Imaginary Worlds - The Muppets Before The Muppets

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

In honor of Muppet*Vision 3D closing at Disney World, we look at the history of The Muppets before Kermit joined Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear. Two decades earlier, Kermit was hanging out with Sam and Friends -- a local TV show in Washington, D.C., that launched Jim Henson's career. This episode comes from the podcast Sidedoor, produced by The Smithsonian with support from PRX. Their host Lizzie Peabody journeys back to 1955 to figure out how this eccentric cast of puppets built the foundation for everything Jim Henson would do afterwards, from Sesame Street to The Muppet Show and even Labyrinth. And the Sidedoor team ventures into the conservation labs to learn what it took to revive these crumbling hunks of foam and fabric when they landed at the Smithsonian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Happy New Year everybody! We will be back with new episodes in two weeks. But for today, I'm going to play an episode from the excellent podcast Side Door, which is produced by the Smithsonian. The episode is about the Muppets.

I wanted to play this episode for two reasons. First you might have read the news that Disney World is closing Muppet Vision 3D. It's a short 3D film featuring the Muppets which has been playing at Disney World since 1991. It was also the final project overseen by Jim Henson before he died. Muppet Vision 3D is expected to close in 2025 and it will be replaced with a Monsters Inc experience. I love Monsters Inc, but I am sad to see Muppet Vision go.

It was really great. The other reason I want to play this episode is because a year and a half ago I interviewed the puppet designer Bonnie Erickson about her time working on The Muppet Show. In that episode, I talked briefly about how the Muppets came into existence, but I didn't get a chance to do a deep dive because that was a process which went back to the 1950s. This episode from the podcast Side Door works as a companion piece to my interview with Bonnie Erickson. They explore Jim Henson's early days in puppeteering,

and they talk with people who are trying to preserve the Muppets. Not just as cultural content, but literally preserve the Muppets themselves. That's something Bonnie Erickson has been involved with. In fact, you will hear her in this episode. So I'm gonna hand things over to Lizzie Peabody, the host of the podcast, Side Door. This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Lizzie Peabody.

Sunny Park Evans has touched some pretty important pieces of clothing. Washington's uniform and Ben Franklin's costumes and Lincoln's suit. And it's kind of a lot of different people. Wow, so you touched the fabric that touched Abraham Lincoln's skin. I know, it's so amazing. Sunnay is a costume conservator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. And costume is basically museum speak for clothing. So when a first lady's ball gown or a boxer's gloves or an actor's legendary cowboy hat come to the Smithsonian to be preserved for all time, they usually wind up in her workshop. But the things she

receives aren't always in great shape. Like a few years ago, when someone dropped a bag on her pristine lab table. She pulled it open and saw what looked like a pile of orange dust and gunk. And some metal parts that once held everything together. This is like a pipe kind of holder. Oh, the meta? Like that's what you find in the ceiling of like an infinite basement. Right, right.

I've since learned she was pointing to a hose clamp, for those of you in the ceiling of like an unfinished basement. Right, right. I've since learned she was pointing to a hose clamp, for those of you in the know. And then this is the duct tape. That's duct tape? Yeah. Oh my gosh, it is duct tape. Yeah. This bag contained the remnants of a puppet named Sam.

He was the central character in a 1950s TV show called Sam and Friends, one of the earliest puppet shows on television. He had a wooden head, and his body was made from polyurethane foam, you know, like the yellow stuffing inside your grandma's couch, or an old car seat. But by now, this foam was old.

And so it becomes really kind of soft, and then smelly, and then something like a sticky kind of feeling and then become hard. Oh it gets like crusty on the edges. So Sam was in rough shape and he wasn't alone. Remember the show was called Sam and Friends and one of those friends was this guy. This guy is made of green coat. Sunny showed me a puppet made out of an old green coat.

Sunny showed me a puppet made out of an old winter coat. It's got these buggy eyes. These eyes were made by ping pong balls. Ping pong balls? Ping pong balls. And the mouth was made from the sole of an old shoe. Like a leather shoe sole. And they banded in the middle, and then that

was made for mouth. And what about the, what's coming out of its butt? I know that's like a gene, child gene, because the hand has to go into anyway. So they kind of try to hide the hand and arms. So, yeah. Oh, I see. So it's like a sheath for the arm. Right.

