For generations, the Muppets have been entertaining audiences with their good natured and yet slightly chaotic sense of fun.  And the remarkable thing is just how broad their fanbase has become.  They are truly an audience of all ages pleaser, from grown ups to young toddlers.  For many of us, Generation X’s all the way to Gen Alpha, they have always been there as a part of growth as individuals.  We learn the ABC’s and 123’s from the likes of Big Bird and all of his friends on Sesame Street during our youngest years and eventually we grow up to appreciate the delightfully absurdist and subtly adult humor of the Muppet Show.  Kermit the Frog may be the most recognizable character to represent a whole brand across the whole world since Mickey Mouse.  And the Muppets can even count people like Elton John and Quentin Tarantino among their biggest fans.  But what has made these characters who are just puppets made of felt so beloved by so many.  The Muppets weren’t the first puppet characters to become household names.  Puppeteering has been an artform for centuries, going all the way back to the Punch and Judy days.  But what seems to have set the Muppets apart has been the way they are presented to us.  The men and women behind the Muppets are not just great puppeteers, they are also skilled in the art of filmmaking as well.  The Jim Henson Company has been just as instrumental over the years as Industrial Light and Magic and the Stan Winston Studio in changing the way that movies are made.  What started as just a place to build and craft new types of puppets has grown into a visual effects workshop where some of the most creative minds in the industry can experiment with new ways to make the impossible possible.  And yet, even with all the technical advancements that have been employed by the Jim Henson Company to create all their brilliant practical effects over the years, the Muppets which are still puppeteered by hand are still their most magical creations.

To understand the reason why this kind of “Muppet Filmmaking” is special, it helps to understand the man who made it all happen.  The company’s namesake, Jim Henson, was a true original creative genius.  Born in Mississippi and raised in Maryland, Henson always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.  While in high school, he found a creative outlet in creating puppets and performing with them.  He attended many workshops over the years where he would meet other puppeteers that shared his interests, including a fortuitous meeting with a future collaborator named Frank Oz.  After college, Henson and his small band of fellow puppeteers created a short form comedy for a local Baltimore TV station called Sam and Friends.  The puppets in the show were very simplistic, often lacking in much detail and character, but one puppet modeled after a frog that Henson puppeteered himself managed to stand out from the rest.  The other Sam and Friends puppets faded into obscurity, but Kermit as he became known lived on and would become the catalyst for what was to follow.  In 1968, Jim Henson’s workshop was hired to develop puppets for the new public broadcasting show for children called Sesame Street, a show that took the nation by storm and quickly became a institution for young audiences everywhere.  All the while, Henson was developing more and more elaborate puppets, which by now were being called Muppets.  In 1976, Henson and his team were given a prime time slot on television with The Muppet Show, and it became his biggest breakout hit yet.  Not only was the Henson Company making it big with their success as puppeteers, but they were also doing so while take bold experimental swings with what they could do with puppets on television.  They weren’t just bringing puppets to life, they were making them feel alive.  On the Muppet Show and Sesame Street, the most magical trick that Henson and his team pulled off was to make you forget you were watching puppets at all.  The Muppets feel like real living characters and that’s largely due not just to how they are performed, but the way they are staged as well.

Jim Henson, surprisingly, never considered himself a family friendly entertainer.  It was never his ambition to make anything just for children.  He always saw himself more as an Avant Garde filmmaker; someone using the medium of film to experiment with the illusion of life.  And while we may view the Muppets as a mainstream entity today, what Henson saw with his popular characters was a way to do things in film that no one would have ever thought was possible.  After the success of The Muppet Show, Henson was granted his greatest wish which was to direct a feature film, naturally starring the Muppets.  The Muppet Movie (1979) may seem like a fun comedic romp starring Kermit and the gang, but when you take a step back and think about some of the scenes in the movie, especially those where the Muppets are out in the real world, you start to realize just how experimental the film acutally was.  It’s simple things like Kermit and Fozzie the Bear driving around in a car that you don’t think are out of the ordinary until you realize they had to rig a car to drive on it’s own just so they could fit Jim Henson and Frank Oz into the front of the car to make it look like the Muppet characters are really driving.  There are many other incredible illusions found throughout the film, including in the opening shot where Kermit sits on a log in a real swamp playing his banjo, which involved Jim Henson cramming himself tightly into a hidden submersible that they then placed into swamp water so it would leave Jim hidden from view.  But perhaps the most mind-blowing sequence that the Henson Company ever put into one of their movies was in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper, where the Muppets all ride bicycles through a park.  This sequence baffled visual effects experts for years wondering how they managed to get Muppets to look like they are really riding bicycles.  It was revealed that there was a hidden marionette rig just out of frame that helped to create the illusion, but it’s just another great example of how the Jim Henson Workshop was taking both filmmaking and puppeteering and elevating both artforms at the same time.

