Meanwhile, over in the UK…

Kermit, Miss Piggy, and James Bobin were busy bees promoting The Muppets.  It’s hard not to be jealous, despite the fact that we got our fair share of Muppet promotions stateside.  But among the cool stuff the Brits got was a long video press conference!  And thanks to the magic of the internet, we can watch the whole thing from the comfort of our American homes.

Watch them all, including the viral video of Kermit and Piggy’s memorable response to the Fox News scandal, below!

Click here to ask your question with a funny accent on the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

Awards season is upon us!  Which means we’re here to ride the coattails of the Academy Awards with our very special movie-themed Muppet Vault!

That’s right, we’re reprising Muppet Vault: Movies (think of it as a sequel) on Sunday, February 19 at 2:00pm!  We’ll be showing the classic Muppets Go to the Movies, as well as some of our favorite movie-themed Muppet clips, including Oscar nominated actors and memorable movie spoofs!  As always, there will be drink specials, rare Muppet videos, trivia, and prizes! All that and more for just $8!  But really, it’s just an honor to be nominated.

Once again, the Vault will be held at Union Hall, located at 702 Union Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY. The venue is near the 2,3,4,D,N, and R trains. So many options! Union Hall has a fully-stocked bar, food options, a fireplace, a library, and two bocce ball courts. And on February 19, it will be lined with paparazzi!

Don’t let the bar atmosphere fool you, the Muppet Vault is all-ages! So bring your kids, bring your grandparents, and bring your miniature gold statuettes!

Want to be the first to know about the Muppet Vault? Join our mailing list! We promise, you’ll only get two e-mails from us per month: One when we announce the next Vault and another to remind you a week beforehand. And we won’t use your e-mail addys for anything else or sell them to the highest bidder. We’re cool like that.

We’ll see you in Brooklyn on February 19 for Muppet Vault: Movies!

Click here to thank the Academy on the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

When the Tale of Sand script surfaced in the Henson Company archives, I’m sure the Henson folks were tempted to try producing it as an actual film.  With today’s movie technology, you can create all that stuff semi-convincingly with a greenscreen and some CGI.

But they didn’t make a movie, they teamed with Archaia Comics to make a graphic novel, which was (FINALLY!)  released last month. Archaia has done great work with translating existing Henson properties to comics, and the comics medium proves to be the right choice for this project.  With Jim and Jerry gone, any producers or directors would have had an enormous responsibility to do justice to their great “lost” work, and besides that, any kind of mainstream production would probably have required some cuts to the original screenplay, but this format allows us to experience Jim and Jerry’s entire story without constantly asking, “Is that really how they would have done it?”

The first thing you notice when you hold this book in your hands is how pretty it is.  The price tag reads $29.95, but I would have easily expected to pay ten dollars more than that.  It’s a lovely hardcover with a simple but appealing design, and it even has a little ribbony thing that I think is meant to be used as a bookmark.  As if any Henson fan could restrain themselves from devouring the whole book in one sitting!

I’m a pretty big comic book geek, but I had never heard of Ramón K. Pérez before this book was announced, so I wondered why Archaia and Henson didn’t choose a more high-profile artist, but now I can’t imagine another artist doing any better with the material.  I’d be interested to know how much instruction he got from the Henson Company and how much creative freedom he had in interpreting what was obviously a crazy script, but the result is fantastically readable.

The layouts vary — sometimes the pages are crowded with panels, sometimes there are full-age drawings with no panel borders at all.  Sometimes pages and pages go by without dialogue, so the art has to carry all of the action.  But it’s never confusing, which is pretty impressive for a story that features stuff like a guy getting chased through the desert by an Arabian army and a football team.

I also want to mention the colors, an aspect of comics that I don’t even notice most of the time.  Ian Herring is credited as colorist alongside Pérez, and the colors are just as beautiful as the art itself. The script is called Tale of Sand, and it takes place in the desert, so as you might guess, there’s an abundance of sand in it. But the clever, not-always-naturalistic coloring prevents the whole book from being page after page of orange or brown.

Oh hey, what about the story?  It’s good too!  Although Henson and Juhl were geniuses, not every single thing they ever worked on was pure gold, so it would have been unfortunate but not impossible for Tale of Sand to be lousy.  And it’s altogether likely that some of those Hollywood producers who rejected the project just didn’t like it.  But it’s a rollicking good time, with tons of weird, funny moments, and you really never can guess what’s going to happen next.  If you like Timepiece and The Cube, you’re going to like Tale of Sand.  It feels exactly like the next project Jim and Jerry would start on after The Cube, with similar themes and an all-around similar vibe.

In The Cube, you have a guy stuck in an inescapable prison which may or may not represent life itself, as a series of unusual characters enter, torment him, and exit.  Tale of Sand gives its lead character a bigger space to inhabit and the ability to explore it, but as in The Cube he’s hampered by bizarre happenings that are beyond his control or understanding.