But it's just a kid's genes. Right. Yes. This guy with the genes of his derri arm, but it's just a kid's jeans. Yes. This guy with the jeans of his derriere, the ping pong eyes, the shoe mouth, and the green coat body is actually a puppet you've probably heard of. So this is a Kermit the Frog, original, made by Jim Henson, the first one. Kermit. The Frog. V-O-G. Kermit. The Frog. V-O-G. Before Kermit ever appeared on Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, or any of the Muppet movies, he was kicking it with Salmon Friends, a local TV show in Washington, D.C.

It's the show that launched Jim Henson's career and made puppets a mainstay of American entertainment. So this time on Side Door, we set the time circuits back to 1955, to the puppet show that started it all. What did Jim Henson's zany and, frankly, unhinged characters tap into that continues to resonate around the world nearly 70 years later? And what does it take to keep these hastily-hewn puppets, most of which have seen an explosion or two, preserved for generations to come? It's Muppet Time, after the break. If you grew up watching TV in the 70s or 80s, you really couldn't escape Jim Henson's puppets.

They were everywhere. From Fraggle Rock to the Muppet Show, Muppet Babies, and of course, Sesame Street. A-K-L-M-N-O-P. Q-R-S. Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is in the letter of the alphabet. It goes Q-R-S-D-U-V. Next time Cookie Monster can do it with you. I'm leaving. I love you.

I love you too. But with all these different shows, there was always a common thread. There is this very diverse group of characters who are all, you know, working towards their dreams. And, you know, there's always this message of acceptance and love and friendship. This is Ryan Lindtelman, a self-described pop culture nerd. More importantly, he's curator of the Entertainment Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Like so many people in America, he grew up watching The Muppets. You know, I wasn't like the biggest fan in the world, but I think for a while my favorite

movie was Muppets Take Manhattan. Really? Yeah. If you weren't like Ryan and didn't grow up watching the Muppets, or you didn't have a TV, or you're Rip Van Winkle and you just woke up and you're still wondering, what the heck is a Muppet? Well, this is how Homer Simpson explains it. Dad, what's a Muppet?

Well, it's not quite a mop, and it's not quite a puppet, but man. So to answer your question, I don't know. The term muppet is actually a mashup of the word marionette and puppet. And muppets are usually eccentric and furry. Some are so big they take two people to operate. Big Bird is just a person in a gigantic yellow bird suit. More like a mascot than a puppet. This is how Miss Piggy reacted the first time she saw Big Bird.

Holy maracas! Oh, hi. I'm Big Bird. No kidding. I'm a friend of Kermit's. Yeah, we both come from the same neighborhood, Sesame Street. Oh, isn't that that cute little children's show with puppets? And the person behind it all, the creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson.

A man whose name is synonymous with puppets, or Muppets. But for all his Muppet mastery, Jim Henson didn't start off wanting to be a puppeteer. The only reason that he got into puppets was because he wanted to work in television. This is Craig Schemann, author of the book Salmon Friends, the story of Jim Henson's first television show, and president of the Jim Henson legacy. He says TV was relatively new technology in the 1950s, when Jim was just a teen, and young Jim was mesmerized by it. And there was a TV station that was looking for a young puppeteer to do

a spot on a weekly show that they were doing. Jim was still in high school, but he applied and got the gig. And the fact that he knew nothing about puppets or puppetry didn't seem to bother him at all. He got a book out of the library and started making puppets with whatever he found lying around, like his mom's old green coat, ping pong balls, the sole of a shoe, and he was enjoying himself. So when that show got canceled, Jim packed his puppets into a trunk and lugged it across town to another TV station called WRC,

where the station executive said, Here, take five minutes. It was in the evening news. The show was a five-minute filler at the end of the local newscast, and Jim was given carte blanche to do basically whatever he wanted. By now, he was a student at the University of Maryland, and he knew he would need some help with this new show, so he roped in a classmate named Jane Neville. They called the show... -"Salmon Friends."

So when he got started with Salmon Friends, you know, he just had these five-minute segments. He had this entire sound library that he could draw on at WRC. So in the earliest days of Salmon Friends, those five minutes were spent with these crazy, like, absurdist sketches where the characters would dance around in lip-sync to comedy records

or funny sounds, and there was just pandemonium. There was no real, you know, idea of what this was supposed to be. I'm sorry, I lost it up. Let's start the thing over. I'm sorry, I lost it up. Let's start the thing over. Now, let's take it again from the top. On top of Osmonde, covered with snow, If you watch this sketch, you'll see Kermit is the one trying to keep everyone in line. But if you know Kermit, you know that that is not his voice. At the very beginning, none of the puppets spoke.