But the Henson Company wasn’t just keeping these tricks strictly in house either.  They were gladly aiding other filmmakers in developing more imaginative worlds for the big screen.  They worked on movies like The Witches (1990) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), creating creatures that could believably exist in the real world, while still being entirely out of this world at the same time.  Perhaps the strongest example of just how well the Jim Henson team’s talents had grown over the years was found in the galaxy far, far away known as the world of Star Wars.  While Star Wars creator George Lucas was getting help from many different visual effects companies from all over the industry, he saved a very special assignment for Henson and his crew.  In the second film of the trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas created this important new character called Yoda; a centuries old, diminitive alien creature who would end up training the hero of the story, Luke Skywalker.  It would’ve been impossible to cast any human actor in the role, so he knew that he had to turn to puppeteers to bring Yoda to life.  And who better to turn to than the greatest workshop for lifelike puppets in the entire world.  Yoda would be a lot different than the other Muppets.  Instead of felt, he would be made of foam and plastic, with highly detailed features sculpted into his face so that he would feel more lifelike.  To bring him to life, Frank Oz would be doing the honors of giving Yoda voice and movement.  The results were beyond successful, as Frank Oz and the Jim Henson artists proved that their Muppet characters could not only hold their own acting opposite human characters, but that it was also possible to have them give dramatic performances as well.  Yoda’s even sharing the screen with an acting titan like Alec Guiness and he still doesn’t feel out of place.  George Lucas tried and failed to campaign for an Oscar nomination for Frank Oz’s performance as Yoda, but regardless of a nomination or not, the creation of the character proved just how far the artform had progressed to where an acting nomination didn’t seem like too much of a stretch for a Muppet character.

One of the key things that really helps to make these characters come alive is the way real human actors interact with them.   It’s not just the case with Yoda holding his own with his Star Wars co-stars.  The collection of Muppet films over the years also demonstrates many different examples where the human actors truly make you believe that talking directly to a puppet is completely ordinary.  It’s honestly not a difficult thing to do, because the Jim Henson puppeteers are so good at their craft that they can bring the illusion of life easily into these characters just through personality alone.  There are so many examples you can find through interviews and special appearances made by the Muppets over the years where your eye is drawn directly towards the character and not at the performer puppeteering them, even when they are visible too.  These puppeteers just know how to make these felt creations feel alive in front of you and that’s helpful for the actor on the opposite end.  It’s easy to see how The Muppets have attracted so many talented people to appear beside them in both the Muppet Show series and in their films.  Sometimes, you even get performances from the human actors in the movie that actually shine through beyond what is called for in a movie where Muppets are their co-stars.  Some of the most special cases are Charles Grodin’s hilariously over the top villainous role in The Great Muppet Caper, as well as Michael Caine’s surprisingly straight forward performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in Muppet Christmas Carol (1993).  The fact that Caine’s performance as Scrooge would feel right at home in any other serious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic novel is all the more remarkable when he’s acting opposite Kermit the Frog.  It’s always a great thing that these Muppet movies have human actors that are selling the illusion alongside their puppet co-stars.  Keeping the artiface up only helps to make us see these characters as genuinely alive, and it’s remarkable how well that translates even into the real world.

Unfortunately, many films today don’t seem to try as hard in making the impossible feel real like these Jim Henson enhanced movies have over the years.  When Henson died suddenly in 1990 at the age of 53, he left a big hole in the world of visual effects.  No one quite had the same intuitive ability to think of ways of doing things differently the way he did.  A large reason why the Henson Company is now a part of the larger Walt Disney Company today is because Henson agreed to have them operate the management of his company while he would continue doing the things he loved the most, which was crafting in his workshop.  He wanted to create bold new things, and having the responsibility to run a company was getting in the way of that.  Sadly as a result of his absence, the industry began to move away from his workshop’s very DIY method of filmmaking.  One of the big things that changed was the advancements in computer generated imagery, which unfortunately was making the need for handcrafted puppetry obsolete in the creation of fantastical creautres on screen.  Ironically, it was a filmmaker who helped to give them one of their big breaks that was also leading the change that would hasten their downfall.  When he decided to create his prequel trilogy to the original run of Star Wars, George Lucas didn’t return to the Henson company to have them craft new and imaginative alien Muppets to populate his film.  Instead, he had his team rely heavily on CGI, including with the creation of characters in the film.  Jar Jar Binks would be a break through creation in character animation through computer animation, and sadly even Yoda would be given a CG make-over in the series (albeit still voiced by Frank Oz.  Now, Jim Henson was never opposed to embracing new technology to help improve the work that his team was doing.  In fact, Henson was already starting to experiment with a new rigging system that would allow him to animate a CGI character by hand the same way he would do with a puppet in something they called Project Waldo.  However, the only time this experiment was ever used was in Jim Henson’s last ever project before he died; the Muppet Vision 3D attraction found at the Disney Hollywood Studios at Disney World.