The protagonist is Mac, a “muscular, stocky man in his late thirties,” according to the screenplay (excerpts of which are cleverly integrated into the art at various intervals).  As the story begins, he finds himself in an old Western town, where all the citizens have gathered for a celebration, which turns out to be in honor of Mac.  Apparently, he’s supposed to go on some kind of journey, and everyone is really excited about it.  The town sheriff gives Mac a debriefing that doesn’t explain anything at all, hands him a map, and sends him off into the desert.

And that’s pretty much the premise of the thing.  There’s no formal beginning/middle/end structure, and if Mac learns anything over the course of the book, I couldn’t tell you what it is.  There is conflict, though, and plenty of it… Mac has to pass numerous obstacles, some dangerous and some ridiculous, and throughout his expedition, a mysterious man appears to make life difficult for him. (He’s not identified in dialogue, but the script calls him Patch.)

Just as there’s no plot, there’s no character development to speak of.  Mac is just a guy — we don’t know anything about him, or where he came from.  He exists only to move from one strange and surreal situation to the next.  That’s probably another good reason this is a graphic novel and not a real film… If it were a film, we’d be talking about how a proper movie needs a three-dimensional lead character, but the visual emphasis provided by the comic book format makes it matter less.

I guess it’s cliché to make this analogy in a book review, but Tale of Sand is like a ride… There are sudden drops and turns and loops that are kind of disorienting, but it’s all so entertaining that it’s worth it.  It’s not like a Muppet production, but it’s unmistakably a product of the Muppet guys. Their sense of humor is present throughout, and as the Archaia folks have pointed out, even the western setting echoes (or whatever the opposite of echo is, as Sand was written first) the ghost town from The Muppet Movie.  For this screenplay to have been uncovered from the depths of the Henson archives and turned into a work of art that we can own and enjoy over and over again is the happiest possible ending this Tale could have had.

Click here to walk through a field of bear traps on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com

Check out some of his Muppet-related artwork right here!

Thanks to Dan Barrett for allowing us to repost your artwork!

Click here to fill out immigration form #4E.1A7Q on the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

Cut scenes, missing celebrities, crazy rumors, and story beats in the novelization all suggest that there was a lot of material left on the cutting room floor.  With the announcement of deleted scenes on the Blu-Ray (in stores March 20th), we’re ready for a taste of what we missed.  But first, let’s take stock of what we know is out there, and what we’re most hoping to see.

The Muppets Get Arrested: In one of the many parody trailers, we saw the Muppets in jail, hosted by the reliably hilarious Wanda Sykes and tag-teamed by honorary Muppet Danny Trejo.  Sadly, the scene wasn’t in the final cut of the film, and neither actor received their on-screen credit.  Even worse, a potential entertaining subplot about the Muppets paying for their crimes (which, according to the novelization, was celebrity kidnapping) and the heroism of Walter the Prison Liberator was lost to the ether.

Head Bowling: In the film, Gonzo’s bowling ball act went quite awry, but a glimpse at one of the trailers told us that he actually had some skills by successfully knocking a pin off Gary’s head.  It didn’t seem like it was necessary to the plot, since we can all imagine what head bowling might look like, but considering Gonzo’s lack of screentime in The Muppets, maybe it would’ve been nice to have included.

Giant Thog: From what we heard, Thog was accidentally built much larger than the original puppet.  So in an inspired bout of inspiration, a joke was written into the movie in which Thog couldn’t quite make it through the Muppet Show arches.  But we also heard that there was an additional joke that explained Thog’s hugeness.  Did he eat his feelings after the Muppets disbanded? Did he have a growth spurt? Did he actually claim to have been built too large??  We may never know.

John Krasinski Breaks the Fourth Wall: In another filmed-but-not-shown joke, The Office’s resident prankster John Krasinski and Sam the Eagle shared a scene in which they trade glances at the camera.  Simple, but potentially hilarious.

Kermit the Hermit: In some of the making-of clips, Kermit has a line of dialog in which he explains that he’s not really a recluse, he only comes to the mansion once a week to check the mail and water the plants and whatnot (which explains why he’s holding a tool box when we first see him).  A lot of fans were upset at this edit, since they didn’t like to think of Kermit as the type to live in a fancy mansion, let alone lock himself in.  Personally, I was cool with this personality change, since Kermit gets the opportunity to rise up from his lonely lifestyle and head back toward the personality we all know and love.  But whatever, that’s just me.

Maniacal Laugh: The Opera: Possibly the biggest complaint about The Muppets was that we didn’t get the full story behind Tex Richman’s devious behavior.  Those complaints rose even further when we heard the soundtrack and the missing operatic verse in his song, explaining his lack of laughter, why he hates the Muppets, and the key to his eventual downfall.  Lucky for us, this is one of the few deleted scenes we know will be on the Blu-Ray, so we’ll finally get the full story! Maniacal laugh!!!