They only lip-synced to the music. The first few puppets were basically blank slates, mouthpieces for whatever record they were lip-synched to the music. The first few puppets were basically blank slates, mouthpieces, for whatever record they were lip-synching to. They didn't have strong characters of their own, but after a couple of years of doing the show... Jim became comfortable using his voice and started making up voices for the characters, and they had more dialogue. You know how when a newsman is giving his news, he's so self-controlled and precise?

Well, we want these two guys just to relax and enjoy a couple moments of pleasant conversation. Here first we have... Chad Huntley, NBC News, New York. This is Kermit interviewing a puppet pretending to be news anchor, Chad Huntley. But the puppet is actually just lip syncing to a recording of Chet's voice. Why don't you just call me Kermit and I'll call you, uh, well, what would you like me to call you? Chet Huntley.

Oh, okay, Chet Huntley. That's where you kind of started to see a more developed sense of humor and something that's like a unique muppet voice that comes through. Little by little, the puppets developed their own voices, and the most distinctive of all these voices was Kermit's. ["Sweet Home Alone"] And the most distinctive of all these voices was Kermit's.

Many people have said that Kermit's personality was strikingly similar to Jim's. Jim really didn't define Kermit as an alter ego, but he did say it was the character that he was the most comfortable performing. Kermit, you know, stepped in as the sort of leader of the group who tries to keep this band of crazy characters together. And I think that Jim started to kind of like see that as his role too. Now remember, Kermit was just one character

on a show called Sam and Friends. Obviously Sam is the ringleader of this whole operation. He's kind of the most human looking of the puppets that were on Sam and Friends. But Sam had a hard wooden head and couldn't change his expression, sort of like a ventriloquist dummy. Kermit's face, on the other hand, was as flexible as a sock puppet. He was full of expression, which made him really fun to watch up close.

And this was Jim Henson's stroke of genius. An accidental stroke, maybe. He realized that if he made the puppets very flexible instead of the more wooden marionettes and that sort of thing, that they could interact with each other and with the audience in a new way. Just by changing the shape of his hand,

Jim could change the expression on Kermit's face from excitement to disbelief to the expression that can only be described as, ah, without realizing it. Jim and Jane were taking puppetry to a new level. If you look at puppetry in the early days of television, a lot of those people had been doing puppets the way they had been done on puppet theater and stage.

Puppet shows on TV at the time were like Howdy Doody, an actor on stage holding a ventriloquist dummy, or the popular puppet show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. They are always like kind of on a stage with a proscenium that creates this. What's a proscenium? That's like the arch that goes around a stage. So if you're in a theater, you know,

you see there's that arch that, you know, it creates this different world. There's a reserve, right, that you're not part of what's happening on the stage. What Jim and Jane did was to play to the cameras instead. By zooming in on just the puppets, the viewers at home were totally immersed in the puppets' world.

Jim was able to just use the camera to hide the puppeteers. It made the puppets look like they were more real. These are like life-size. They're looking right at you. You can totally suspend your disbelief. This revolutionized puppetry on television. Jim Henson later said, quote, When I began on television,

I really didn't know what I was doing. And I'm sure that this was a good thing, because I learned as I tackled each problem of puppetry. If you study, if you learn too much of what others have done, you may take the same direction as everybody else. Because he didn't really know the rules, Jim was breaking them left and right, creating an entirely new type of puppetry with entirely new types of puppets. There was a country boy named Moldy Hay.

Harry the Hipster, who's a favorite of mine. There was sort of a uptight announcer type named Chicken Liver. Mushmelon, who's a really fluffy, marshmallow-y kind of looking puppet. There were about a dozen total on Salmon Friends, including a snaky puppet named Icky Gunk and a purple skull named Yurik.

And if you think these characters sound weird, imagine what people were thinking back when the show first aired. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] If you traveled back in time and plopped yourself down in front of a television in the mid-1950s, the first thing you'd notice is that TV was pretty basic. Most of what was on television locally

was either kiddie shows that were repackaging old movies. A lot of adaptation of radio shows, right? So formats that were popular there, like westerns, like detective stories. Or news. So you didn't really have just a straight entertainment program. That's where Sam and Friends stood out.

It wasn't news. It wasn't an old movie repackaged for TV. And it was not meant for kids. I think Hansen struggled his entire life with the idea that everybody thought that he was a children's puppeteer or a children's entertainer. And that was not what he set out to do, and certainly not with Sam and friends.

