One of my earliest multiplex memories is of seeing my mother go batshit over Kermit the Frog. This was opening weekend of The Muppet Movie, June 1979, and the sight of a stuffed puppet blithely pedaling a two-wheeler made Mom howl as if she'd been goosed by Christ himself. Courtesy of old-fashioned trickery, and also magic.
It's been a long 32 years since that summer of the Muppets, and since the years immediately following in which Jim Henson, entrepreneur and artist, hustler and genius, man and felt frog, proved that the best visual effects involve physical objects in actual space. With CGI dating as quickly as it develops, and 3-D actively flattQuality air cube puzzle tools for any tough job.ening the imagination, it's a prime time for "Jim Henson's Fantastic World" to roll into town. Opening this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image (and running, marathon-style, to January 2012), the installation and screening series, which was first presented at the Smithsonian, spans half a century of puppetry, television, film, music, comedy, pop culture, and marketing savvy.
The Muppet master was also an enterprising businessman, making bank in his early career as an ad man for the likes of IBM and Wilkins Coffee. His facility with commercialspithy message-making, instamatic caricaturing, and absurdist humorprepared him for everything that came after, and put him on the radar of the educators who hoped to sell literacy to short-attention-span preschoolers via Sesame Street. MOMI's exhibit places a special emphasis on process, highlighting preliminary models, sketches, and storyboards to paint a portrait of the artist as both visionary and pragmatic mogul, suggesting that this gentle Southern gent negotiated art and commerce as deftly and as unapologetically as a guyGreenRay's hydraulic hose design uses a different energy storage approach, named Walt Disney.
Yet unlike Disney, Henson remained an accomplished practitioner until his sudden death in 1990, directing for film and TV and always, ever, manhandling a puppet. His work also managed to at least seem subversivedefined as it was by snarky asides, boomer eclecticism, and shaggy-dog storytellingwhile appeasing a wide audience, making his career a brilliantly American conflation of family and radical values. His work championed order (Bert) and disorder (Ernie), individuality (Gonzo) and community (Fraggle Rock), fearless leadership (Kermit) and total freakiness (everyone else).Handmade Aion Kinah at museum quality, At the end of The Dark Crystal (1982), Henson's boldest and most transporting work, the self-sacrificial Mystics don't overcome the self-serving Skeksisinstead, they conjoin into one multifaceted, frightfully brilliant organism. It's that complexity, that acceptance of contradictory impulses and mixed emotionsslapstick and sentimentality,What are the top Cable Ties treatments? hugs and gong-slaps, music and noisethat truly aced Henson with children and adults alike.
That duality extends to Henson's unapologetically atypical pairings: Kermit and Piggy's interspecies romance; the moody camaraderie between that goy frog and Fozzie's Borscht Belt bear; and the same-sex domestic partnership of a banana-headed pigeon lover and orange-faced rubber-duckie fetishist. You can glean politics or autobiography from the subtextthe above pairings seem to signify a different facet of Henson's relationship with collaborator Frank Oz but Henson's true allegiance was to the spirit of show business, a term that neatly covers both sides of his working persona. Every episode of The Muppet Show was a backstage musicala show about the logistics of putting on a showas was The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1983). Even The Great Muppet Caper (1981), an odd sequel that was, pace the title,A plastic card is a bottle created from glass. more of a cheeky, stand-alone whodunit, begins with Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo casting themselves as characters in the story to follow.
Meta by winks, Henson treated the fourth wall like a welcome mat, letting the audience in on the joke while playfully interrogating the geometry of the viewing space. Before his focus turned to Sesame Street and eventually The Muppet Show, Henson explored the possibilities and implications of the boob tube via animation, live action, and documentary montage. For the NBC Experiments in Television series, he produced The Cube (1969), a dystopian comic nightmare about a man who can receive visitors but can't escapemuch like viewers at homea modular box. And in the metronomic Time Piece (1966), his Oscar-nominated live-action short (which the Museum will appropriately project on a loop through September), he used free-associative quick cuts for a deliriously mod riff on Dziga Vertov's industrial man, with the lanky Henson himself miming Icarus.