Wherefore Art Thou, Muppets Studio?: It seems that we’re finally getting used to seeing “Disney’s The Muppets”, which is fine with me as long as Disney keeps bankrolling quality Muppet productions.  But strangely missing is Muppets Studios’ own logo, not seen in the intro or in the credits of the film.  Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Muppets Studio had something to do with The Muppets.

Muppet Labs: CERN Edition: Did it seem odd to anyone else that Bunsen and Beaker were the only ones in the “montage” that weren’t carried away by oversized vaudeville stage hooks?  It even seems like Bunsen, who is clearly working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is busy delivering an inaudible line when we first see them.  Call me crazy, but I bet that was part of a much longer scene in which Kermit finds some explanation for why The Muppet Telethon needs a scientist.

Redhead on the Red Carpet: After some photos leaked all over Twitter, we learned that there would be a scene with Kathy Griffin, Billy Crystal, and Ricky Gervais on the red carpet of some big awards show (Crystal’s appearance suggests the Oscars, Gervais the Golden Globes).  My best guess: It was to be included in a scene of the Muppets trying (and failing) at getting a celebrity host for their show.  Really, they should’ve kept it if only so we could’ve gotten more of Scooter in a tuxedo.

More celebrities? Don’t mind if I do!: Even more celebrities confirmed that they filmed scenes for the movie, including Liza Minnelli, French Stewart, Mila Kunis, and Sterling Knight.  I can’t even fathom what that odd quartet could’ve done, so I’m gonna hazard a far-out guess and say they were going to play a team of slapstick acrobats auditioning for the Telethon, only to be booed off stage by Link Hogthrob and surprise guest star Barack Obama.

Pig of the ’80s: What exactly were Kermit and Piggy fighting about?  In one of the tags at the end of the film, Piggy decides to share her newfound happiness with the paparazzi, much to the dismay of a certain frog.  But Piggy’s familiar attire hinted at something else, that maybe this scene was supposed to take place in 1984.  According to the novelization, Miss Piggy dragged Kermit to a door full of flashing cameras and newspapermen after their wedding in Muppets Take Manhattan.  Kermit, understandably upset about being tricked into getting married, responded by firing Piggy and forcing the two to go their separate ways.  And then, y’know, the movie.

This list doesn’t even count all of the hard-to-confirm rumors, including more scenes with ’80s Robot, the Moopets, and Gary and Walter’s mother.  We might’ve heard of Swedish Chef Pigs in Space sketches during the telethon.  The novelization mentions a bit where Statler offers the final dollar needed at the end (though it’s whisked away by the wind, and the broken money counter made it all moot anyway).  And probably dozens more that may or may not exist in some format.

So there’s a lot to hope for with The Muppets Blu-Ray, and deleted scenes are just the tip of the iceberg.  Here’s hoping we get to see everything we want and more!

Thanks to the members of the ToughPigs forum for their additional help!  Click here to squeeze through the arches of the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

Once a day, for the final 26 days leading up to November 23, David Vortriede posted an illustration on his blog.  One Muppet for every letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order.  The results are astounding.

Thanks to David for allowing us to repost the images here!  Give the pictures a click to see them in their full glory!

You can buy the Statler/Waldorf image as a t-shirt on Threadless! Click here to buy “You Call That a Pocket?”

Click here to go from Animal to Zoot on the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

TP: You were a Creative Director of the Product Division of Sesame Workshop.  What were your duties in that position?

BE: At the time that I was there, we did a number of things in that department.  We would not only respond to what licensees would bring in as ideas of what they wanted to do, we would also initiate some projects ourselves.  We would work with the licensees to make sure they met safety requirements, that they met educational requirements, that they embodied the spirit of the Muppets the way we thought they should.

Initially there were some pretty tight parameters, particularly in the educational value. When I first started out at Muppets, some of us in the shop were reviewing three-dimensional things that they were doing for licensing, because CTW — as it was called then — really didn’t have anybody at that time who was specifically overseeing that area.  For the first Big Bird, for instance, and stuff like that, we would take a look at the prototypes.  We had a Big Bird that talked, and at that time they didn’t make one that didn’t talk because it wasn’t considered educational.  Even sheets and pillowcases and everything else — it had to have some sort of a message.

TP: Like the alphabet?

BE: Yep.  Some learning tool.  Which was a very grounded way to get started. It was inhibiting initially because we thought, “Couldn’t you just hug a toy? Wouldn’t that be enough?”  Ultimately people did find that that was true in certain circumstances.  But for the most part there was a really strong intent to make these things at difference price points, so that it wasn’t just an expensive toy we were putting out, but we were putting out toys that were less expensive but with a good value, and that was really an important thing.

We also had certain parameters about advertising, and we could not advertise to the children directly. You could say something to the parent.  We also did not have the characters shilling for the product, although I must say, when Jim was doing early stuff for just the Henson company, he definitely had “Buy this toy and we won’t shoot your dog!” or something like that.