Kids would watch it, but it was more aimed at young adults. And a lot of college students got into it. And you know if college students are into it, it's probably weird and subversive, which it was. Jim and Jane did whatever wild stuff they felt like doing on that particular night. But it might have been a little too far out there, because after just a few months, WRC decided...

Oh, well, we're just gonna take it off the air. ...they canceled it. And that's when they learned what Washingtonians really thought of Sam and Friends. There was immediate outcry. Really? And within days, tons of letters came into the station and the show was put back on the air.

Wow, so people really loved it. Oh yeah, yeah. Over the next few years, Jim embraced his place as a puppeteer and he told his business partner, by now also his romantic partner, Jane. We're going to keep doing this show. We are going to make it official. We're going to form a legal partnership. And we are going to incorporate.

And we're going to get married. Oh, wow. Just throw that one at the end. Remember, kids, there are many ways to propose marriage. Sam and Friends expanded from D.C. to Baltimore, won a local Emmy, made fun of politics, and spoofed the biggest shows of the day. They did a parody of Gunsmoke, which was the biggest Western at the time, so they did Punsmoke.

Oh! About a marshal who was afraid to go out and face the bad guys. By Marshal Billy, what in the world are you doing under the dust? I was tying my shoelaces. Did you hear shooting just now? But you wear cowboy boots, Marshal Billy. They don't have laces. It wasn't an easy job, pester.

But no matter what the sketch was about, many had one thing in common. A lot of sketches either ended with one character eating the other or one character exploding. Oh my gosh. Like, for the final show, the cast of Salmon Friends went out with a bang. By this time, Jim had been making Salmon Friends for years and he was ready to move on to other projects. So, for the last episode... It started as just talking about the fact that it was the last show.

And then Kermit sang a very sweet song called, I Come For To Sing. -♪ Some come to laugh, their voices do ring. But as for me, I come far to sing. The song was just about a humble guy who just comes to sing. And then at the very end, Harry comes in and says, well, yep. Oh, was that it? Hmm?

That was the last song? Yeah. This is the last Sam and Friends show? Yeah. After all, we've been on the air for about seven years now. It's time we tried something else. We're not gonna do the show anymore? No.

Oh. Well, then I guess we won't need that pile of scenery that's in the hall. And boom, it starts blowing up stuff. Hey, what are you doing? I just blew up the scenery and we won't be using it again. Now, wait a minute. And we sure don't need that costume wardrobe. Hermit's like, no, some of that stuff doesn't belong to us.

Wait a minute, some of that stuff doesn't belong to us. Anybody want this lighting board, these old spotlights? Yes! Anybody in the control room? Yes! Hold it, Harry. Help! And, you know, the whole place is just here,

these explosions all over the place, while Permit's trying to stop them. After Sam and Friends, Jim and Jane moved to New York, and in the late 60s, they created a new show called Sesame Street. They brought in a team of puppeteers, or Muppeteers, as they're known, And in the late 60s, they created a new show called Sesame Street. They brought in a team of puppeteers, or Muppeteers, as they're known. And they created a brand new cast of puppets.

And I think Jim thought that mixing those puppets with the Salmon Friends puppets really called out how primitive the Salmon Friends puppets were. Kermit was the only one from Salmon Friends to make the leap to Sesame Street. But even he got a makeover. Here's Jim describing Kermit's new look on the Dick Cavett show in 1971. His whole body has changed a great deal since the early one.

Why did it change? Is it a matter of diet? Yeah, well, it's not really diet, no. It's a matter of progressing you know in the direction of you know better looking frogs I suppose. Hard to tell where Kermit leaves off and you begin. Yes I've noticed that. Sam and the rest of the friends fell by the wayside, or literally fell on the floor, for Jim and Jane's kids to play with. I mean, that's even, I think, something that the Hensons, early on at least, didn't

understand, right? I mean, the idea that the Sam and Friends puppets were like under his desk and kind of got kicked around and the kids would play with them. Jim Henson brought the same qualities that made Kermit such a hit to all of his puppets. His dozens of expressive characters fueled multiple TV shows, movies, and became beloved by Americans of all ages. Jim Henson would eventually become a household name, because he created the characters people connected with.

We enjoy seeing the vanity of Miss Piggy, because we know that there's something of Miss Piggy in us. So I think that Jim really succeeded in creating characters that are very real to us. Now after 40 years the Sam and Friends puppets are being recognized as the ones who started it all and that's how they found themselves singed and a little worse for the wear at the Smithsonian's National are being recognized as the ones who started it all. And that's how they found themselves, singed and a little worse for the wear, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Sunnay Park Evans's workshop.

