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Kermit the Frog welcomes visitors to “Jim Henson's Fantastic World” at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.


By LAUREL GRAEBER
Published: August 18, 2011

 
COOKIE MONSTER has an important lesson for Don Draper.

If you’re wondering what a fuzzy blue Muppet, adored by millions of children, could possibly have to do with the debonair protagonist of television’s “Mad Men,” you’ll have to visit the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. Its new exhibition “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World” shows that Henson, the designer, puppeteer and filmmaker probably best known for “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” was once quite a Mad Man himself.



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“A lot of this material I found in boxes Jim had saved and labeled ‘Old Production Files,’ ” said Craig Shemin, president of the Jim Henson Legacy, the organization that created the exhibition with the Smithsonian. “Jim saved everything.” When Mr. Shemin was working for the Jim Henson Company in the 1990s, “the production department said, ‘Oh, we don’t need these,’ ” he recalled, referring to the boxes. The trove went into the company archives, which Ms. Falk directs.

“There hadn’t been a traveling exhibition particularly devoted to Jim, ever,” said Ms. Falk, who broached the idea to the Smithsonian with Henson’s widow, Jane Henson. “The other shows that have gone up were much more about the Muppets.”

Not that “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World” lacks Muppets. Its more than a dozen examples include Kermit, the unflappable, easygoing frog whom Henson regarded as his alter ego; Bert and Ernie, the “Sesame Street” pals who embodied Henson’s comedic partnership with the puppeteer Frank Oz; Rowlf the dog, the first nationally known Muppet, who went from dog food commercials to “The Jimmy Dean Show”; the wise minstrel Cantus from “Fraggle Rock,” another Henson stand-in; and the inimitable Miss Piggy, absent from most of the tour but resplendent here in a wedding dress. (She had not been available until the show was nearing its end, said Bonnie Erickson, the designer who created her and the executive director of the Jim Henson Legacy. “But she’s delighted to be in New York and on display.”)

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With its multiple theaters, the museum can also enhance the exhibition in ways not possible elsewhere. Screenings will feature Henson projects outside the show’s main focus, like the science-fiction film “The Labyrinth” (1986) and episodes from his 1980s TV series “The Storyteller” and “The Jim Henson Hour.”

“The story of how he developed his thinking process and how his creativity grew from that make up the core of our show,” said Deborah Macanic, the project director at the Smithsonian. “If we had focused a lot on individual film projects, we wouldn’t have been able to tell that story.”

While the exhibition has an excerpt from “Time Piece” (1965), an Oscar-nominated short that Henson wrote, directed and starred in, only this museum has devoted an amphitheater to screening the whole nine-minute work continuously (through Sept. 30). A surreal, nonlinear film depicting its harried protagonist in places including the hospital, the street and the jungle, it was, Henson said, “the story of Everyman, frustrated by the typical tasks of a typical day.” No Muppets, no sunny songs.

Another surprise is the many displays of unrealized projects. But Henson often adapted early rejected concepts into later successful ones. Elements of “The Zoocus,” for instance, an unproduced 1960 variety show, turn up in “The Muppet Show” some 15 years later. “Jim never wasted an idea,” Ms. Falk said.

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Laurel Graeber writes that the exhibition "shows that Henson, the designer, puppeteer and filmmaker probably best known for 'Sesame Street' and 'The Muppet Show,' was once quite a Mad Man himself."

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=43002.0

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=43002.0