Since then, the need for these felt puppets in live action films began to wane, as CGI was giving filmmakers better and more lifelike results.  Even still, the Muppets never truly went away.  Sesame Street still provides valuable educational entertainment to young children even after being on public broadcasting for over 50 years.  The Muppets have also continued to make movies over the years, though many of them don’t have the same high quality as the ones that came out during Jim Henson’s time.  And though they keep trying, the Walt Disney Company doesn’t to know quite what to do with the Muppets that are now under their control.  They’ve tried to reboot the characters in many different ways, but audience interest seems to have waned considerably.  There really hasn’t been an adequate replacement at the Jim Henson Workshop since the sudden loss of Jim Henson himself.  Frank Oz had already left the workshop to pursue his own career as a film director and Jim’s son Brian didn’t last very long at the time top before leaving to pursue other things as well.  It also didn’t help that Henson’s hand-picked successor to play Kermit after him, Steve Whitmire, was fired by Disney due to toxic workplace complaints leveled against him by Workshop staff.  The Jim Henson Company has been in search of an identity in the years since Jim’s death, and sadly it has led to a long decline where the their influence in the world of visual effects has considerably waned.  And yet, there is still an appetite for Muppet related content.  The visual wonder of the movies made by Jim Henson during the 1980’s, including his more mature films like The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986) have a strong nostalgic value, especailly as more and more people are getting bored with what CGI has been offering us lately.  And who knows what will happed to the Muppets in the AI era of visual effects. What really made the Jim Henson visual effects stand out is the fact that so much of the creativity comes through in the construction of the visuals.  Unlike other movies today, the Henson visual effects team are building things that are tangible and present in front of the camera. And that’s what’s getting audiences more interested again in the practice of Muppet Filmmaking; the fact that what we are seeing is present in the scene itself, even when it’s a talking Frog or Pig.

There are strong signs that some filmmakers want to bring back more physical effects into their movies.  And when your movie or show is filled with alien style creatures, the Henson Company  has a proven history in delivering on that.  This was definitely evident in parts of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, with J.J. Abrams incorporating many puppeteered aliens to fill out his scenes in The Force Awakens (2015), and Rian Johnson bringing back the non-CGI, Muppet version of Yoda in The Last Jedi (2017).  Sticking with the practical effect of having a Muppet style puppet in Star Wars properties, the popular Mandalorian series also won over many audiences with the introduction of Grogu (aka Baby Yoda), a true fully puppeteered character just like the original Yoda.  But the real test of the future will be whether the Muppets manage to survive the shifting sands of the movie industry.  As a counter balance to the rise of AI, more and more people are valuing the things that are tangible and real in their consumption of media, and the Muppets fit right into that.  Even as AI media generation improves, the appeal of the hand-crafted Muppets is enough to help boost it’s profile into a whole new generation of audiences.  One would hope it’s not just the characters themselves that are gaining popular traction with audiences; that the inventive thinking that enabled the Jim Henson company to take bold artistic risks also spills over into the general visual effects field as well.  There’s a reason why the original Muppet projects like the Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island still hold up and it’s not just the characters alone.  Jim Henson knew that audiences needed to be dazzled by visuals often never achieved before by special effects.  Muppet Filmmaking may be undervalued at the moment by the industry, but audiences are coming to realize it’s value, and it is shifting movie studios towards considering more practical approaches to creating imaginative special effects without the aid of computers.  Regardless of the shifting priorities in Hollywood, we know that there are still enough people out there who have been raised their whole lives with the Muppets being an especially fond part of our childhood memories.  Tmes will change, but there will always be a place in our culture  for Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and Gonzo to keep us looking for that rainbow connection.