Part One: Jim Henson: A Complicated Guy Who Made Stories I Really Like

Cool Zone Media.

Yeah, but I'm not morally complicated because I don't have those complications. It's just that they're like sanded down so smooth, both positive and negative. So it's just like, it's like the amplitude is so small.

It's not that the direction is still changing, but.

The amplitude is so small on both my positives and my negatives. So it's just like.

That's honestly kind of relatable.

You know, you're like, I just don't do anything that good or that bad. I do good and bad things.

I suspect you do more good things. Every time you come on the show, you're like, I don't do anything. And then you describe how you.

Well, I describe a little something.

Yeah.

Just how I operate.

Okay. Okay.

Well, maybe the world is made up of people trying to do these little good things.

I hope so.

Like remembering to introduce our producer, Sophie.

That's me.

Hi, Sophie.

Hi. And hi to Peanut.

That's one of the many dogs that is on this call. There are four dogs available to this call, which is more than people and approximately the right number.

That's my preference. Yeah, I was going to say that's my preference.

Andrew T., what is crabtalism?

Oh, that's on the poster behind me. That, gosh, I should know. My friend gave that to me as a gift. It is some artist whose name I don't remember takes like old pulp sci-fi novel covers, scans them, And then.

Does new typefaces and stuff for him. Hold on.

I'm going to go away from the mic for just a second because... Okay. It says, Crabitalism on a distant planet of crustaceans exists a new and exciting economic system. And the author is listed as Horx Mixlin. And it's basically just one of those old pulp sci-fi paintings of a... I call it a 40-foot tall dungeness crab. And then it's sort of surrounded by spacemen.

I just, I was really excited. That is one of the only things that is available within Frame, and I have been staring at it the whole time you've been on the call.

I don't forget that it's there, but I forget that people can read it.

Oh, yeah. No, I actually, I made my Zoom window much bigger so that I could read about Crabitalism behind you, but I still only got the title. And that is a little bit like what we're going to talk about, because today... On Cool People, we're going to talk about someone who struggled within capitalism to make the kind of art he wanted to make. Because this week, I was looking at my shelf of books I want to use for this show, and I was thinking, I'm really burned out by everything that's happening in the world. And so I picked up a book by Brian J. Jones. It's a biography. And the biography is called, fittingly enough, Jim Henson.

Hey.

So this week, we're going to talk about Jim Henson. You heard much about Jim Henson? You work in television.

I've heard not that much about Jim Henson specifically. I have heard, I'll just say that I knew someone, let's just say that way. Actually, I guess I knew a couple of people who'd worked on one of the Muppet reboots.

Oh, interesting.

A thing that I did not know is that the actors for the puppets were like so contractually locked in that you basically have to treat Miss Piggy, Kermit, et cetera, like that level of talent as if they were a real human being. Like their whims, because they're so connected to that human being who cannot be like moved from that role. So, you know, you basically have to treat them like a whatever's above A-list celebrity.

The puppeteers who are doing.

The puppeteers, but functionally it becomes, you know, to just sort of paraphrase a story I heard. One time my friend or this person heard was just like, hey, Gonzo's really mad at you. And it was like real.

No, I know, unfortunately, very little about behind the scenes because everything that we are shown behind the scenes in the broader audience is, I think, carefully constructed. That is a thing that I ran across while trying to do this particular episode. Jim Henson was absolutely foundational to my family because we were suburban progressives and I was alive in the 80s. So this was kind of my childhood.

My family still sends Muppet reels to each other on our group signal chat that we all have. And there are a few people that I have avoided. There's two people that I've avoided doing episodes about because they're like famous men that are important to my understanding of the world. And I didn't really want to see the warts and all side of them.

We got, of course, yeah.

And Jim Henson was one of them. The other was Erico Malatesta, an Italian anarchist who, and I think this describes me fairly well. These are the two figures that I was like, maybe I don't want to meet these heroes. Maybe they could stay over there in hero land. But I decided to do this to myself this week. But before I did, I Googled Jim Henson controversies, and I didn't find anything particularly spicy, partly because internet search doesn't work anymore.

Sure, sure, sure.

I figured I was in the clear. I was like, this guy, probably pretty good. The shortest version of this story, the story of Jim Henson, is that there was a man named Jim Henson, and he and his wife, Jane, invented the Muppets. And if you're thinking to yourself, well, I never hear about Jane Henson. That's a large part of my problem with this story.

Right.

But they invented the Muppets, a style of puppeteering that is fit perfectly for television. And he helped create Sesame Street. He created The Muppet Show. He made my favorites of his work, Fraggle Rock and The Storyteller. And he spent his entire life his very kind of short life, obsessively making art, obsessively pushing the technical limits of filmmaking and television, and obsessively trying to spread values like we should value each other for our differences, not our similarities.

Wow, what a concept in this economy.

And including in the economy of being in mainstream television.

Yeah.

In the 20th century, this was his like constant tension, right? Is that he's like, I'm trying to make stuff that makes the world good. And everyone else is like, yeah, we don't care about that. No. And he's like, I made you some money. And they're like, okay, we like you a little bit for right now.

That part.

And he is not a saint. He is a man. And like so many men who wind up with any kind of power, he was a shitty husband. I wouldn't have wanted to be married to him. And frankly, in the end, neither did his wife, Jane Henson, with whom he started the Muppets. But she forgave him. and stayed his best friend, and sat at his bedside when he died.

So in some ways, I'm like, all right, who am I to cast stones?

Sure. Yeah. But it's also like the most classic showbiz story possible, even if it's relatively nice.

