Jim Henson: The Mind Behind the Muppets
"Sure, Jim the creator was a genius. Yet I see Jim foremost as an appreciator. He appreciated the Muppet family and his own family. He appreciated flying kites with his children. He appreciated beauty and he appreciated fun." -Frank Oz (Readers Digest, 126)
There is no doubt in Frank Oz's mind that Jim Henson was a creative genius. According to the model of creativity proposed by Howard Gardner, Henson can be considered creative in five of the seven intelligences: interpersonal, spatial, music, verbal, kinesthetic. He became a master at combining these intelligences to create Muppet productions full of wit, music, sight gags, bright colors, and meaningful messages. He also had the ability to coordinate all of the people who worked with him. Before, discussing how Henson's life fits into Gardner's model, I will present some influential events in Henson's life and his major creative works.
James Maury Henson was born September 2, 1936 in Leland, Mississippi as the second son in the Henson family. During his childhood, Jim's maternal grandmother, a prolific painter and master of needlework, encouraged Henson to appreciate imagination, visual imagery, and creativity. She was a steady emotional support for him, constantly listening to his adventures and dreams. When Jim was fourteen, his parents finally acquiesced and bought a television set, after years of badgering from Jim. He always knew that he wanted to work in television; watching Burr Tillstrom, Bil Baird, Ernie Kovac, Spike Jones, and Walt Kelly influenced him greatly during his adolescence. In 1954, while Jim was still in high school, he began working for WTOP television station doing puppet performances on the "Junior Good Morning Show". "It was interesting and kind of fun to do -- but I wasn't really interested in puppetry then. It was just a means to an end," Henson later recalled about his first job (Finch, 9).
At the University of Maryland, he studied art and continued doing puppetry for TV with a fellow student, Jane Nebel, whom he later married. Their show, "Sam and Friends", debuted as a five minute piece aired twice a day, right before the Huntley-Brinkley Report and the Tonight Show. Jane recollected, "We were just college students amusing ourselves, and we did all these wild things with puppets...I guess it had a quality of abandon and nonsense and of being somewhat experimental." (Finch, 15) Their show became very popular, partly because of its widely-viewed time slots, and it won a local Emmy in 1958.
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