus Emmies, changed all that.
The unconventional twists and turns of Henson’s vision – from the eccentricity of the Muppets to the near-Gothic tone of “Labyrinth” and some of “The Storyteller” episodes – has prompted some observers to remark on a Henson “streak of madness.” Once, when an interviewer submitted this description, Henson responded, thoughtfully, “Many creative people have a certain degree of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the established way. If you look at things differently, you are thought of as ‘different.’ In turn, ‘different’ people are thought to be ‘mad.’”
A pause, then, “I like the absurd. Absurd can get into surrealism. Absurd is taking what life really is and pushing it into an abstraction that people recognize. The most interesting characters I’ve created have a fixation or a trait you can exaggerate. As you exaggerate, it becomes funny and people see that trait in themselves. There’s great value in being able to step back and laugh at yourself, at life and at attitudes. Laughter helps you put everything into perspective.”
Asked to comment further on the Henson/Muppet philosophy during his Florida shooting break, Henson offered a simple credo that might have applied just as well to Disney: “All of our work has an overall positive slant to it. We’re taking a positive view of life, affirming the goodness of people, basically.” That unaffected message has been embraced not only be generations of Mickey Mouse fans, but by the citizens of nearly 100 countries in which “The Muppet Show,” “Sesame Street,” “Fraggle Rock,” and other Henson productions have been seen. And just recently, “Fraggle Rock” and “The Muppet Show” have joined Mickey and Donald in doing their bit for glasnost on Russian television. “We tried to get into Russia for quite a while,” Henson reveals. “Only in the last couple of years, of course, the climate changed. We like the idea of being all over the world.”
Henson’s affinity for “the family audience” is a real family matter. All five of the Henson children share his enthusiasm or fantasy, puppetry and design. Four of them have already made significant contributions to the world of the Muppets. Son Brian performed the pivotal role of the Storyteller’s dog, whose questions and commentary punctuated the fables. Brian’s talents were also put to use by the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” for whom he worked as a principal puppet performer and second-unit director when they made their first non-cartoon screen appearance. Another Henson son, John, helps run Jim Henson Productions’ New York studio. One daughter, Cheryl, has served as a designer and builder on a variety of Henson productions, while the eldest Henson child, Lisa, now in creative development at Warner Brothers, helped inspire “The Storyteller” series with the insight she gained as a folklore and mythology major at Harvard.
Youngest daughter Heather is still in school…at Rhode Island School of Design. “She’s heading toward an art career of some sort,” Henson says confidently.
He adds that the Disney Company’s rapport with the family audience was one of its major attractions for him. “We both work for families, and at Disney they have the best ways of reaching families, the best distribution channels. I wanted to work with that whole Disney machinery. It’s such a terrifically strong one.
“Besides,” he says, “we’re having a lot of fun.”
MUPPETS TEAM UP WITH MICKEY
By John McClintock
While Disney News was on press, Jim Henson tragically passed away. All in the Disney family mourn the death of this talented man. We feel privileged that we were able to dedicate this cover story to the imagination and vision of Jim Henson.
Michael Eisner was pleased – and amused. “Just about every newspaper in the country featured our joining with the Muppets as if it were a merger of GM and Ford Motor Company,” he told a recent gathering of Disney Company stockholders. He might have been thinking of the reporter who, when Muppet creator Jim Henson decided to join with Disney last August, declared it was “a deal so natural it’s more like a marriage than a merger.”
On Henson’s side, there’s no question that the Muppet master is happy to have Kermit the Frog and Mickey Mouse on the same team at last. As a design student in college, he once considered applying for a job in the animation department at the Disney Studios. “I’ve loved Disney, the whole Disney image, for years,” he says. “I grew up on the Disney movies. Every new animated feature was a major event in my upbringing. And the Parks have always been among my favorite places. The idea of designing for them is a wonderful thing to me.”