Oh, yeah. He is going to date his secretary who's 19 years younger than him until she goes no contact with him and doesn't let him call her anymore.

Yeah.

No, that's just to get it all right. Let's get that right out right at the beginning.

Many such cases. Such a bummer.

My sincerest hope is that now that society has polyamory, we're going to have fewer of these problems. My hope is that when we talk about people from the 2020s, if they're still humans, like 50 years from now, people are going to be like, well, He would have been a terrible person in any other generation, but he was in the generation where they could talk about how they wanted to fuck other people.

Right.

Jim Henson was not a monogamous person. He seemed to deeply love and usually respect the women in his life. And he doesn't seem to be a misogynist at all. But no part of him was the slightest bit faithful to any of them. Sure. He was a good puppeteer. He was a good coworker. He was a good boss, which is actually, again, like there's all these things that you like, you think you hear this. You're like, ah, there's like this powerful man. Yeah. Everyone has to work for his vision. No, he's like cares deeply about everyone who works for him. Right. He is like trying to bring everyone up with him. He is the opposite of the crabitalism. He is trying to help everyone else get out of the same bucket that he just got out of.

He was also a good father, despite the fact that he was gone, like, all the time, which is impressive. Like, he actually, like, had to really try. He couldn't phone that one in, you know?

I mean, I guess he would— not he would argue, but one could actually argue he was sort of fathering most of America.

Yeah.

Not in that way, but in the— Oh, well.

God, who knows? I guess actually no one's come forward as an illegitimate child of him. So maybe he was, you know, maybe he was careful. But, yeah, no, he did raise a lot of us. And honestly, like, again, the moral values that he put into his work, there is obviously some, like, racist tropes, especially in his older work, right? Like, he he was really into orientalist television and like wild west stuff and like things from the near east you know i.

Also feel like that kind of hippie white guy it's like i really know like exactly who that is and it could be.

Worse absolutely because he He's like both genuinely well-meaning and willing to kind of put the work in slowly over the course of his short life, you know?

It's a wee bit cringe, but it's not the worst morally person you could be.

Right. Yeah, I buy it. I was talking to my friend about this, and she was just like, you know, I kind of like that he was a bit of a hoe. Yeah.

Yeah, at least it's something.

Yeah.

If he weren't, it would be weird.

Yeah, because you'd be like, you'd be waiting for the even darker thing.

Yeah.

You know?

Which has happened with other people involved in Sesame Street and things like that.

Sure.

So Jim Henson, he put his heart into everything he did, and he dared to ask the question, what if mass media can be good for the world, both in terms of educational content and also just in terms of being good art? And he butted heads with producers and TV executives his entire life for daring to try and do that.

And As someone who sells ads for a living while trying to make the world a better place, and who can scarcely take one day off a week, I saw some of myself in Jim Henson. And I suspect that you all might a little bit too. Which is frightening, because Jim Henson worked himself into an early grave. He died at 53 from a bacterial infection in his lungs caused by strep throat that he ignored until it was too late, because he didn't think he had time to be sick. So... Jim Henson. Jim Henson was born in 1936 in the Mississippi Delta near Leland, Mississippi. His father was Paul Ransom Henson, and his mother was Betty Hanson.

One of his ancestors was a southern farmer with unionist views who moved up to Kansas after the South seceded, and he was like, I don't want anything to do with this. But another one of his ancestors on the other side His great-grandfather was a guy named Oskar Hinrich. This is nothing to do with Jim Henson. I do not blame him. This is not Jim Henson's fault.

Oh, yeah. I mean, keep digging. Yeah, yeah.

And this is not who Oskar the Grouch is named after. Oskar the Grouch is named after a grouchy guy who owns a sandwich shop. Oskar Hinrich was born in Prussia. And not only did he make maps for the Confederates, he was like the Confederates' mapmaker or whatever, he actually went through quite a bit of trouble in order to do so. He was living in Maryland, which didn't secede, and so he got himself smuggled down into the South in order to help the Southern cause.

Oh, right. That's sort of not the opposite of the Underground Railroad. Yeah, totally. Oh, I will break statutes to go help these people.

Yeah, the Underground Railroad that gets concerned white racists to the South to try and help them do racism on a systematic level. Yeah. And so he picked the loser side of the war, and they lost. And then he went back up north. He's a mapmaker. He moves to New York City as this Confederate mapmaker who's married to the daughter of one of the people who helped him get to the south. And the north are like, we're not going to fucking hire you, you piece of shit Confederate.

Fuck off.

So he killed himself. Anyway.

Anyways.

You know. Insert that video of the like way on down south in the land of traders. Paul, Jim Henson's dad, who wasn't related to Oscar Henrich, was from Oklahoma and he was an agricultural scientist. He met and married Betty when she was the secretary of the dean of the school he studied at. Betty was born in D.C., raised in Maryland, but she was a southerner culturally, which is something that's hard to explain to people who aren't from Maryland is that We fought for the North, but the Mason-Dixon line is north of Maryland. It is the line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. And every now and then, if you catch a Marylander on the wrong day, they'll tell you that fact and you'll wonder why they're telling you.

Sure.

Maryland has always been a little bit confused about where it sits culturally. I'm not bitter about this. Betty, though, came by her Southern accent because she grew up partly in the actual South and she was very artsy and Jim Henson has a very happy childhood, which is like, frankly, just shows in the work, you know?

Sure. Yeah.

This is like, you create this by creating like the perfect white American 20th century childhood in a lab.

Right, right, right.

