Your Thoughts: "Jim Henson: The Biography" by Brian Jay Jones

[minor muppetz]

That's really the only unfortunate aspect of doing business with Lord Grade; yes, Lord Grade was the one who finally helped turn Jim's dreams into realities, but Lord Grade was the one who owned said realities, not Jim. Then again, the sad thing is, with the exception of his contributions to SST, practically everything else Jim did in his career was owned by other companies, which isn't a good thing.

Actually, Sesame Workshop owned the rights to his Sesame Street contributions (just not the Muppet characters, until 2000).

Of course there were things Henson did that the company had always owned the distribution rights to (before the 2004 Disney sale). As far as I know, Henson had originally owned the distribution rights to the Tales from Muppetland specials, Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, and Fraggle Rock. I'm not sure if Henson always owned the distribution rights to Time Piece (I think another company held the distribution rights at first) or the two NBC Experiments in Television specials.

There's a few points in the book where the quote "never sell anything I create" appears. At first I thought that was referring to characters, as a few of the companies Henson did commercials for tried to get the rights to characters Henson created for those commercials. And of course two of Henson's earliest characters, Longhorn and Shorthorn, are partially owned by Joe Campbell (but in that case Jim didn't actually create the characters, and he still owned a percent of the characters). And at one point Jimmy Dean's producer or manager told him that he thought he could get him partial ownership of Muppets Inc. but Dean turned it down, but I wonder if Jim Henson ever actually said anything on the subject or if the person who told Dean was just overly-confident that he could get Jim to sell part of his company.

But then when it comes to getting back the ACC properties, it seems that "never sell anything I own" attitude extended to distribution rights of his productions. Though at that point it seems like Jim was retaining the distribution rights to all his TV projects (but still needed bigger companies to distribute his films). I wonder if Jim ever tried to obtain the rights to The Muppets Take Manhattan or Labyrinth from Tri-Star Pictures.

It is a shame the book doesn't talk much about Tri-Star distributing those films. There's a lot of talk about ACC's ownership of Henson properties and Jim getting the rights to those, but barely anything about Tri-Star. At one point when discussing Jim buying properties from ACC, it says that The Muppets Take Manhattan was produced independently, without mentioning Tri-Star. Not sure if that meant it was produced without the involvement of ACC, or if it was a mistake, or if maybe the film was finished before Tri-Star committed to distributing it. Tri-Star is only briefly mentioned once, as distributor of Labyrinth.

It also would have been great to have learned a bit more about Universal's American distribution of The Great Muppet Caper and The Dark Crystal. It's said that after Henson bought the distribution rights to The Dark Crystal he'd still have to deal with Universal, but how and when did Universal stop distributing it? I've read recently that Universal was the American distributor of ITV/ACC properties when GMC and TDC were produced, and every TV broadcast I've seen of The Great Muppet Caper (the last of which was in 1994) began with the Universal logo, while every video release I've seen of those movies feature the Jim Henson Productions or Jim Henson Pictures logo and no Universal Pictures logo.

 

[D'Snowth]

I'm not sure, but I think HBO may have owned FR.

 

[dwayne1115]

I have not finished the book, but I have gotten at least half way through it, and just finished the chapter on Sesame Street. What seems clear to me thus far is that Jim was in a never ending battle with ownership. It also seems that everyone knew at least that the Muppets where hot, but they never gave Jim the respect, and the chances that he so desperately wanted.

I also like Minor Mppetz is saying wonder about that quote "never sell anything I own." I would think that is something that the Henson children would have tied not to do. instead they have sold, and bought them, and sold the Muppets a few times. I just wonder why they didn't fight harder to keep everything Jim owned. Now his properties are all over the place, and it takes high end lawyers to figure out who really owns what.

 

[MuppetGuy75]

Just started reading it this past week... Love it.

 

[pileobunnies]

Fantastic book. I wasn't really aware of how distracted Jim was by technology. I kind of wish that drive had been a little less powerful since I think it worked against him a bit too much, leading to some of Jason Segel's complaints of even the Muppets getting gimmicky.

 

[dwayne1115]

Fantastic book. I wasn't really aware of how distracted Jim was by technology. I kind of wish that drive had been a little less powerful since I think it worked against him a bit too much, leading to some of Jason Segel's complaints of even the Muppets getting gimmicky.

I don't think they Muppets where getting gimmicky at all. The Muppets take Manhattan was the last big screen movie that the "Muppets and Jim" worked on. Even though it did push the envelop with it's advances in puppetry it was still a very spot on story and one of the best.
I think with the Jim Henson hour the Muppet Central parts worked really well, with the storyteller parts being kind of flat or out there. Which is sad because I think that in today's media the Jim Henson Hour with both Muppet Central and storyteller parts would really work.

 

[pileobunnies]

I'm the reverse on the Jim Henson Hour. I loved the Storyteller bits but found the overuse of tech and green screen and computers kinda killed the joy in the Muppet parts of it. Instead of getting good story and compelling character relationships, we got flashy bits and a CGI puppet who didn't do much for me.

 

[CensoredAlso]

I'm the reverse on the Jim Henson Hour. I loved the Storyteller bits but found the overuse of tech and green screen and computers kinda killed the joy in the Muppet parts of it. Instead of getting good story and compelling character relationships, we got flashy bits and a CGI puppet who didn't do much for me.

I'm right there with you. Explaining special effects can only be interesting for so long and unless you're really into it. There weren't really stories to latch on to.

 

[Oscarfan]

I just finished the portion about the Dark Crystal. I haven't seen it yet, and I don't really want to (but I'll do it eventually, for Jim), but it's really sad how much heart and soul he poured into that and the so-so response he got.

 

[D'Snowth]

Same with LABYRINTH, he poured his heart and soul into that one too, and it tanked, Caroll even said Jim went into a deep depression over that for quite sometime.

Not sure about DARK CRYSTAL (likewise I still haven't seen it yet either, and I know it's been on cable quite a bit lately), but Caroll seemed to think the reason why LABYRINTH bombed was because it came out shortly after another dark fantasy movie was released with Tom Cruise and Tim Curry called LEGEND, and apparently that movie wasn't very successful either, so perhaps, moviegoers were getting the two movies mixed up (dark fantasy movie with a one-word title with the letter 'L'...)