Wikipedia Deep Dive

The Muppets

12 min read

Jim Henson was twenty years old when he invented something that didn't quite exist yet. It wasn't a puppet, exactly. It wasn't a marionette either. He called it a Muppet—a word he claimed was a blend of "marionette" and "puppet," though some who knew him suspected he just liked how it sounded. The year was 1955, and Henson was making five-minute comedy sketches for a local television station in Washington, D.C.

What he created would eventually become one of the most recognizable entertainment franchises on Earth, spawning films, television series, music albums, and theme park attractions across seven decades. But in those early days, Henson was simply a young man with a felt frog and an idea that puppetry could be something more than children's entertainment.

The Revolutionary Television Puppet

To understand what made the Muppets different, you need to understand what puppet shows looked like before them. Traditional puppetry used something called a proscenium arch—essentially a little theater stage with a frame around it, like a window into a miniature world. The puppets performed behind this frame while the puppeteers hid below or behind.

Henson threw that convention away entirely.

His show, called Sam and Friends, used the television screen itself as the frame. No little stage. No visible boundaries between the puppet world and the viewer's living room. The Muppets existed directly in the space of television, looking right at you, talking to you. This sounds like a small technical change, but it fundamentally altered the relationship between puppet and audience. These weren't performers on a distant stage—they were characters sharing your space.

Among Henson's earliest creations was a simple green frog made from his mother's old coat. The frog didn't have much personality yet, but his name was Kermit, and he would become the most famous puppet in American history.

The Long Road to Stardom

Success didn't come quickly. Throughout the 1960s, the Muppets hustled for visibility wherever they could find it. Kermit and a piano-playing dog named Rowlf appeared on late-night talk shows and in television commercials—selling everything from coffee to computers. Rowlf actually became the first Muppet to achieve something like regular fame when he became a recurring character on The Jimmy Dean Show, bantering with the country singer host as if he were any other celebrity guest.

But Henson wasn't satisfied with commercial work and talk show appearances. He wanted to create something substantial—a showcase for what the Muppets could really do.

Then, in 1966, an opportunity appeared that would reshape both his career and American children's education. Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett were developing an experimental new concept: an educational television program that would use the techniques of commercial television—the catchy songs, the quick cuts, the engaging characters—to teach preschoolers their letters and numbers. They approached Henson to create puppet characters for their show.

That show became Sesame Street.

The Sesame Street Years

When Sesame Street debuted in 1969, it was unlike anything that had come before. And the Muppets—Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster—were immediately recognized as essential to its success. Research on the show's educational effectiveness found that children learned best during the Muppet segments. The puppets provided what researchers called "effective and pleasurable viewing"—they made learning feel like play.

Henson made a shrewd business decision during his negotiations with the Children's Television Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street. He waived his performance fee in exchange for keeping the ownership rights to the characters he created for the show. This would prove enormously significant decades later when the Muppet empire was sold and resold.

But Henson had a problem. Sesame Street was wonderful, but it was firmly children's programming. And Henson had always envisioned the Muppets as entertainment for everyone—including adults. He didn't want to be typecast as a children's entertainer.

The Disastrous Saturday Night Experiment

In 1975, Henson saw what seemed like a perfect opportunity. NBC was launching a new late-night comedy show called Saturday Night Live, and they wanted the Muppets to be part of it. Henson created a segment called "The Land of Gorch," featuring a cast of grotesque alien Muppets who drank, made sexual innuendos, and referenced drug use.

It was a catastrophe.

The Saturday Night Live writers hated writing for puppets. The cast members resented sharing screen time with felt characters. The segments were awkward, the collaboration was hostile, and after one season, the Muppets were dropped from the show. Years later, writer Michael O'Donoghue would describe the experience memorably: "I won't write for felt."

But failure, it turned out, was just a detour.

The Muppet Show Changes Everything

After ABC passed on two pilot episodes and no American network showed interest in a Muppet variety show, Henson found an unlikely savior: a British television producer named Lew Grade. Grade agreed to co-produce a weekly Muppet variety series for Associated Television in the United Kingdom, which would then be syndicated to American stations.

The Muppet Show debuted in 1976, and it was nothing like the failed Saturday Night Live experiment. Instead of trying to be edgy, it was unabashedly vaudevillian—a throwback to the variety shows of an earlier era, complete with corny jokes, musical numbers, and backstage chaos. Each episode featured a celebrity guest host, from Rudolf Nureyev to Alice Cooper to Mark Hamill.

The show introduced characters who would become icons: Miss Piggy, a diva pig with delusions of grandeur and a violent temper; Fozzie Bear, a desperately unfunny comedian; Gonzo, an unidentifiable blue creature with a passion for dangerous stunts and chickens; and two elderly hecklers named Statler and Waldorf who watched from a balcony and criticized everything.

The humor was self-aware in ways that children's television had never been. Characters acknowledged they were on a television show. Jokes fell flat and the characters reacted to the failure. The fourth wall didn't just get broken—it never really existed.

The Muppet Show ran for five seasons and won four Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Variety Series. At its peak, it was watched by an estimated 235 million viewers in over 100 countries, making it one of the most-watched television programs in the world.

The Movie Years

Success on television opened the door to something bigger: theatrical films. In 1979, The Muppet Movie told the story of how Kermit left his swamp in Florida and traveled to Hollywood, picking up the other Muppets along the way. The film was a critical and commercial triumph, featuring celebrity cameos, original songs (including "Rainbow Connection," which was nominated for an Academy Award), and a surprisingly emotional core.