And give it to like a very nice soul of a person.

Well, yeah. The multiple conditions need to be met, but I do think like a certain happiness needs to be there and a willingness to Realize that everyone should have that happiness, not just the master race.

Yeah, totally. Jim Henson's grandparents on his mother's side were named Pop and Deer. And it wasn't just like, oh, I call my granddad Pop. That's what they called each other. That was their names. That was what they went by. It was Pop and Deer.

Right, as in like deer, honey.

Yeah, like Deer John or whatever. Not like deer in the headlights.

Right, sure.

And they were this very happy, loving family of Christian scientists, which is the famous don't go to the doctor religion. That is literally all I know about Christian science.

Yeah.

But Betty was not hardcore, and they still went to doctors in moments of crisis. And there is so much debate about whether Christian science killed Jim Henson.

Oh, sure.

Because he didn't go to the doctor when he should have, and that killed him.

Right, right, right.

But as someone who also doesn't go to the doctor— When I should.

We've talked about this magpie.

Yeah.

You could arrive to the Christian science endpoint via many roads.

Right. It's not a moral thing for me at all. It's that I spent almost my entire adult life uninsured and just kind of got used to it. So Paul, dad, converted to Christian science in order to marry Betty. And then in 1931, the U.S. Department of Agriculture shipped the couple off to a crop research facility down in the Mississippi Delta. Basically, go down south, learn how to grow crops.

It's the Great Depression. Everyone needs to be able to grow more food. Everyone's dying. But Leland, Mississippi, was not a big city. It was about 4,000. There's currently about 4,000 people living on what's traditionally Choctaw territory. And in 1931... It was about 3,000 people. And the scientists there, they lived decent lives and they were largely insulated from the Great Depression. But do you know what is or isn't insulated from? I actually don't know the economics of how economic recessions affect advertising. So I actually can't make any claims at all. But do you know what our advertisers are?

Oh, pure profit gold machines.

Yeah, all of them are great. If you buy them, you will end up rich. I think we can promise that. Why not? I don't know. Here they are. And we're back. And so, on September 24th, 1936, James Maury Henson, named Jimmy, was born. And then two years later, they moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, so Paul could work at a different agricultural research center.

And this is why Jim Henson doesn't have a southern accent. But then they were off back to the South soon enough, and he lived in the South until he was 12. And he had just the picture book childhood, or at least no one's breaking character and claiming otherwise, you know? They kept chickens. He would tromp around the riverbanks. His best friend was his older brother, Paul Jr., and they would sneak into pecan orchards and steal sacks of nuts that their mom, Betty, would bake into pecan pies. And I know I pronounce pecan two different ways in that sentence, and I'm not sorry. Sick.

You're catching your bets.

Yeah, exactly. Well— It's actually a regional thing, but I don't remember which region it is. And then whenever I take those maps, they either pinpoint me perfectly. The ones where you put in, you like.

It pinpoints you based on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then the other problem is that I spent my 20s just wandering around. And so I have like, I don't know what I grew up calling catty corner or kitty corner. We don't have a word for it. I just like straight up don't know, you know? Yeah. Because I'm like, no, I heard that from punks in Portland. I don't know where they're from. Anyway. Jim Henson said about his youth, I was a Mississippi Tom Sawyer. I had a BB gun. I'd shoot at water moccasins in the swamp just to wake them up. He was in Cub Scouts. He carried around binoculars and a bird ID book, and he was into birding well before. Like, usually you're supposed to wait until you're 30s and then get really into birding.

Well, but that was also the era, yeah, where Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts is, you know, just sort of a good in the world. Yeah. Just to get the lad outside.

Yeah, totally. Totally. His friends say he was a good friend and a giving person. Like literally no one will say anything bad about this man except some of his girlfriends, but not all of them. He built model airplanes and crystal radios. He listened to radio dramas. His favorite was Edgar Bergen, the father of modern ventriloquism, who somehow was really popular on the radio. He was raised half-believing in Christian science. You go to the doctor for the big things, but not the little things was the general view of it.

And that's how I both grew up and am. But the other family virtue that he grew up into that impacts his career in interesting ways, kind of both positive, negative ways, was don't rock the boat. Avoid confrontation. The ancestor who fled the South to get away from the Confederacy, who just was like, ah, moving to Kansas, he's seen as a good example of just quietly getting away from the bad stuff. Like, Have the values but don't fight about it. Just kind of go.

Right, right, right. I guess.

It's weird because like normally I don't see that as a virtue. Just be blunt.

Yeah.

But to be able to like– if you spend your time searching, oh, I don't know, Jim Henson socialist, Jim Henson communist, Jim Henson anarchist on the– if that's what you do with your time, which everyone should spend their time doing– no one fucking talks about that except there's like one person who's like, I was watching Fraggle Rock and I think they're communists in a negative way. And everyone's like, don't you dare slander this perfect man who talks about peace and taking care of each other and calling him a communist. You know? You're like, this is how he got that shit under the radar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because Fraggle Rock is just like fundamentally an anarchist show. I will die on that hill.

I can't remember their structure.

Well, they... I believe that they make... Oh, now I'm just going to apply things to it. It's been a while since I watched this and came up with this conception. They do convince a prince that he should not become king, that they do not need a king, and they worship a compost heap.

That's true.

So they're hippies, if nothing else. And Jim Henson, he did go to the temple every week, but that was the name of a movie theater.

Sure.