But could she bring them back to their rough and rowdy days? When the Sam and Friends puppets came to the Smithsonian in 2005, Sunday Park Evans was like, I work with Abraham Lincoln's top hat and Martha Washington's dress. I don't usually deal with hipster puppets. So I had to think about that, what am I supposed to do? And, you know, I have no idea. Sune didn't grow up watching Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. She says there were puppet shows on TV in South Korea from when she was a kid, but not with characters

like Icky Gunk, Moldy Hay, and Chicken Liver. They were a little more realistic. Like, you know, human and kind of a family kind of a thing, but not with these characters. Not a bunch of weird monsters. All the names is really funny, too, you know? And Sunny quickly found out that her task of preserving these puppets was a much bigger deal

than she'd originally thought. See, the Sam and Friends puppets weren't actually being donated to the museum. The Jim Henson Company was loaning them for a temporary exhibition. And the museum folks were thinking, maybe if we do a good job, they'll give them to us for good. So our curators and museum really wanted to get them. So I know we have to really do good job. So this was kind of like a trial period in a way.

Yeah, exactly. That was kind of a situation. Yeah, so. High stakes. I know. But you know, only thing we were all excited because they were so cute. Except Chicken Liver, who looks like a giant booger. I'm just kidding Chicken Liver, you're perfect the way you are.

Sunny knew she needed all the help she could get, preferably from a muppet expert. So she made a call to this person. My name is Bonnie Erickson. I've been involved with Jim Hansen and his work for many years. Bonnie is the creator of one of the most iconic Muppets of all time, Miss Piggy. She's carved out of foam, which is a real process to begin with. It's hand-carved with, first of all, something like a carving knife, and then it's all by little manicure scissors.

And the way we smooth them out is to go to a belt sander. A what? A belt sander. Like Michelangelo said about his statue David, he was already complete within the marble. I just had to chisel away the surrounding material. Well, Bonnie says, Ms. Piggy's personality and attitude were always there. She just had to release the pig. "...she was sassy when I carved her."

And she's been sassy ever since. Here she is sassing Martha Stewart. "...back this morning for another holiday visit. And luckily we're not dressed alike this time." Yes, yes. No, no, we are not. We are not. I wouldn't be caught dead in that. Sunni had clearly gotten in touch with the right person.

But she and Bonnie were coming at this job from totally different perspectives. Bonnie was used to working quick and dirty, literally tossing muppets. I mean, we were used to taking these puppets off once they were off screen, throw them in a corner and get the other one out of the box, put it on

the puppeteer's arm. And Sun-A was used to slowly and meticulously fretting over every thread and fiber during a preservation. I mean, she literally made me put booties over my shoes before I could come into her workshop. So if you can wear on top of your shoes. Okay. Yeah.

So I put these little... Yeah, booties. Little booties. Yeah. This was quite a new world for Bonnie. I was there on my first meeting in her workshop. There were several other people around. We were talking about the puppets that had come in. And I knew I had to use archival materials, right?

So I said to Sune, Sune, do you have an archival safety pin? At which point everyone in the room cracked up with laughter. I soon figured out there is no such thing as an archival safety pin. To get started preserving and posing these puppets, Sunnay had to figure out what could be salvaged. The outside of the puppets weren't so bad, but the insides. It was sticky and crumbling, so we just had to get rid of them. So Sun-A started getting rid of all the stuff inside the puppets.

She gutted them. And then came the hard part. She needed to build the puppet bodies. She approached the preservation of Kermit the same way she'd preserved Benjamin Franklin's suit, by creating a mannequin in the exact shape of old Silents Do-Good's body. But... My brain was so trained about the costumes, not for really this odd-shaped character. There were all sorts of books where you could read about men's fashion and posture in the 1700s. Not so much for obscure monster puppets.

They look a little different, but I can make mannequin for them. And so they all came together. But it wasn't enough just to stuff the puppet. These puppets had personalities that came through in their gestures and expressions. Somehow, Sun-A had to capture the attitude of these characters in a frozen position. She had to figure out how to make a soft puppet like Kermit look like he was permanently in mid-sentence.