It's been a long 32 years since that summer of the Muppets, and since the years immediately following in which Jim Henson, entrepreneur and artist, hustler and genius, man and felt frog, proved that the best visual effects involve physical objects in actual space. With CGI dating as quickly as it develops, and 3-D actively flattQuality air cube puzzle tools for any tough job.ening the imagination, it's a prime time for "Jim Henson's Fantastic World" to roll into town. Opening this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image (and running, marathon-style, to January 2012), the installation and screening series, which was first presented at the Smithsonian, spans half a century of puppetry, television, film, music, comedy, pop culture, and marketing savvy.
The Muppet master was also an enterprising businessman, making bank in his early career as an ad man for the likes of IBM and Wilkins Coffee. His facility with commercialspithy message-making, instamatic caricaturing, and absurdist humorprepared him for everything that came after, and put him on the radar of the educators who hoped to sell literacy to short-attention-span preschoolers via Sesame Street. MOMI's exhibit places a special emphasis on process, highlighting preliminary models, sketches, and storyboards to paint a portrait of the artist as both visionary and pragmatic mogul, suggesting that this gentle Southern gent negotiated art and commerce as deftly and as unapologetically as a guyGreenRay's hydraulic hose design uses a different energy storage approach, named Walt Disney.
Yet unlike Disney, Henson remained an accomplished practitioner until his sudden death in 1990, directing for film and TV and always, ever, manhandling a puppet. His work also managed to at least seem subversivedefined as it was by snarky asides, boomer eclecticism, and shaggy-dog storytellingwhile appeasing a wide audience, making his career a brilliantly American conflation of family and radical values. His work championed order (Bert) and disorder (Ernie), individuality (Gonzo) and community (Fraggle Rock), fearless leadership (Kermit) and total freakiness (everyone else).Handmade Aion Kinah at museum quality, At the end of The Dark Crystal (1982), Henson's boldest and most transporting work, the self-sacrificial Mystics don't overcome the self-serving Skeksisinstead, they conjoin into one multifaceted, frightfully brilliant organism. It's that complexity, that acceptance of contradictory impulses and mixed emotionsslapstick and sentimentality,What are the top Cable Ties treatments? hugs and gong-slaps, music and noisethat truly aced Henson with children and adults alike.
That duality extends to Henson's unapologetically atypical pairings: Kermit and Piggy's interspecies romance; the moody camaraderie between that goy frog and Fozzie's Borscht Belt bear; and the same-sex domestic partnership of a banana-headed pigeon lover and orange-faced rubber-duckie fetishist. You can glean politics or autobiography from the subtextthe above pairings seem to signify a different facet of Henson's relationship with collaborator Frank Oz but Henson's true allegiance was to the spirit of show business, a term that neatly covers both sides of his working persona. Every episode of The Muppet Show was a backstage musicala show about the logistics of putting on a showas was The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1983). Even The Great Muppet Caper (1981), an odd sequel that was, pace the title,A plastic card is a bottle created from glass. more of a cheeky, stand-alone whodunit, begins with Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo casting themselves as characters in the story to follow.
Meta by winks, Henson treated the fourth wall like a welcome mat, letting the audience in on the joke while playfully interrogating the geometry of the viewing space. Before his focus turned to Sesame Street and eventually The Muppet Show, Henson explored the possibilities and implications of the boob tube via animation, live action, and documentary montage. For the NBC Experiments in Television series, he produced The Cube (1969), a dystopian comic nightmare about a man who can receive visitors but can't escapemuch like viewers at homea modular box. And in the metronomic Time Piece (1966), his Oscar-nominated live-action short (which the Museum will appropriately project on a loop through September), he used free-associative quick cuts for a deliriously mod riff on Dziga Vertov's industrial man, with the lanky Henson himself miming Icarus.
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