He spent every Saturday watching the double features on the movie theater in town. And he loved Westerns and the Orientalist films. And whenever you read a biography and they're like, ah, he loved all these things that were so obviously influential on him later. I'm like, man, maybe. I don't know. You know, how much is your own myth making? I don't know.

Sure.

He and his friends would play act all the movies they saw and build props and sets. And his grandma Deer would travel down from Maryland and they had the same birthday as each other. And they would do artsy stuff together. He would draw monsters. She painted and sewed. She encouraged him to tell stories, but he was always soft-spoken.

He took after his father. He just literally, in order to do, at the end of his life, when he was the host of a show, the Jim Henson Hour, they were like, you got to stop fidgeting and speak up. And he was like, can't Kermit be in charge of the show? And they're like, nope, got to be you.

I mean, it was only a matter of time before he just built like a, you know, six-foot-something Jim Henson to help it himself.

It's just Sweetums, the giant monster Muppet. Oh my gosh. Sweetums is my favorite.

That makes sense.

I had an almost life-sized Sweetums poster on my wall as a teenager.

I think I'm going to go with I guess, is it the sax player from Electric Teeth? Electric Mayhem?

Let's see, there's Janice, I think. I can't remember who. No, Janice doesn't play the sax.

Yeah.

Which one plays the.

It's the guy with the sunglasses.

Yeah. Honestly, Electric Mayhem is also my favorite. Animal was my other favorite as a kid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sophie, what's your favorite Muppet?

It might be Camilla, the chicken. That's like the lover of Gonzo, but she's like, I'm an independent chicken.

Yeah.

So it might be her. I'm also just always Oscar the Grouch, though.

Oh, sure.

Oscar the Grouch was my favorite Sesame. Gonzo was my favorite Muppet Baby.

Yeah.

Sweetums was my favorite Muppet Show. Partly because Sweetums scared me.

Janice is cool, too. I always forget about Janice for some reason. Sweetums is adorable.

Zoot on saxophone.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, his name was Zoot. I don't think he talks.

And if he does, he talks real cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was just going to say, I think if I was to make Robert Evans a Muppet, he'd be animal.

Oh, sure.

Making noises.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim Henson's first performance was a classic. He was in Cub Scouts, and his friend gave a very serious monologue in a deadpan voice with his arms at his side, while Jim Henson stuck his arms through the armpits to pretend to be the arms and did really silly things. And then when he was 12, he moved back into Maryland.

If this was any other biography, he'd be like, and it was tragic and I lost all my friends or whatever. He's just like, all right, now I'm in Maryland now.

Fuck it.

Fucking always look on the bright side of life. In 1949, he's 12 or 13 years old. He's at a friend's house and he sees television for the first time. And he falls in love. TV was a big deal. Never before had people been able to see something happening far away while it was happening. And when they first came out, televisions were expensive and weird for people to have. The U.S.

was a radio nation. But that did not last. Which is funny because we've gone full circle because we are podcast nation America.

Yeah. Well, we're tiny, tiny dumb TVs.

Yeah, that's true. We're actually a TikTok real nation.

Yeah. Yeah. And if we could pay attention for a shorter amount of time, we would.

Yeah.

It was possible to monetize something even shorter. We would be doing it.

Didn't we try that? Wasn't that.

Quibi?

Wasn't it Quibi?

No, Quibi's are too long.

No, it was Vines. Vines were... No, Vines were like... How long were Vines?

15 seconds.

Yeah. Well, he's going to make his first big break in TV making six-second advertisements.

No.

He makes 179 of them. He would have fucking killed in the modern era.

Except.

I'm not sure how he would have felt about AI.

Oh, yeah.

He was a huge believer in new technology. Although, even with computer animation, he wanted what his big innovation was, was computer animation that you could still control with physical apparatus.

Yeah. I think if you actually understand AI, it's certainly not impressive or creative work.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't want to put that on him. He certainly likes CG, and that's fine.

Yeah.

But Jim spent about a year bugging his parents that they needed a TV. And then in 1915, 1950, they broke down and they got their kid a TV. Here, they could watch the four channels in the D.C. area at the time. And he watched variety shows every chance he got. And he was like, this is it. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make TV shows.

Hell, yeah.

He has no interest in puppets, though. None at all. It doesn't even occur to him that he would care about puppets. And he's doing creative shit whenever he can. His first published comic was a one-panel cartoon. It was in the Christian Science Monitor. And he spent time with his brother riding bikes around D.C. in Rock Creek Park.

They rode a tandem bike together. They dumpstered a pump organ and fixed it up so that mom could play it and the kids would sing.

Whoa.

And he just had a nice childhood with no major crises.

Yeah.

That's cool.

I know. a tandem bike is the wildest thing I can think of, honestly.

I know.

I only think of them as confiances for Muppets.

I can think of them as like Manic Pixie Dream Girl machines.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's fictional people in Portland who you go on dates with who take you on tandem bikes.

But no one that's like.

They don't take me on dates.

Well, maybe that's... Maybe you need to get a bike, attach it to the back of another bike.

Yeah, you just need a Kermit.

Or something.

Although Kermit did not appreciate Miss Piggy. That's what I was going to say. That's why I said it.

Or something.

Physically assaulted him on a regular basis.

You know what? I support women's wrongs.

Yeah, totally.

I really see it from both sides.

Yeah, especially when you think about the man who made the Muppets. Anyway, we'll get to that. So he went to Northwestern High School. He played tennis and he painted sets for drama club. Set design was his passion. He thought he was going to get into TV and do set design. And he was tall and thin and strong.

