Jim Henson Influence

Among one of Jim Henson’s greatest quotes is, “My hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.” While the current status of the world is up to debate, there is no doubt that Henson touched the lives of both children and adults through his work with puppets and entertainment as a whole. The Muppets is a show that continues to engage and attract people throughout the world while Sesame Street still puts out quality work that touches on topics most people would not even dare to bring up. To say that Henson did not leave even a little bit of a positive impact on the world would be a tremendous understatement. However; despite Jim Henson being regarded as one of the world’s greatest puppeteers because of his revolutionary

Their activities ranged from watching the animals in their area to messing around in the local creek. Everything changed when he was thirteen and more and more families started buying televisions. Author Kathleen Krull describes the Henson family getting their first television by stating “the set was small, with fuzzy images in black and white. But TV connected people - like his family, as they gathered in the living room to watch shows together” (Krull 16). Jim Henson’s world would completely change after being introduced to the different genres television had to offer at the time. Among one of his favorite shows, and one that definitely played a role in him getting into puppeteering, was Kukla, Fran and Ollie; a show that centered around different different puppets created by Burr Tillstrom. Jim Henson eventually became

More familiar, however, with the work of a talented puppeteer whom he would later count as a friend: Burr Tillstrom, who performed the puppet stars of NBC’s enormously popular Kukla, Fran and Ollie. There were few people, in fact, who weren’t fans of Tillstrom’s work. Launched as a kids’ show in 1947, Kukla, Fran and Ollie had quickly attracted more adult fans than children—it counted among its admirers John Steinbeck, Orson Welles, and James Thurber—and by 1949 it had already been featured in Life magazine. (Jones