Who owns Kermit the Frog? Technically, it’s the Walt Disney Company, which bought the Muppets, in 2004. Spiritually, it’s Jim Henson, who created the Muppets and was the voice and soul of Kermit until his untimely death, of an infection, in 1990. Beyond that, there are a few other claimants. Henson’s five children became custodians of his creations after his death and have overseen a winding path of corporate ownership, while continuing to promote their father’s legacy. And there are the millions of children who grew up with Kermit and feel entitled to a piece of him. (The rusting Muppet lunchbox on my dresser qualifies me as part of that group.)
Then there’s the ragtag band of puppeteers whom Henson drew into his enchanted orbit, among them Steve Whitmire, who played Kermit from Henson’s death until recently. His firing, which got out earlier this month, brought the question of the character’s divided froghood to the fore. Whitmire told the Hollywood Reporter that Disney had replaced him over a union-related quibble and some unwanted note-giving during the short-lived (and admittedly flawed) ABC series “The Muppets.” In response, Disney’s Muppets Studio said that Whitmire had displayed “unacceptable business conduct,” while Cheryl Henson, the second-oldest of the Henson children, wrote on Facebook that Whitmire had been playing Kermit as “a bitter, angry, depressed victim,” and called for a return to the “true spirit of Jim Henson’s Kermit!”
Fortunately, anyone longing for the “true spirit” of Jim Henson has a new place to seek it out. The Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria, has just opened a permanent Jim Henson exhibition, which offers a zoological tour of his restlessly creative spirit. I went last week during a preview event, where the hors d’œuvres included Fraggle Tartines, Labyrinth Frittatas, and (It’s Not That Easy Being) Green Gazpacho. Upstairs, children and former children were sidling up to Rowlf and Big Bird—under glass, but close enough that you longed to give them a big hug. There was also Miss Piggy in her wedding dress, from “The Muppets Take Manhattan”; David Bowie’s goblin-king robe, from “Labyrinth”; and the cassette tape that Henson used to learn (or mislearn) Swedish, in preparation to play the Swedish Chef.
Henson’s brand of “affectionate anarchy”—as his closest collaborator, Frank Oz, put it in Brian Jay Jones’s authoritative biography—is in evidence from his earliest work. In his senior year of high school, Henson got a job puppeteering for a local TV series. By 1955, he had created “Sam and Friends,” along with his college classmate Jane Nebel, who would become his wife. The five-minute show aired twice a day on WRC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., and starred a humanoid puppet named Sam. One of his pals was Kermit, who wasn’t yet a frog. Originally an abstract creature of turquoise hue, Kermit was constructed from a sliced Ping-Pong ball and a swatch of Henson’s mother’s old coat. Henson wanted to rethink puppetry for television, and one of his major innovations was to construct Kermit not out of wood (like theatrical marionette puppets) but from cloth, which allowed him to contort Kermit’s face into a range of expressions, subtle enough for the camera to pick up.
The original Kermit was also voiceless. Many of the “Sam and Friends” skits involved lip-synching to popular songs. The one on view at the museum shows Sam and Kermit crooning along to “That Old Black Magic.” Kermit, performed by Nebel and outfitted with a sleek black bob, takes the Keely Smith part. He’s weirdly disembodied, but funny. The camera pulls back to reveal that the whole thing is a misbegotten ad for Esskay Quality meats, with a mustachioed Muppet executive chiding, “You’re all getting sloppy on your delivery.”
Advertisements were Henson’s early form of exposure, and another screen shows some of his brilliant eight-second Wilkins Coffee commercials, made between 1957 and 1969. They featured two characters, Wilkins and Wontkins. When Wontkins refuses the coffee, Wilkins dispatches him in some absurdly violent manner, like shooting him with a cannonball or blowing him up with dynamite. The Muppet taste for mayhem (and for explosions) is there from the start.
Henson pulled back on commercials after the success of “Sesame Street,” which premièred in 1969 and gave his characters an educational mission. But the sinister humor of the Wilkins commercials carried over to “The Muppet Show,” which began in 1976 and borrowed the format of a variety show. It had two different pilots, one of them titled “The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence,” hosted not by Kermit but by a beige fellow called Nigel (also on view at the museum).
Once Kermit took over, he became the heart and soul of the Muppets: an earnest, beleaguered ringmaster around whom the wackier characters revolved. (Like Henson himself, Kermit had a nonconfrontational management style that both inspired and frustrated his charges.) It was a dynamic that Henson absorbed from Pogo, the Walt Kelly comic strip of his youth. “Kermit is the Pogo,” Henson once said. “You have one normal person who represents the way people ordinarily think. And everything else, slightly crazier comedy characters are all around that person.” One of those characters, of course, was Miss Piggy, played by Oz, who moved from a background part into the spotlight and never let go.
Almost as soon as Henson landed “The Muppet Show,” he started dreaming of the movies. “The Muppet Movie” came out in 1979 and gave us the indelible image of Kermit in a swamp strumming a banjo and singing “The Rainbow Connection.” (Henson performed it from an underwater diving bell, with his arm sticking up through a rubber sleeve.) But the worldwide success of the Muppets made him restless still, and in the eighties he alternated between lucrative Muppet projects and gothic fantasies like “The Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth,” which were less crowd-pleasing but more technically ambitious.
As Jones’s book details, Henson continually resisted that which made him most famous, including his reputation as a children’s entertainer. In one gallery room called “Experiments,” we see a prototype of an unrealized brainstorm from the late sixties called “Cyclia,” a multimedia night club where film would project onto the body of a live dancer. There’s also Henson’s psychedelic short film “Time Piece” (1965), which was nominated for an Academy Award and has not a puppet in sight. Instead, you see rapid cuts of surreal images, among them Henson dressed as Abraham Lincoln and painting an elephant pink.
It all adds up to a dizzying portrait of imagination. Henson was the rare artist who invented an entire creative world—and then sought out new materials to construct it. But let’s be honest: if you come to a Jim Henson exhibit, you want to see Kermit. He’s there, all right, seated on a white cube, his right arm held up in a friendly wave. It’s a model from circa 1974, made from “fleece fabric, felt, plastic, rubber, and self-adhesive vinyl,” according the label. Below, there’s a quote from Henson: “Kermit is the closest to me. . . . The character is literally my hand.” No wonder he’s been tricky to extract. That hand, like the man, has a long reach.