He was six foot one. He didn't see himself as handsome because he had pretty intense acne scarring and he blamed Christian Science for his mom not taking him to the doctor about acne when he was younger. And so that's why he always had a beard. And he was six foot one and he got his start as a ladies man, philanderer, slut, I don't know, whatever, young. Everything I've read about him wants to be euphemistic, which makes it hard to find concrete information about how he was going about this, because there's a huge difference in how you can go about this. But basically, he was known as fast by girls in his high school. He was always ready to hop in the back seat.

Sure.

And when he was 16, he started applying for jobs in television. But no one was hiring a high school student with no experience until a show called The Junior Morning Show put out a call for teenage puppeteers. And so Jim, who didn't give a single shit about puppets up until that point in his life, was like, all right, I'm going to make some fucking puppets in my living room with one of my friends from drama club. And they made the first proto-Muppets. And we know the name of one of these. We know he made Pierre the Rat, who was a rat with a beret and sunglasses.

Hell yeah.

Oui. do you know what he didn't make till later? Ads. But he did make a lot of ads.

Yeah, once he got started.

Yeah.

No. So it goes. Much like pitching ads right now. Like this! And we're back. So he and his friend, and I just leave extra names out of scripts whenever I can.

Sure.

I don't know. His friend has a name. It doesn't really come up later.

Yeah.

They applied for the job, and they got it, and Jim Henson was on TV. Except, you know how they just put out a call for teenage puppeteers for the Junior Morning Show? Do you know what you're not allowed to do in America in 1940-whatever? Have children under the age of 14 working.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a shame because got to get those kids back in the factories.

I know.

They yearned for the factories with their nimble fingers.

So they shut down the show for violating child labor laws. But the Saturday show hired him to keep puppeteering. And then that was canceled too because showbiz, baby. Jim's entire creative career was dictated by the whims of the fickle TV market. Andrew, I assume things are completely different today.

You're a screenwriter.

Oh, my God. Imagine just being 14 and just like, yeah, I'm going to work in TV and just doing it.

Yeah, totally. Well, partly because it was like every– because TV wasn't necessarily nationally syndicated on a regular basis.

Right.

It was the difference between like community access and for-profit community access and then national. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it was– okay, I know less about public access and stuff like that. But I know that it was being shot live, right? It was kind of like how old-timey radio– I didn't quite realize this. Old-timey radio was like mostly live for a while. There was a period when the Musicians Guild or Union or whatever was like, no, you can't play pre-recorded shit on the radio. And they enforced it. And it was like all radio was live presentations of music. Hell, yeah.

It's kind of cool.

I know. Yeah. I remember talking to someone in showbiz who was talking to me about what it meant to have a career in showbiz, which I technically do in some way of understanding it.

You're closer to the original than almost ever in the 21st century.

Yeah, that's true.

You're back.

And basically he was like, look, if you find something you love and that pays you well, never expect to get more than about seven years out of it. You always have to have the next thing lined up because that's just the way that this fucking thing goes. But not me. Cool people till the sun devours the earth.

It's going to totally work. Because I'm going to live forever. There's no way I'm going to die young from not going to the... I got to admit, it a little bit spooked me because when I read about it, just like.

Yeah. I had a similar thing. I didn't have as strong probably an aversion to going to the doctor.

Or I only.

Pretty recently started being like, all right, I'll take an over-the-counter drug.

Yeah.

I didn't even have it in the house. I was just like, I don't know.

Yeah, you're like a headache. That's just the thing you suffer with and then it goes away.

Have some water and a nap.

Yeah. Turns out there's actually a thing you can just take that lets you keep going. But I'm like, why would you keep going? Your body's telling you to take a break.

I think that's a little bit the boat that I'm in, but it's like, I don't know if that's the best boat.

Dear audience, don't do what Margaret and Andrew do.

Just have a thing that helps you.

Yeah. There's essentially no reason not to.

Yeah. What I'm ultimately saying is even though we have different results of how the mindset has manifested, I do ultimately at the heart basically have RFK Jr. 's beliefs about how health should work. I don't like.

You don't want to put that on people.

I think at the end of the day, I'm basically like, it's kind of my own fault for not doing X or Y healthy thing.

Yeah.

And therefore... I don't deserve an aspirin.

Yeah, totally. Like, I didn't drink enough water and walk my 15,000 steps today.

I genuinely think that's basically what is my problem.

Yeah.

I'm drinking what the internet calls a fridge cig right now, a.k.a. a Diet Coke.

Okay, we're going to take a small diversion to say I got zero sugar, blackberry, diet pepper, and holy shit, it is the best drink I've ever had in my life.

Say more.

Man, I can't with anything with no sugar in it. I wish I did. Because I don't drink sugar either.

I love the no sugar soda, I think.

I just... It's like, I'm the equivalent of a soap taster to cilantro with all fake sugars.

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

They just all taste... I was like, why does this protein bar taste like garbage? And I was like, oh, it has stevia in it. It might as well be just like trash from the street.

Yeah.

Only I used to eat trash from the street, so it's worse than trash in the street.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I just don't mind the taste. And I love a crazy-ass soda.

I love a soda, a very unexpected soda, where you're like, wow, I had no idea this was going to taste this way. I think I love it.

Why did you even bother doing that? Yeah.

See, I'll go with the, like, Spindrift seltzers that have, like, five calories, like, just enough juice in them to actually have a taste. Yeah, yeah, those are good. And kombucha I finally became convinced on, although I think that just has sugar in it, honestly.

It does.

This is great. Thank you for indulging me.