Jim Henson’s own remarkable achievements in the field of family entertainment have occasionally earned him comparisons with Walt Disney. Beginning with home-crafted puppets on a Washington, D.C., TV show in the mid-‘50s. Henson went on to create some of the most memorable – not to mention some of the most offbeat – fantasy characters in television history, from the whimsical Kermit and his cronies to the magical and mysterious Storyteller.
On the big screen, Jim Henson Productions has presented a trio of comedy adventures with the Muppets in various familiar locales – Hollywood, London, Manhattan – and created entire new worlds of imagination for “The Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth.” The Henson “Creature Shop” in London has contributed to the fantasy environments of such non-Henson motion pictures as “Dreamchild,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” and the recent hit “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Given the combined creative track records of The Walt Disney Company and Jim Henson Productions, the question on everyone’s mind since the announcement of the “merger” has been, “What will these two do once they get together?” This summer, the first answers to that question have begun to appear at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida as the Muppets, long familiar from their television and motion picture appearances, have started performing live on the stages and streets of the Disney-MGM Studios.
It’s the product of what Jim Henson is already describing as “a very easy, comfortable working relationship.”
“We haven’t had any problem,” he said during a break in shooting “The Muppets at Walt Disney World,” a special episode for “The Magical World of Disney” on NBC. “I think Jeffrey (Katzenberg of Walt Disney Pictures) and Michael (Eisner) both want the Muppets to be what they are and not try to duplicate exactly what Disney’s been doing in the past.”
The Muppets are jumping into the Disney-MGM Studios with both feet – or flippers, or whatever – this summer, so Studio visitors have plenty of opportunities to see them in this new environment. Kermit is joined by the grande dame of Muppetdom, Miss Piggy, when he makes a guest appearance in the popular “Hollywood/Hollywood!” stage show at the Theater of the Stars on the Studio’s Hollywood Boulevard. Never one to shrink from the spotlight, Miss Piggy gives her impression of a few of Hollywood’s legendary ladies in “Hollywood/Hollywood!” making a bid for her own place among the screen goddesses.
One of the great attractions at the Disney-MGM Studios is the opportunity to watch movies and television shows being made. This experience now has a new dimension as a Muppet film crew sets right in front of the Studio’s Chinese Theater for “The Muppets on Location.” Walt Disney World performers and the celebrated “streetmosphere” characters of the Disney-MGM Studios join Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie Bear, the Great Gonzo, and “Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem” (the Muppet house band) to give spectators a preview of a Muppet work-in-progress.
In another show, presented on a specially built stage in the courtyard adjoining the Animation Tour, Kermit and his friends are officially welcomed to the Disney Theme Parks. “Here Comes the Muppets” combines the high-energy showmanship which marks all of Disney’s live stage presentations with the Muppets’ own offbeat humor and that added touch of video magic that has become a Jim Henson trademark. The live Kermit joins forces with an animated Mickey Mouse and some surprise guests in the kind of TV/puppet mix that has made the Muppets famous throughout the world. “I think it’s kind of neat,” Henson modestly says of the show.
Muppet creativity has proceeded unabated ever since Jim Henson first transformed his mother’s old green coat into Kermit the Frog some 35 years ago. In the mid-‘60s, Muppet regular Rowlf the Dog co-starred on “The Jimmy Dean Show,” and the adult appeal of Henson’s characters was confirmed through frequent guest appearances on programs like “The Tonight Show.”
Next came “Sesame Street” whose Muppet characters, owned by Children’s Television Workshop, are the only Henson creations not included in the Disney agreement. Muppets were cast in the historic first season of “Saturday Night Live,” and Henson continued expanding the boundaries of TV whimsy and invention with “The Muppet Show,” “Fraggle Rock,” “The Storyteller,” “The Ghost of Faffner Hall,” and the recent “Jim Henson Hour.” In the ‘80s, Jim Henson Productions even ventured into animation, with the hit cartoon series “Muppet Babies.”