She created a foam clamp to put inside Kermit's head. My hand goes into the body without the sting. So you had to reach all the way in this narrow puppet. You couldn't see what you were doing and with your fingers maneuver this little clamp so that it would pinch the corners of Kermit's mouth from the inside so that he could smile. Right. Sun-A got Sam and all his friends smiling. Line their bodies up so they looked right, posed all the puppets together,

and then took a photo to send Bonnie, proud to show off all of her hard work. What did you think when you saw that first photo? Oh, well, we went in and made some corrections. Technically, the puppets were perfect, but they just didn't look like themselves. And that gets at the hardest part of putting puppets were perfect. But they just didn't look like themselves. And that gets at the hardest part of putting puppets on display. They're not just objects. They're bizarre and absurd characters with distinct personalities. They shouldn't look stoic, but like they're about to get shot out of a cannon

or eat a bunch of cookies. Jim Henson had died of an illness in 1990, so Jane Henson came down to the Smithsonian with Bonnie to help Sunnay get the puppets posed right. They set out making little adjustments. Bonnie turned Kermit toward the center of the group to look like he's talking to the rest of them, moved Harry the hipster so he's hanging out in the background

like that friend who always shows up even though they're not invited. And I remember Jane Henson came in and she wanted to fix a mushroom and she touched him and the front seam came apart. Yeah, we were all crunching our eyes and stuff like that. By the time they were done posing the puppets, the difference was clear. You know, it really looks like the difference between a staged photo and a candid photo. Exactly.

Sane and the team had done it. All 10 of the Salmon Friends puppets looked like they were ready to go back on air and blow some stuff up. Shortly after, the Jim Henson Company donated the puppets to the Smithsonian with a few other Muppets too. So you did it.

I mean, you... I know. I'm so proud. And then I'm like a puppet conservator now. You became the authority. Right. Even though Sunnay and her team had no idea if the Salmon Friends puppets would be donated to the Smithsonian, Craig Schemann says Jane Henson had a pretty good idea all along where they would end up. Jane knew that she wanted these characters

to come home to Washington, D.C. It was her who guided them back to D.C. And, you know, it was important to her for people to see where Jim started. Just a high school student with a dream to be on television and the imagination to back it up and some friends he made along the way to help make it happen.

A lot of us who work with Jim have called him the gentle anarchist. He never stopped playing around. I think he challenged himself, and I think he had a passion for it, and I think he would encourage everyone to, you know, you have a muse, use it. Ha ha.

Jim Henson created dozens of characters over the course of a long career, beloved by entire generations of viewers in the U.S. and the rest of the world. At its height, Sesame Street played to 240 million people weekly in over 100 countries. Ryan Lindtelman, curator of the American Entertainment Collection, says, My favorite object in our entire collection is the original Kermit. Really? I think it's an amazing piece. The whole collection?

Yeah, yeah. If you go and see the original Kermit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, you'll see the ping pong balls Jim used for eyes, the jean leg coming out of his rear end, the shoe that was used for a mouth. If people see the simplicity that these world famous characters started from, I think it can inspire people,

the next generation of creators, to come up with something really, really big. And you just have to sort of start simple. Jim used to say, simple is good. Well, then he'd go on and figure out the most complicated way from PRX. To see some photos of all the different puppets we have at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, or to learn more about Salmon Friends, check out our newsletter.

You can subscribe at si.edu. We'll also share a link to Craig Shimon's book, Sam and Friends, the story of Jim Henson's first television show. For help with this episode, we want to thank Sunay Park Evans, Ryan Lintelman, Bonnie Erickson, and Craig Shemin. Special thanks to the Jim Henson Company for some of the archival audio featured in this episode. Our podcast is produced by James Morrison and me, Lizzie Peabody.

Our associate producer is Natalie Boyd. Executive producer is Ann Kananen. Our editorial team is Jess Sadek and Sharon Bryant. Tammy O'Neill writes our newsletter. Episode artwork is by Dave Leonard. Extra support comes from PRX. Our show is mixed by Targ Futa. Our theme song and episode music are by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you're listening on the Spotify app, comment and tell us your favorite Muppet or Jim Henson creation. I can say with certainty we have our fair share of labyrinth fans on this show. Just sodic. If you have a pitch for us, send us an email at sidedorr.si.edu. And if you want to sponsor our show, please email sponsorship at prx.org. I'm your host, Lizzie Peabody. Thanks for listening.

You've got a great Kermit voice. When I used to work for the Muppets and I was writing, that was, you know, when you're writing the characters, you'd be like, you'd be talking like Kermermit while you're doing, my Kermit's not that great, but... Oh, it's great. I want to hear more of it. You'd be writing, you know, and when you would write for Miss Piggy, you were like, kissy kissy! So you'd always be doing, ah, this is great, so you're always sort of talking them through while you're writing the scripts, so you know that the characters are gonna sound right.