For Sesame Street the effort was to really be a credible product for kids to have, and to have some educational bent to it. My job would be also to review all the art that was done for any of the packaging, or any background materials, or any of that kind of stuff, and to redraw; for instance, we did a calendar that was art-based. I would often hire the illustrators, and work with them, blue-line them. They still use some of them, but I was working with a really talented group of illustrators, and people who more or less defined the graphic nature of the Muppets. I could give you a bunch of names, but I’d hate to slight anybody.

Just recently, last year, they invited a group of us who worked in the art department with illustrators and art directors, to come in and get together, just all of us to meet and greet each other.  Some of us hadn’t seen each other for years, and some of us had never even met because so much of our work was done at that time with FedEx or faxes, and stuff like that.

We were responsible also as art directors for making sure that we had color charts for everything, and what kinds of colors were being used, and to define different styles that were used, and I still see a lot of styles that were created then being used now in new and different ways. With computers, it’s really changed the way people work, and I remember the sort of breath everybody took when I started telling illustrators they needed to learn computer art, because it was going to be something for the future and without it they would not be able to be part of it.  I would say almost everybody made that transition one way or another.  We also had developed a group of illustrators who would interpret the illustrations and turn them into the digital files that we needed. So it was an interesting period of time.

TP: Can you think of any products that were rejected because maybe they weren’t right for Sesame Street?

BE: Oh, sure.  Many, many, many, many.  There was one that I really questioned… and that was Tickle Me Elmo.  When I first saw it, I said, “Oh, he looks like he’s rather apoplectic, but we’ll make him as cute as we can,” And what did I know?  It was the biggest hit of all time, kids loved it, and to this day it’s a fun toy.

Things got rejected because they didn’t embody the personality of the character, or because they might not be safe. One of the things that was of particular interest was the fact that, even if you were old enough to have a toy that had small parts and things, we often considered the hazard of having a sibling who was older having a toy that they could use, but which might be attractive to a younger sibling.  So there was a lot to watch out for, and certainly everybody was very aware of the fact that Sesame Street was the credible entity for your child to watch on television, and we wanted to make it the same for the products as well.

I remember how different the approach was to the artwork and everything else when I was in Hong Kong, setting up training for an art group over there to do product for China.   Their attitude toward the art and how it was applied to products was very different from ours, and it was a cultural thing.  But they also were concerned about safety because they have rules and regulations about that, but their application of art was very different, in how they used it decoratively, which was a little different from what we’d been doing, but each side influenced the other, and a lot of the Japanese product that we did was very innovative in design and simplifications, and likewise we informed theirs, because they got used to seeing the Sesame Street characters for an older group of kids who were trying to learn English.  So the products were different.  We had younger kids for the domestic product, and they had an older group that was anywhere from 7 up to 10 or 12 or maybe even older.

TP: What kind of products did they make for that age group?

BE: They did a lot of pencil cases, they did a lot of school things… They did bibs and things like that too, but they also had this whole line that was more appropriate to kids who were in grade school, and it was very popular and still is in these other countries, in terms of learning English for older kids.  That was its main purpose in Japan for a long time. They would show the show, and they produced written materials that duplicated the dialogue so they could read along. At that time we were also doing things like English as a second language and using illustrations for it, so the product division was very instrumental in defining how those products rolled out to the public, but it also was an enormous help to the production in terms of the revenues that it brought in so that it could continue to be produced, because there was not that much public funding.  There was public funding, but there’s less and less as time has gone on.  It has to be supporting itself in some way, and this is the way to do it.

There’s always that balance: How do you balance the feeling that has a commercial nature with wanting it to be purist in some ways too?  I didn’t find it a conflict, because I think everybody’s efforts at the workshop were to make sure that we did the very best job we could to produce something that was a valuable toy.  A toy is a toy.  But this is also a disposable society, or has been.  I think it’s changing.  But I think there’s a time when kids have too many toys… Sometimes a pot and a pan is a really good thing.  So Sesame Street can make those too! (Laughs.)

TP: You just became the Executive Director of the Jim Henson Legacy.  What are your duties?

BE: The duties were really defined by our previous Executive Director, Arthur Novell, who was also a founder along with Jane Henson, Al Gottesman and Richard Wedemeyer. It is up to the Board of Directors to decide on what projects we’d like to take on.  We get a lot of people who come to us with projects, and we try to initiate some projects of our own.  The board decides which of those projects we want to do, and my job is really to facilitate that, and to work with the partners that we have. We, as the Jim Henson Legacy, have a good relationship with Sesame Workshop, with Disney, and with the Jim Henson Company.  All of those entities have some interest or property rights in the things that we want when we tell Jim’s story, so we work very hard to make sure that we are in good relationships with all those partners.