His longtime colleague Joan Ganz Cooney, president of Children’s Television Workshop, doesn’t hesitate to describe Jim Henson as “an authentic American genius,” adding, “I don’t use that term very often.” Cooney sums up the peculiar nature of Henson’s inspiration: “I think he is some combination of Disney, Chaplin, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers.”
However bizarre that brew might sound, it works. The list of awards and honors – Emmies, Peabodies, Grammies and more – earned by Jim Henson Productions runs to over 100 entries. That’s not even counting Record World Magazine’s 1977 citation of Animal, the Muppet drummer, as “Personality of the Year.”
Henson co-workers have occasionally been known to observe that there is a certain resemblance between their boss and Kermit the Frog, the even-tempered master of ceremonies. While physical similarities are scant – Henson is bearded, his eyes are of normal dimensions, and he need not concern himself with the uneasiness of being green – it’s easy enough to detect some of Kermit’s cheery, slightly nasal inflections when Henson speaks. He also uses his hands quite a bit, though never quite as frantically as Kermit is prone to do.
The real similarities are a matter of temperament. Henson himself has observed, “Kermit is easy-going and very normal. His role in ‘The Muppet Show’ was as the central character, the glue that held together all the crazier people that bounced off of him. That role is similar to mine.”
But the portrayal of Henson as the calm center in a storm of Muppet craziness tells only half the story. The Muppets broke new ground, not just because they explored some new and occasionally bizarre avenues of comedy, but because Henson explored the relationship of traditional puppetry and the camera. He developed puppets specifically for on-camera presentation. Even today, Muppet performers will watch television monitors while they work, in order to see the performance as the audience sees it.
Given this particular aspect of Henson’s work, one might wonder how easy it will be for Muppets to take to their feet and begin entertaining in the Disney Theme Parks. Henson seems unconcerned about that. “We’ve been doing an arena show for the past few years – we’ve had a Muppet Show on tour and we’ve had a ‘Sesame Street Live’ and we have ‘Muppet Babies’ now playing – so we’ve been doing costumed characters for quite a while. And now we’re working with the Disney costumed character department.”
In addition to working on the various Muppet shows now playing at the Disney-MGM Studios, Henson has been contemplating a whole array of film, television and Theme Park projects he wants to pursue with his new Disney partners. Many of them are still confidential, but plans for an as-yet-untitled program for The Disney Channel were announced recently. The show will employ a cast of all-new Muppets to introduce young people to environmental issues. In addition, principal photography on “Kermit the Frog Presents MuppetVision 3-D” (consider the possibilities!) has been completed. That motion picture, combining 3-D film technology, live special effects and new Audio-Animatronics figures, may premiere as early as 1991 as an attraction in “Muppet Studios,” a new “land” at the Disney-MGM Studios.
Disneyland Park in California will have its own version of “MuppetVision 3-D” by 1993, but Kermit and the gang will make their initial Disneyland appearance in early 1991, as soon as the Park has concluded its current yearlong 35th Anniversary celebration. There will be a Muppet stage show for Disneyland, and an all-new parade, tentatively titled “The Magnificent Muppet All-Star Motorcade.”
The first full-scale, Muppet-inspired, Audio-Animatronics show at a Disney Theme Park will open at the Disney-MGM Studios in 1993. “The Muppet Movie Ride” will offer a misinformed look at how movies are made, with the Muppets presenting their own interpretations of famous scenes from great films. When Henson announced his intention to join Disney last summer, one of the reasons given was a desire to make use of the Theme Park technologies pioneered by Walt Disney Imagineering. “This is a form of technology I’ve never been into before, and it’s as if these characters were designed to be Audio-Animatronics,” he now says enthusiastically. “When we try to do a live person or a cartoon character as an Audio-Animatronics figure, we’re changing medium, we’re trying to turn a person or a cartoon character into something plastic or fabric. But when we take puppets into Audio-Animatronics, we’re staying in the same medium. These characters were created in these three-dimensional forms, so we should be able to use them in Park attractions in a way that will still look very authentic.”