Absolutely. We live in a little treat economy. You're like, I'm going to reward myself for getting through my garbage day by spending $ 6 on a thing that I don't need that will bring me that small little bit of joy, you know?

Yeah.

So not Jim Henson. He lives in perfect America utopia land. I'm sure his life had complications and it's just no one's talking about them.

Yeah.

And also they're maybe just not newsworthy complications.

Yeah, totally. And he was doing TV and going to school. Actually, that's interesting too, right? Because like people claim that you have to suffer to make good art.

Yeah.

And like Jim Henson has some stuff in his life. You don't go through life without stuff, right? But like you couldn't describe this man as having suffered. Right.

I think that suffer, yeah, suffer is the thing that you got to like define as That's also– not hate, but one of the reasons that phrase is so troubling to me is like it really like, you know, sort of glorifies or like something, you know, just like puts this nobility on suffering that it's like, oh, see, it's okay that you're, you know, suffering for X or Y reason.

Almost always it's like economic. It's like you should enjoy this.

And what he did is he worked himself to death, but he was happy the whole fucking time.

Yeah, yeah.

He was like, I'm doing what I love, and I feel like I only got so many hours to live in this life. So he's just like full YOLO, running straight forward, you know?

Yeah.

And so he's doing TV. He's 16, 17. He's doing TV. He's going to school. And he started working as a set designer for Circle 4 Ranch, a singing cowboy show. And soon they had him doing puppets on that show, two cowboys called Shorthorn and Longhorn. And the contract referred to them as Muppets. This is before they start getting anything that's called Muppets is the earliest time that anyone's tracked it down. And the usual history is that Muppet combines marionette and puppet. But the Muppets don't really use marionettes.

The biographer Brian J. Jones suspects that Jim was subconsciously inspired more by the word Muppet. With like an O, which is an old-timey word for ragdoll that is familiar to most people only because it was spoken once by a pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Sure.

But it was the title of a TV show that he almost certainly saw, Hoppity Skippity and the Moppet movies. And Hoppity Skippity and the Moppet movies sounds like a fucking Muppet thing.

Yeah.

So that's really easy for me to believe is the origin.

Hoppity Skippity and the Muppet movies also sounds like, you know, like your mom trying to remember the title of like a Muppet movie.

Totally.

You know, Hoppity Skippity, Muppet something.

Your weird Muppet movies with the Pokemon in it. And Shorthorn and Longhorn and Circle 4 Ranch also got canceled. They were just cycling through shows back then.

Sure.

Because.

I feel like there's probably more leeway now that there's more than four channels. You know?

I don't... But I don't... I mean, that's... Listen, again, we're back. We're back to the, like, eh, one or two seasons. Nothing gets a runway.

I know. I notice everything's one or two seasons now. I finally start liking a show. And then it's gone. And then it's gone.

Yeah.

I heard that Star Trek Academy is fucking over. And that sucks.

I mean, partially it's because the underlying contracts... Talent gets more expensive at season three or season four, depending on the context.

Oh, so it's like, oh, it's the equivalent of, oh, you have to make you full-time now? Never mind, you're fired. I don't want to give you health insurance. It's like that, but for actors.

I mean, there's other reasons. It's also... speaking for myself, not on behalf of any other pieces of the entertainment industry, but it's also this sort of like the tech and shitification of all industries is entertainment. So they're, you know, they're like really not able to see like long-term anything, basically.

They're sort of like a velociraptor for financial forecasts. Cause it's like, yeah, you know, I worked on like a multicam on Netflix and we had a 10 episode season, even though the underlying economic business models of multicam as you build this fucking set once and you make 100 episodes because it's like so cheap to do so when you you know amortize it over many and many episodes yeah yeah it's just like i don't know they don't take like economics 101 they take like, you know, fraud economics 405.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

I'm like thinking about the like, and shitification of everything and how I'm like, I don't like being like, things are so great in the middle of the 20th century. Like, yeah, for fucking who? Which Jim Henson is aware of and he's like involved in civil rights shit. But like, that makes me sad.

I think what you can say is that like, however, like bad shit was socially, I think we are on like, the part of the arc of capitalism that's the... Oh, the down part? The inarguable down part for everyone. Like, it's always had down parts, but now it's like the overall trend is down. Yeah.

Like, Jim Henson's life would be way harder right now.

Yeah.

If he was this age at... Yeah, totally.

Despite all the nice things he had. Yeah.

Yeah, if he'd been born in 2006 instead of 1936. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he graduated high school after his show gets canceled. And he's doing this in fucking high school. He graduates high school and he heads off to University of Maryland, which is basically right next door. And he keeps living with his parents so he doesn't have to pay rent. And he starts off in the fine arts department, but he likes practical shit too much. And there's a practical arts department now. And it does stuff like stage design and puppetry.

And best of all, for young Jim Henson. It was in the home economics department, which meant that there were literally a hundred women to every man.

Hell yeah.

And Jim Henson recalls this period of his life very fondly. He was in heaven. And if college and puppeteering on TV wasn't enough, he opens a silk screen shop and gets hired to design and print posters for student events. And he joins the puppet class. It's a senior level class when he's a freshman. And the teacher was a silversmith who didn't know shit about puppets. They just were like, all right, we need someone to teach puppets. You're our guy.

And he's like, I don't know anything about puppets. They're like, we don't care. And so basically, he takes over the class. He starts teaching the class when he is a freshman in the senior class.

I guess he has professional experience. Like, who else is going to do it?