The Legacy has been very successful with the traveling exhibit called “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World” that we did with the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Services, or SITES.  They’ve been terrific partners, and we’ve learned a lot about conservation and traveling shows, about tours.  Henson had done tours before this but they had ceased for a few years, and now we’re back, and this tour we have is specifically about Jim, and his early inspirations, his success and all the way up through the fantasy films.  And we have broken attendance records wherever we’ve been at the museums and we’ve also helped them, I hope, increase their membership, because that’s something museums are having a very tough time with right now, trying to raise funds, and we need to have them because it’s our history that they’re able to show us.

It’s been interesting because we were in Chicago at the Museum of Science & Industry, and people were saying, “What are you doing at Science & Industry?” and well, the whole point is to inspire people with what you can do to be entrepreneurial and innovative. No one was more innovative at the time in that area than Jim Henson.  He has patents.  He’s inspired other people.  Also, I think there’s a warmth and a nostalgia for the times that people shared with their families watching things that Jim had done. A whole new crop of people have liked the fantasy films and other things that he’s done, and are carrying on at the Henson Company.

Our last venue for the traveling exhibit at The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens has just been extended until March. It’s like coming home to have our exhibit at this beautiful, newly renovated space in New York City.

We also have this traveling film tour that we’ve been doing in partnership with the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  As I said, I went to Argentina… Craig Shemin, who has been so instrumental in putting together all these films and some of the archival material that he’s been able to dig up, has traveled to Australia. Arthur Novell has presented the retrospective in Singapore. Our agent, Irena Kovarova, has booked us in a number of places over the last few years where they’ll do a whole weekend or even a month of different shows.  We gear it for younger kids earlier in the day and for adults later.

The most successful ones are those that are accompanied by speakers — Jim’s colleagues. I’ve done some of them, Craig’s done some of them, Karen Falk, who was really instrumental in putting together the SITES traveling exhibit and knows the material really well and knows the background of everything, has introduced some of these pieces.  They’re always accompanied by a question and answer period at the end, which is fun for people because it gives them an opportunity to ask questions when they might not otherwise have written a letter – we’re there, available.

In addition to that, we have screenings, films, things that we do at the Legacy. And at Leland, Mississippi they have a museum there, and they have just celebrated their 20th anniversary that coincided with what would have been Jim’s 75th birthday, so we worked with them on that.  We have a program at Northwestern High School in Maryland.  And of course we work with the University of Maryland, and there’s a wonderful statue there that we helped get done.  We’re facilitators, I think, in anything that has to do with promoting the idea and inspiration of Jim’s work and the idea that he was such a positive person and really wanted to make a difference, and I think always had the confidence that he could do good stuff.

Of course, this would have been more than enough for our interview… but after we finished the initial portion, Ms. Erickson thought of a few more things to say about Don Sahlin, the wizard of the Muppet Workshop:

BE: Don Sahlin was the biggest practical joker — I mean, everybody was.  I believe it was Frank Oz who sent the same Danish back and forth to Jerry Juhl for years.  It may still be in the mail, I don’t know.

Donald lived two stories above Jerry Juhl in the same building in New York City, and he would take things and drop them down on strings, past this person who lived between them, to Jerry Juhl’s window. We always wondered what did that person who lived between them think.

One time Jim was having a big meeting at the office when we had these arch windows and we were on the second floor.  Donald was up on the roof with Thog, and he dropped Thog over the edge of the roof and had Thog looking in the window while Jim was having this meeting.

You know the Caleb character [from The Muppet Musicians of Bremen].  The first prototype, when I was experimenting with textures on his face and really disgusting stuff, I’d also brought my clothing mannequin up to the workshop.  Donald put the mannequin in the shower of the bathroom, and he put his trenchcoat on it, and a hat on Caleb’s head, which was sitting on top, and tied a string from the sleeve of the coat to the door.  So anytime anybody came in, this character would go, “NNNNNG!” and swing around and just scare the living daylights out of you!  You would hear everybody go in and go “Guh!” [supressed gasp] and then there’d be nothing, and they wouldn’t say anything so the next person would have the same surprise.

At night before Don would leave, he would often take these very, very long elastic bands that he would have, like weather balloon elastic stuff, and he would tie something fuzzy or something funny to the end of it, and wrap it around absolutely everything in the room.  So the first person in would trip it, and this thing would go flying all over the whole room, up and down, on the floor, and everywhere.

He was so funny, such different interests, and he was a specialist in rocketry!  He got daily updates from NASA whenever there was an event going on. These big folders would come for Donald, which were photographs of stuff they got from spaceflights.

He and Faz Fazakas, our mechanical genius, worked together on a lot of things — Dr. Teeth for instance – the eye mechanism and the teeth, and working the head and how all the mechanics of that would work. They did a lot of that together.  But Donald was always pulling some sort of trick and surprising somebody.

He also helped with special effects, I think it was during Sex & Violence… We were almost asked to leave the studio, because Don taught me how to fill the charges, and we would put little things in there that were sparkly and all kinds of stuff, and we would do the explosions for Crazy Harry.  We had one rigged and it went off, and it was just much bigger than anybody expected.  And of course it wasn’t union either. But it really was good!  It was a really fine explosion! (Laughs.)

