Actually the copies of characters is something I don't particularly like to talk about in articles but just for your information, most characters there's only one.
And also there wasn't much money in television in those days anyhow.
Andrew Terhone is a very good French puppeteer, who does some marvelous things, and I'm sure I picked up some things from him but that was, as I say, three or four years into my work at least.
At the time of Polaroid - and I did a couple of other commercials just before I stopped doing that stuff - at that point I was at the level where they respect you and your opinion and all that sort of thing.
At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.
Bunraku is a marvelous and fascinating art form and puppetry form but, basically, I knew nothing about it until I had been working for a number of years myself.
But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.
I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint.
I do remember doing shows strictly in black and white, too, so you're right.
I think my own strengths are in television production.
I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.
I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends; we're all good friends.
If anything, there's a difference in working with color in England and the color in the US.
If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle.
If you're doing a large, complicated character with radio controls, it might take a number of people several months to make it and if you're talking about a quick little hand puppet, it could be made in 2 days, so there's enormous range there, and no real easy generalities.
It has always been difficult to get Big Bird to be very pretty. Big Bird in England is much more gorgeous.
It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.
Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
My hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.
NBC was trying to convert all of their local programming to color right away to encourage the sale of the sets, so I barely remember working in black and white, although I do know that I did do it, but there was not a major difference, though.
No, there's not much competition between puppeteers in general because everybody's working their own style.
One of the first things I did was start a commercial series for Wilkins Coffee, and for that I did both character voices.
See I still like very much the abstract characters and some of those abstract characters I still feel are slightly more pure.
Since the show was done in small bits and pieces, we seldom taped anything more than a couple of minutes so generally you could learn your lines.
Somebody like a Piggy or a Kermit, there needs to be several versions and so there will be several of them.
That very first Pierre, the French rat, that came out of a cartoon thing I had done for my high school magazine.
The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children.
There was a little afternoon show that was called Afternoon. Back in those days in television, most local stations had a midday show for housewives that had a series of things. It was like a variety show for midday.
We thought it would be fun to try to design a show that would work well internationally and so that' s what we're intending to do with Fraggle Rock, and we are indeed now selling it around the world.
Well, Detroit Institute is kind of a key - probably the largest permanent collection of puppets in the US.
When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show. I never played with puppets or had any interest in them.
When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.
When Sesame Street came on - well, it was a combination - we were too busy to do commercials and it was a pleasure to get out of that world.
When The Muppet Show ended, we all sat around and said, what kind of television show would we like to do. We felt the need these days are for some quality children's programming.
Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.
Yeah, I did some small parts in high school and the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery, and then at the University of Maryland I was doing posters for their productions.
Yeah, I think we did the term Muppets before we got the show Sam and Friends - a few months after I started working.
Yeah, we pretty much had a form and a shape by that time - a style - and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put those together myself for the needs of television.
Yeah, well when I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.
Yeah, well, the nice thing about Kermit is there's nothing in that head. I mean, the whole shape is merely just a cloth pattern and so it takes the shape of your hand inside, and so the whole thing is really created by your hand, which is why he's a delightful character to operate, too.
You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing.
Jim named Kermit the Frog after a childhood friend from Mississippi.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) was one of his favorite films.
Before his career in puppetry, he would experiment with 8mm and 16mm film, often making animation.
Harry Belafonte sang the much beloved song "Turn the World Around" from The Muppet Show (1976) at Jim's funeral. It was reported to be his favorite.
Created the original Kermit the Frog out of his mother's old coat and a ping-pong ball. In the beginning Kermit was not a frog, but a lizard-like character.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!