What made the Muppet films work was their peculiar sincerity. They were silly—absurdly, anarchically silly—but they also had genuine heart. Kermit believed in his dreams. Fozzie desperately wanted to make people laugh. Miss Piggy loved with a passion that was both ridiculous and touching. The films invited you to laugh at the Muppets while also rooting for them.

The Great Muppet Caper followed in 1981, a caper comedy set in London. The Muppets Take Manhattan came in 1984, telling the story of the Muppets trying to stage a Broadway show. Together, the three films received four Academy Award nominations.

The Disney Negotiations

By the late 1980s, the Muppets had become a major entertainment property, and the Walt Disney Company wanted to buy them. In 1989, Jim Henson entered negotiations with Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Disney offered $150 million for Jim Henson Productions, which would include the Muppets.

Eisner also wanted to acquire the Sesame Street characters, but Henson refused. Those characters belonged to a nonprofit educational organization, and Henson considered selling them to a for-profit entertainment company to be, in his words, a "non-starter."

On August 28, 1989, Disney and Henson announced their agreement at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park in Florida. Plans were unveiled for Muppet attractions at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland. A television special, The Muppets at Walt Disney World, was produced to celebrate the merger.

Then Jim Henson died.

On May 16, 1990, just ten days after that television special aired, Henson passed away suddenly from toxic shock syndrome caused by a bacterial infection. He was 53 years old. The acquisition was never completed.

The Wilderness Years

Without Henson, the Muppets entered a strange period. The characters continued to appear in films and television shows—The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992, Muppet Treasure Island in 1996, a new variety show called Muppets Tonight—but something was different. The anarchic energy felt more calculated. The sincerity felt strained.

The Jim Henson Company itself went through turbulent ownership changes. In 2000, it was sold to a German media company called EM.TV for $680 million. When EM.TV's stock collapsed, the Henson family bought the company back in 2003—though the Sesame Street characters had been separately sold to the nonprofit Sesame Workshop.

Finally, in February 2004, Disney succeeded in acquiring what it had tried to buy fourteen years earlier. But the price had dropped dramatically: Disney paid just $75 million for the Muppet intellectual property—half what they had originally offered Henson.

The acquisition was complicated by decades of tangled rights. Disney got most of the Muppet characters and their film library, but not the Sesame Street Muppets (owned by Sesame Workshop), not the Fraggle Rock characters (retained by the Henson Company), and not several films whose distribution rights belonged to other studios.

Even the word "Muppet" became legally complex. It's now a Disney trademark, but Sesame Workshop licenses the term from Disney to continue describing Big Bird and friends as Muppets.

The Disney Revival

For several years after the acquisition, Disney seemed unsure what to do with the Muppets. They appeared in a television movie, some YouTube videos, and various promotional materials, but nothing captured the old magic.

Then in 2011, actor and writer Jason Segel convinced Disney to let him make a new Muppet movie. Segel had grown up loving the Muppets and wanted to introduce them to a new generation while honoring what made them special. The film he co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller, simply titled The Muppets, was a love letter to the characters—a story about the Muppets reuniting after years of separation to save their old theater.

The movie was a critical and commercial success. It became the highest-grossing puppet film of all time and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Man or Muppet." In March 2012, the Muppets received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—not individual stars for Kermit or Miss Piggy, but a collective star for the Muppets as a whole.

A sequel, Muppets Most Wanted, followed in 2014. It received positive reviews but disappointed at the box office, and Disney's enthusiasm seemed to cool again.

The Uncertain Present

The Muppets have continued to appear in various projects—a mockumentary-style television series in 2015 (canceled after one season), a Halloween special in 2021, a streaming series about the Muppet house band called The Muppets Mayhem in 2023. But none have recaptured the cultural centrality the characters enjoyed during their 1970s and 1980s peak.

Part of the challenge is that the Muppets were always fundamentally a live performance medium. The magic came from watching skilled puppeteers bring these characters to life in real time, improvising and responding to their environment. Jim Henson understood this instinctively—he knew that what made Kermit feel real wasn't just the puppet, but the person inside it.

Today, many of the original performers have retired or died. New puppeteers have taken over the characters, and while they're skilled, something intangible has shifted. The characters look the same, but they feel different—like hearing a cover band play your favorite songs.

The Legacy

Despite the uncertainty of their present, the Muppets' place in cultural history is secure. They've been recognized by the American Film Institute, the Library of Congress, and both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. They pioneered a form of entertainment that was simultaneously for children and adults, silly and sincere, anarchic and heartfelt.

More than that, they proved that puppets could be real characters—not just props or novelties, but beings with personalities and emotional lives that audiences could genuinely care about. When Kermit sang "Rainbow Connection" in that first movie, sitting alone on a log in a swamp, something remarkable happened: millions of people felt moved by a piece of green felt operated by a man lying in the mud below camera frame.

That's the real Muppet magic. Not the technical craft of puppetry, impressive as it is, but the emotional alchemy that transforms fabric and foam into something that feels alive. Jim Henson understood that magic better than anyone, and he built an empire on it.

The empire has changed hands several times since he died. The characters have been rebooted and reimagined and licensed and merchandised. But somewhere in all of that, the essential thing remains: a frog who believes in dreams, a pig who believes in herself, a bear who just wants to make you laugh. They've been making people smile for seven decades now, and that's no small thing.

It's not easy being green, as Kermit once sang. But somehow, he and his friends have managed.