No, it makes sense. And Later, his wife, in a mostly negative way of describing some things, is going to say that, like, Jim Henson is a natural leader and she was a natural follower, which is, like, not how I would go about describing things. But he was a natural leader in terms of, like, charisma and the ability to try and, like, actually, like, find what's best about people and bring it out, you know? And there's one woman in that class that he takes over who does not catch his eye romantically, but instead catches his eye professionally.

A senior who is naturally gifted with the puppets, Jane Nebel. Eventually, Jane Nebel Henson. But that comes several years later. And Jane Nebel Henson, her father is a professional astrologer. Because I guess that's a job.

That's crazy.

It's not a job I think of as like the 1940s and 50s, you know?

Yeah.

Or even just calling it that. I guess it's more the name of the title. It's like that job function, I buy it. I don't know. Calling it in the 50s astrologer is.

Yeah. He wrote a bunch of books about it.

Yeah.

Sure.

And the two started working together right away. And they started working for a variety show called Afternoon in 1955. Because people weren't as creative with TV names.

Well, they didn't have to be. Yeah. It wasn't taken.

Yeah. It's in the afternoon. Yeah. The only competition is the afternoon show on Channel 4.

Everyone knows the difference.

And they, the performers, Jane and Jim, were called the Muppets. They'd be like, oh, we'll be back on later with the Muppets. And it was the performers. And they had to have a new skit every single day, I believe five days a week, with basically no downtime. And they just did. And they always had to do it live because the shows weren't taped. And mostly these early puppet shows that they're doing, they're just lip syncing puppets to novelty songs, like the equivalent of Weird Al Yankovic.

Oh, sure.

And they're just going like, mer, mer, mer, mer with their people. You all can see my hands, but no one else can see my hands. There's no dialogue. They're just doing goofy dances, and they are not clearing the rights on this music, and the musicians are not being paid. And one of the musicians that they used all the time, like, later, like, stormed down there and be like, what the fuck, man?

And then he, like, saw the thing, and he was like, oh, you all are awesome. This is so cute. I love it. You can keep doing it. And Jim keeps trying to quit and do something else behind the scenes. He's like, I'm not a fucking puppeteer. I'm an artiste, you know? And they're like, nah, stick with the puppets.

Yeah.

Eventually, Jane and Jim were given their own four-minute slot for their own show, Sam and Friends, in 1955. And it played immediately before or after the evening news. And that's really good. Prime time, as it were, although I think it's like a late news, so it's not as prime time. And Sam was a human puppet, not like a person in a costume, but, you know, like a– Right.

Not a monster, just a human. Right, right, right. And his friends were a beatnik named Harry the Hipster, a skull named Yorick, who like would often just like eat the other characters.

Sure.

A bunch of other weird muppets named Hank and Frank and Mushmelon. And had kind of a Calvin and Hobbes vibe. Sam was real and the rest of his friends were imaginary forces within him that helped him sort out what to do. So that kind of a highbrow concept for a four-minute daily show that involved usually each one ended with someone getting blown up or eaten.

Yeah, yeah.

And he used the camera like no other TV puppeteer ever had. Instead of like filming a puppet stage, he realized that the camera is the stage, right? Yeah. He didn't need to build another frame in. And he made the puppets be part of the TV show like actors on any show. And old puppets were meant to be seen from 20 feet away. But the Muppets had to be available for close-ups. They had to have dynamic, expressive faces.

Up until that point, most puppets for this kind of work tended to have less expressive faces, usually ones that were literally wooden. It's in order to be realistic looking, right? One of the revolutionary ideas of the Muppets was that expressivity is more important than realism. People are actually better able to connect to something that looks less human. Like I read this book about cartooning a long time ago and it's talking about how like people actually can see themselves in stick figures better. Like the comic strips that last are not the ones that are perfectly clearly rendered, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the nice part about comics and the bad part about AI is it doesn't need to be human or even human for at least some percentage of the population to be like, yeah.

Yeah, you don't even have to be able to see it. It could just literally be the computer program and you're like, that's alive.

Yeah, as a soul.

Yeah, we are really desperate to ensoul everything except the food we eat. Sorry, yeah. Oh, and people, yeah. Yeah. And he also, the other thing that he did, I believe that Shane and he did, that he actually does own up to that he gets too much of the credit, but that he gets too much of the credit for.

He set up TV monitors backstage where the puppeteers could see live what they were doing. And so that was like a huge step up in terms of them to be able to actually like react and act and do all this stuff. It had a big learning curve because you had to kind of work mirrored and stuff, you know? Yeah.

Yeah.

And meanwhile, his grandfather, Pop, was dying. And Jim used to spend hours at a time at Pop's deathbed. And while he was doing that, he's like 19 or so, he cut up his mom's blue fleece coat and sewed it into a puppet with ping pong halves for eyes, like the simplest puppet that he had made. And he called it Kermit. And it wasn't a frog, not yet, but it was Kermit. And Kermit was born to cheer up a dying man. And Kermit wound up on Sam and Friends, of course, and the whole thing was a hit.

And Jim and Jane had a Muppet on each arm, and they did a new show every single fucking day, which, again, Sophie, I have no idea. Could you imagine having to do a show every single day? Check me out sometimes as a guest on The Daily Show. It could happen here. That Sophie is also a producer on. And Jane graduated and went off to Catholic University for a master's degree and still recorded for the afternoon show every day and Salmon Friends every night. And they still aren't dating. She's engaged to someone. He's engaged to someone. But he's also just sleeping around.

Hensing it up.

He's what?