And now, as promised, we have video, in which we ask the really tough questions.



Our thanks one more time to Bonnie Erickson for generously offering her time and memories.  Click here to wish you had a job where meetings were interrupted by Thog, on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com

TP: Let’s talk for a minute about the Swedish Chef.  How did the approach to the design change when you knew you were making a puppet with real hands?

BE: Jim was the primary mover for that puppet.  Jim and Frank and Jerry Juhl, and you probably even know the story of how that came about.  Everyone comes to Muppets and says, “Oh, I think I was the inspiration for this or that,” but Jim, if you look at his career or you look at his childhood, there are these things that keep happening that show up in a much more blown-up way later in life.  I think he met some chef or some Swede somewhere along the way, and that happened. As it happened, I only knew a few things in Norwegian, which I would say and we played around with all that part of it, but this was Jim’s creation.

Jim really did build that puppet…  I helped, I did some finishing on it for him and stuff, but Jim had the idea for it, and the sketch originally came from Mike Frith.  Caroly Wilcox did costuming and some of the sketches for that, and we can see them on the pattern… It’s really fascinating to see that stuff after all these years, see the pattern pages that we all worked on, and some of us would make sketches of what we were doing at the time.

The reason they did the live hands was that there was no other way to manipulate the materials in the way they wanted to.  It was unique — again, here’s another “Muppet look” — but you know, none of these things is typically new.  I go to see so many things that are reminiscent of things that Jim did, and then when you get into the history of puppetry you see that that’s reminiscent of something that somebody else did before that.  Everybody’s adapting these things to their own use.

The hands were a particularly practical way to approach the Swedish Chef.  The only way to throw that stuff around.  And believe me, I know they threw it around, because half the time I was sitting under that table when they were shooting, and shredding that stuff, saying, (adopts Swedish Chef voice) ”Reeya reeya runkin, hessen hetta blonkin!”  They would make up their own silly words.

We had fun.  I can only hope that when people are watching these shows or these reruns or even the new things, that they have as much fun watching them as we did when we were doing them, because we were cracking up all the time.

TP: The Swedish Chef is one of the few characters that doesn’t have eyeballs.  He just has eyebrows.  How do you think that affects the character?   We hear a lot about eye focus, but he doesn’t have eyes.

BE: If you look at some of the Anythings on Sesame Street, there are a number of puppets with no eyes.  They have brows or whatever.  They become sort of a one-trick pony, but once you know who the character is, it doesn’t seem to matter.  It’s sort of like Piggy — she’s shy, she’s seductive, she’s flirty, and her eyes never move.  Her pupils don’t move; they’re staying in the same place.  That is the skill of the puppeteer, who is making you believe this and who has transferred all of that performance into the tip of his fingers.

I don’t know what the comments from people have been about the brow stuff, but it creates feeling, it’s a graphic look, it’s a signature characteristic.  And monobrows mean things to people. So we always thought that was great. If we could find fur fabric that made a good eyebrow, we were happy people.

TP: Going back to the Country Trio… Was it difficult to create a puppet likeness of your boss and your coworkers?

BE: No, it never occurred to me that it would be a problem! (Laughs.)  It was fun. I did the sketches first, and Jim saw them and liked them and said go ahead and do it, and I don’t recall that it was for anything special… We used them, but I think it was just because I thought it would be a fun project to do.

At that time, that’s what those guys wore.  Jim was wearing a lot of country-western kinds of things, with the fringe and things like that.  It’s the period. It’s so set in that time frame.  And the Jim puppet is down at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta now, so you can go take a look at it there, but I always liked to see the three of them together, because it was such a great point in time.

TP: With the humanoid puppets that you built for Bremen, was it difficult finding the balance between puppet and human?  Was it always the intention for those characters to be humans with puppet heads?

BE: Jim wanted to do live-action, and he wanted to have the humans distinct from the animals, which were marionettes and puppets, so these were human costumes and puppets.  I didn’t have any problem with it, but I can tell you the puppeteers did. (Laughs.)  It was hot, it was sticky… I have a wonderful picture of Jim sitting with Caleb’s head sort of stuck back on his head, and he’s sitting forward in a chair with his pants rolled all the way up because it was so hot, and with these funny old shoes on…

Those costumes really were tricky, because they had to switch from performing as a full-body puppet, and then there would be a cross-cut, so we really had to match the shots and stuff like that with the puppets.  But again, it was something Jim wanted to try, and it was very different from anything he’d done before.

TP: I don’t think we’ve ever seen any humanoid characters like that since then.  Do you think that lends itself better to monsters and larger characters?

BE: I don’t know.  When you think of Dark Crystal, for instance, they’re not as humanoid, but it’s an extension of that; it’s just a more bizarre look.  It’s a much more fantasy world, but it functions the same way.  They were wearing those costumes, but they also at the same time had puppets for close-ups and doing special effect-type things.  So again, it just evolved.  The look of it changed, but the mechanism is still very similar to what we did on that show.  I haven’t seen it for a while, but I’ll have to go take a look, and I’m sure it’s rather “Oh my gosh, that’s how we did that then!”