The fact that the Muppets are beginning to roam the streets of Disney Theme Parks raises an inevitable question: “Are Kermit and Mickey going to start appearing together, making movies and TV shows together, hanging out together?” Actually, Henson notes, as far as the costumed Disney and Muppet characters are concerned, the answer, for the time being, is “No.”
“I think there will undoubtedly be times when Disney characters and Muppet characters will interact, but that’s not what we’re trying to do first off,” he explains. “On ‘The Magical World of Disney’ special, Kermit talked to an animated Mickey, and that also happens in ‘Here Comes the Muppets.’ So far, it’s always been cartoon-to-live-puppet, that kind of interface. But we’ll see.”
Henson’s earliest interest in the entertainment field was focused on design in general, rather than puppetry in particular. When he joined the puppet club at his Washington, D.C. high school, it was to design scenery. As a theater arts student at University of Maryland, he continued to see his future largely in terms of graphic design. The success of “Sam and Friends,” the local TV show which, in 1958, earned Henson the first of his dozen-plus Emmies, changed all that.
The unconventional twists and turns of Henson’s vision – from the eccentricity of the Muppets to the near-Gothic tone of “Labyrinth” and some of “The Storyteller” episodes – has prompted some observers to remark on a Henson “streak of madness.” Once, when an interviewer submitted this description, Henson responded, thoughtfully, “Many creative people have a certain degree of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the established way. If you look at things differently, you are thought of as ‘different.’ In turn, ‘different’ people are thought to be ‘mad.’”
A pause, then, “I like the absurd. Absurd can get into surrealism. Absurd is taking what life really is and pushing it into an abstraction that people recognize. The most interesting characters I’ve created have a fixation or a trait you can exaggerate. As you exaggerate, it becomes funny and people see that trait in themselves. There’s great value in being able to step back and laugh at yourself, at life and at attitudes. Laughter helps you put everything into perspective.”
Asked to comment further on the Henson/Muppet philosophy during his Florida shooting break, Henson offered a simple credo that might have applied just as well to Disney: “All of our work has an overall positive slant to it. We’re taking a positive view of life, affirming the goodness of people, basically.” That unaffected message has been embraced not only be generations of Mickey Mouse fans, but by the citizens of nearly 100 countries in which “The Muppet Show,” “Sesame Street,” “Fraggle Rock,” and other Henson productions have been seen. And just recently, “Fraggle Rock” and “The Muppet Show” have joined Mickey and Donald in doing their bit for glasnost on Russian television. “We tried to get into Russia for quite a while,” Henson reveals. “Only in the last couple of years, of course, the climate changed. We like the idea of being all over the world.”
Henson’s affinity for “the family audience” is a real family matter. All five of the Henson children share his enthusiasm or fantasy, puppetry and design. Four of them have already made significant contributions to the world of the Muppets. Son Brian performed the pivotal role of the Storyteller’s dog, whose questions and commentary punctuated the fables. Brian’s talents were also put to use by the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” for whom he worked as a principal puppet performer and second-unit director when they made their first non-cartoon screen appearance. Another Henson son, John, helps run Jim Henson Productions’ New York studio. One daughter, Cheryl, has served as a designer and builder on a variety of Henson productions, while the eldest Henson child, Lisa, now in creative development at Warner Brothers, helped inspire “The Storyteller” series with the insight she gained as a folklore and mythology major at Harvard.
Youngest daughter Heather is still in school…at Rhode Island School of Design. “She’s heading toward an art career of some sort,” Henson says confidently.
He adds that the Disney Company’s rapport with the family audience was one of its major attractions for him. “We both work for families, and at Disney they have the best ways of reaching families, the best distribution channels. I wanted to work with that whole Disney machinery. It’s such a terrifically strong one.
“Besides,” he says, “we’re having a lot of fun.”