He's hensing it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That should be the verb is bringing delight to everyone. And they also they made money. They made not great money, but not terrible. He got $ 5 a show at first, about $ 60 today. And then he was getting $ 100 a week, roughly $ 60, 000 a year in today's money when he's 19 and in college. It was way better than minimum wage at the time. And so he runs out and he buys a fucking Thunderbird.

Sure.

He's like a car guy his whole life. He's going to drive around a fucking Rolls Royce. He's like a hippie, but he's like, I got a Rolls Royce over there, right? Later, he's going to, when the Muppet show is huge, he's going to buy a sports car with the little pop-up headlights and paint the whole thing Kermit green.

Oh, that's so rad.

I know. And the network tried to cancel Salmon Friends because they were just like, just canceling shit randomly to try things. And they were flooded with viewers demanding that they wanted Salmon Friends back. And It came back on, but then it was three nights a week instead of five, and then it was canceled again, and then yada, just fucking back and forth all the time. And then in 1956, the big bad thing happens in his life. When he is 19 years old, Paul Jr., his best friend and his older brother, dies in a car accident, age 23.

And neither Jim nor his mom, Betty, ever really got over Paul's death.

Yeah.

Betty lost some of her spark, her lust for life. And Jim poured his sadness into his art. And okay, as a tangent, I used to dislike hippies. I kind of was one, but I was no, I'm a goth. I'm not a hippie. Because I thought it was strange to pretend like everything is happy all the time, right? But Jim Henson is kind of the perfect example of a hippie creator. And it helps me understand it better.

It's not At least when I understand it, it's not about superficially papering over the sorrows of the world with faux happiness and pretending everything's fine. It's about like trying to put on a smile and optimism and channel sadness into beauty. And that's not really a fully fledged thought. But Kermit is a melancholic frog. And that's part of what makes him so believable and capable of producing so much joy.

Yeah, he's got problem. I mean, his most iconic face is the kind of like.

Yeah, totally. Totally. But yeah, in their early heyday as a professional pair, Jane was more famous for the Muppets because she was the press darling. He's like a weird acne-scarred kid who lives with his parents, you know? And she's like artsy and earthy and hangs out in the art scene and she makes ceramics. And that's where we're going to leave it for today. And when we come back, Jim Henson is going to do everything we know him for.

Yeah, we're only in preamble. Well, we've made Kermit. We've met Kermit.

Yeah, we've met Kermit. Blue Kermit.

We got the Magpie Context episode.

Yeah.

I loved it. Yeah. Anyway, how are you feeling about Jim Henson?

I mean, look, still good.

Still good. Sad he lost his brother. That's brutal.

Yeah, I grew up in that kind of like hippie town where I'm like, guys like Jim Henson were like a lot of my friends' dads.

Yeah, totally.

But, It's good to walk the road towards they were still good guys. Yeah. I do think a lot of those guys are like big Trump guys now or if they're alive and da-da-da. You know, hippies really fell off a cliff.

Yeah. Jim Henson's like one of the people that was like trying to keep them on the cliff.

Yeah. You know? Yeah.

I kept reading things that would talk about how he kept butting heads with people because he was non-confrontational. So if they would try and butt heads, he'd just like kind of dodge out of the way. But he kept just trying to act like everyone's good. And he's in fucking show business. No one's good. And he's just like, clearly, obviously, everyone's just going to do what's right and ethical and creates the best art and treat all of the workers very well. And everyone's like, why would we do that?

And he's like, all right, KD, see your ass.

Wherever the hell Candide ends up, I don't remember the end of the book.

Candide? Yeah.

Isn't it Candide?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Isn't Candide the one who's all like, everything's good?

Yeah, I think so.

And what?

Is it Voltaire?

I don't know.

Listen.

Oh, it's not a modern thing. I was the one who was supposed to know it. I don't know it. I haven't read Voltaire.

I'm going to tell you this. I think I was supposed to. I can't remember what I read, but it wasn't much.

It was a school thing. Well, If people want to engage with the work that you make, how can they do that?

Right now on the pods, we've switched Yo! Is This Racist over to Starter Trek. We're getting into Star Trek. We're, depending on when this comes out, we've just wrapped up our, officially we're not calling them the horny episodes, but I, one of my first Star Trek revelations was I didn't realize how like sort of underlying horny the franchise was.

Oh yeah, no, they're just like trapped on a ship together.

Yeah. So we watched some horny episodes and yeah, that's where you can find me.

Hell yeah.

I want to plug Cool Zone's newest podcast.

What's Cool Zone's newest?

Go ahead.

It's called Knowledge By Country, hosted by the great Dan Friesen.

Is there a promo of it available in this very feed? Or will there be?

There'll be a trailer drop, I'm sure.

Cool.

Yeah, but the show's out now every week.

And I have a new zine up for pre-order. Zine is short for magazine. It's like a little pamphlet. It looks really beautiful, Magpie. I'm so excited about it. This is the most beautiful thing that I've ever had a hand in making. It is called The Folk Tales of Lolan Sakan, and it is five folk stories set in the world of the Sapling Cage. But you don't have to have read my book, The Sapling Cage, in order to understand it because, in fact, none of the characters overlap whatsoever. It is set hundreds of years earlier. I am just slowly sliding into my Tolkien era where I will just create ephemera from the worlds that I like.

And it was beautifully illustrated by two of my friends. And you can preorder it at tangledwilderness.org. It's only six bucks, which is part of why it's not really distributed. You can't really find people who want to distribute $ 6 zines. So go get it there. And see you all on Wednesday.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Part One: Jim Henson: A Complicated Guy Who Made Stories I Really Like

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