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“It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights!
It’s time to get things started on the Muppet Show tonight!”
It’s a refrain that has echoed down through my memories, and Jim Henson is to blame. Oh, no doubt he had scores of collaborators and enablers and fellow travelers along the way, not the least of which was his wife Jane who did indeed help “get things started” way back with their first TV puppeteering show, Sam and Friends, in 1955. After that came commercials, Sesame Street (50th anniversary next year!), The Muppet Show, and then cult movie classics like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. And honestly that’s just the most well known output.
This last weekend Dawn and I managed to get ourselves out to the Jim Henson Exhibition on its last day at its (relatively) local Los Angeles location, and passing through in some ways made me sad all over again at his sudden and untimely passing in 1990. I’ll be honest, there are a lot of celebrity deaths that haven’t really impacted me much. Henson was an ouch. Looking at the exhibition’s pictures of him in the year he died, at barely over half century old, I saw a man still smiling, still working, still full of life and energy and imagination. He was 53. By that reckoning I would have eight years left.
But man, what a career. What a legacy. I still don’t know a huge amount about his personal life, but Henson never seemed to suffer from the imposter syndrome that plagues a lot of creatives. He knew he was talented and he knew he had good things to offer the world, but never went full Kanye (never go full Kanye). He worked his employees hard but stayed friends with them as well, sharing credit wherever credit was due. He navigated the adult world like a boss but remained a child at heart.
As creative role models go, you could do a lot worse than Jim Henson. Nearly twenty years after he’s gone, he’s still inspiring. Still getting things started. And we can all be happy about that.