It was 1964, and the Muppets were about to become a national phenomenon. But their creator was at a crossroads. Jim Henson’s ascendancy to primetime television had been meteoric. In 1955, he was just an eighteen-year-old student, newly enrolled on a puppetry course at the University of Maryland, when he got his first gig on local TV, filling a variety show segment with his home-made, felt-covered friends, who would lip-sync to novelty records for five minutes at a time. Within a year he was given valuable broadcasting real estate ahead of the Tonight show, while hoovering up contracts from local businesses who wanted his anarchically expressive puppets for their ad campaigns. By 1958, with two daily TV shows to his name, a newly incorporated business in Muppets, Inc., and an Emmy for Best Local Program burnishing the shelf, Henson threw open his creative floodgates and began experimenting with other forms of media.

“Jim wasn’t a puppeteer,” said Jerry Juhl, an early collaborator who would later become head writer on The Muppet Show. “He got into puppetry because it was a way of getting into television and film… that was really his passion.” Henson was coming up with ideas faster than he could use them, filling sketchbooks by the dozen, and toying with the editorial possibilities of animation. Most of these remained unfinished, and many are lost to history, but what we have testifies to Henson’s boundless reserves of creative energy. In just a minute or three, the short films in our series exemplify the restless formal experimentation that he was already applying to the medium that would bring him international fame.

With a decade of TV work behind him, Henson set out to prove that he wasn’t just “the puppet guy.” Over eight months, he would grab whatever moments he could to shoot fragments of his personal pet project, Time Piece (1965). A modernist stream-of-consciousness without a Muppet in sight, this 9-minute, percussive collage was effectively a one-man operation, following an Everyman’s surrealist race against time. Live-action cinema was a new avenue of creative expression for Henson, but being green wasn’t going to deter him. A surprise art-house hit that played for eighteen months at New York’s Paris Theater, the film would be awarded the Plaque de St. Mark (“Whatever that is,” said Henson) at the Venice Film Festival and score an Oscar® nomination for Best Live Action Short. It would be another 15 years before Henson embarked on another great cinematic caper as director, and by then, the Muppets would always be along for the ride.

Let It Burn