TP: Do you revisit the old stuff very often?

BE: I do, every once in a while, and I certainly got all of the Muppet Show DVDs when they came out.  I’ve got children now who like to watch them, and when we tour the retrospective, I’ve introduced them a couple of times, so I get to see them again.

The things that knock me out are — there’s a section in there where Jim and Frank are doing guest star announcements, where they had to do one right after the other, and Jerry Juhl would write suggestions, and it’s Jim and Frank and sometimes Dave Goelz and other people, but primarily Jim and Frank doing these quick bits, and if you see them — bang, bang, bang — they’re hilarious.  Fozzie comes out with a puppet on his hand… Just really silly stuff, and those are the things that I get a kick out of.  I love seeing all of those, the revivals.  And of course with the Jim Henson Legacy, we often will do an evening where we’ll show some of these very special things that people don’t normally get to see.

TP: (Joe, to Ryan) Did we have any more character questions?

BE: I want to talk about George.

TP: Let’s talk about George!

BE: George the Janitor.  I thought he was underused. (Laughs.)

TP: I agree!

BE: When you ask me about my favorites… What is it about old men? I don’t know.  But I really did like doing George and Statler and Waldorf.  They were very fun to do, and George was very funny too.  I still have the picture in my mind that we did with Jim for TV Guide for the first year we did The Muppet Show, and they shot all the puppets we could possibly put together, and Jim in the middle as one of the heads.  When you look at those, and you go, “Oh, I remember that puppet — but look at this one!  It became famous.”  Partly because there was a look, or partly because there was a special piece that was written, or because the performer did something special.  You never know.  And we never really knew what was going to hit. Except for Piggy, of course, who had dreams.

That was just the way things worked, and so you had a lot of puppets who came to the foreground… George, after we did the Valentine’s Show, where you did see a little more of him, in The Muppet Show it was mainly “At the Dance.”  Mildred also was another one I did that sometimes got used, but I don’t know if she showed up later in other things or not.  There were a lot of characters that were really worthy.  Some of them worked out and got used a lot, some of them not so much.

The same thing has happened on Sesame Street.  They’ll do a character with the Anythings and then they’ll do it again and again, and it’ll become really popular and then they’ll get their own role.  So that happens.  You can still become a star.

TP: You built the Newsman also?

BE: I did.  Again, this was script-driven — they needed a newsman.  I always thought he had a sort of similarity to one of the Anythings that we did for Sesame Street. Sesame Street is very much circles, ovals, triangles, and things like that.  When we started to do The Muppet Show, we went a different direction, but he’s sort of a reminder of that style.

TP: And you built Zoot as well?

BE: Zoot.  Now there’s one I’d have to say is one of my favorites.  I guess all my children are my favorites. (Laughs.)  That one is because my husband Wayde Harrison and I went to see Gato Barbieri.  This was right after he did the score for a film called Last Tango in Paris, and he was playing at the Blue Note.  I always carry a little sketchbook.  I don’t always use it, but you never know.  And he was playing, and he’s very distinctive.  I love his music.  He was wearing a blue or brown hat, and he had on this sort of African shirt, and the dark glasses.  And as an aside, he now has macular degeneration, so I wonder if the sunglasses were a precursor to that as well as being hip.

So there he was with his saxophone, so I made this quick sketch that I brought in to Jim, which was part of some sketches I did for the band.  A lot of us did different sketches.  I brought in this sketch of Gato, and that became Zoot.  It was Dave Goelz who built that, and he’s gone through some changes too, because he’s bag-o-toast, the original.  That was scott foam. Beautiful blue skin, but it just did not last very long.

As a matter of fact, when the Muppet crew was here last year doing the NBC Rockefeller Center Christmas special, I happened to be up there for that just to say hello.  Debbie McClellan [of Muppets Studio] was with the performers and had been in the park, and her dog met another dog, and the two [dog owners] got to talking, and it turned out to be Gato Barbieri’s wife.

She said, “I think my husband is the inspiration for one of the puppets.”  Debbie wasn’t aware of that, but she came back and told Dave Goelz.  So Dave let me know, and I got in touch with Gato, and we went to hear him again, and I now have his album signed from Last Tango, and I have a photo of him with his son.  And his son evidently heard about this because I had done a film presentation in Argentina, which is where Gato’s from.  His son reads the Spanish papers, and saw this article that mentioned that I had done Zoot who was inspired by Gato Barbieri.  So you just never know…This is how many years later?  So it’s a wonderful story, and he’s still as good a musician as he was then.

TP: Was there a specific way puppet-building was assigned?  Would Jim say, “You build this character, you build that character”?

BE: Initially Jim would assign things.  When I became head of the shop, I would probably be instrumental in deciding what was happening, based mainly on schedules. There wasn’t anybody who couldn’t do what we needed to do.  As time went on, people seemed to develop an affinity for a certain style, and that would be taken into consideration, but for the most part, everyone was a skilled builder.  Everyone learned and shared their skills.  And again, people came from different backgrounds, and learned what needed to be learned to do it.

TP: It sounds like you had a lot of freedom as far as building the puppets… Were there ever any instances where you or another builder would create the puppet and Jim would say, “No, that’s not quite what I had in mind”?

BE: Usually it was script-driven. There was the one puppet we did that appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show called The Musician, that was purely something I did as experimentation with this carving technique, and Jim said, “Put a tuxedo on him, we’ll throw him into the show.”  For the most part, I would say things were predetermined as time went on, and we didn’t have much free time on our hands.  When we did, we would experiment.

When we had actual assignments, Jim would come through always to see what the work was after somebody was given a job to do, and you just had to wait to hear what his “Hmmm…” would be like.  Because “Hmmm…” meant that there was still some room for something, and we all got very good at interpreting what that was.  He also could articulate the kinds of things that he wanted.

An enormous job, and another challenge, was the Trash Heap for Fraggle Rock.  This was done by Jane Gootnick, and Jane agonized a bit over what had to happen, because there was so much going on in that thing.  It was enormous!  So there was a lot of back and forth of Jim coming to see what he wanted added, and of course he was also thinking of it from a performable point of view.  What kinds of things we can add later that we’re not going to use now.  So that was a challenge.

Later on, as things became more specifically drawn and illustrated as far as what was going to be seen, Jim was looking at that and deciding if that was what he wanted in the final product, so there wasn’t as much room for improvisation… The jazz of building puppets.  That was certainly true when they got to movies.  They were watching budgets, they had to know how much material would be used, they were using other people who had specific skills. Just the choreography and how it all worked together in the end. I mean, can you imagine, some of those things from The Dark Crystal, those tall, walking characters, the Landstriders? I often think about that when I see The Lion King [on Broadway], for instance.  Yes, Jim made this possible. All these puppeteers doing new and old work have looked at what other people have done and used it as inspiration, as Jim did.

So I would say… yes, he gave us a lot of feedback. (Laughs.)

Thanks once again to Bonnie Erickson for her time, insight, and memories! Click here to express your love of George the Janitor on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com

TP: Can you think of some of the more challenging puppets that you ever had to build for The Muppet Show?

BE: Well, not challenging so much, but Mount Rushmore.  It was this huge wall of foam.

TP: How big was that puppet?

BE: That whole wall was probably eight feet by six or seven feet tall. It’s huge!  I think we still have it.  I know we have the heads, that were separate, of the different presidents.

Because of my archiving of all these materials that the family has in their collection, I now have a very good idea of the life span of these materials.  Scott foam turns to dust. Doesn’t take too long.  But the soft foam, oddly enough, if it’s protected, with the glues or with the flocking, or even with latex paint, anything like that that protects it, and it’s kept out of the light and air, it lasts for quite a while.  Some of those very early puppets are a little dry, but they’re still extant.  Whereas the Scott foam or the insulation foam returns to what it was, only sticky.  Just tiny little globules of plastic.

On Mount Rushmore, there was a woman named Janet Lerman who came in to assist with some of the projects, and one of the jobs I gave her was to carve the different presidents’ heads.  She worked with John Lovelady and a couple people in the shop, but John was pretty much in charge of that building of the mountain. That was a bit of a challenge because the size was difficult, and then fitting the pieces together, being able to make it movable, stand up, have puppeteers behind it, and able to have access to it.  But it was very successful, and it was one of my favorite pieces.

Another challenge was when we were on 67^th Street in a small, one-floor studio area, and we built Sam the Robot for Sesame Street.  I can’t believe Faz Fazakas allowed us to do this, because he was usually the one who would make sure we didn’t make these mistakes, but we built it… and then we had to take it apart again to get it out the door and down the stairs!  That was also a challenge, because we were trying to use found objects, and that was a build that took some time.  I think it lasted a few seasons on Sesame Street, but really, the other pieces that were more anthropomorphic and easily done were more successful.

TP: And for Sam – the puppeteer was actually inside?

BE: Inside, yes.

TP: Looks like it would be cramped.

BE: Yes, it would be! (Laughs) Everybody’s used to that!  I didn’t puppeteer often, because it was not something that I really wanted to do, but there were times when everybody had to get together and do a hand.  I remember being packed into the cupboard with ten other puppeteers and going, “They really like this?!” (Laughs) And of course, they did!

TP: Did you have any favorite characters to design?

BE: I loved Statler and Waldorf.  Partly I love them because I loved doing the bodies.  I loved the curvature, I loved all of that part of it.  I have some photos of them “naked,” just the foam—

TP: That’s a little disturbing.

BE: Yeah, it is!  I kept wanting to show them in a steam bath.  I thought that would be really, really funny.

TP: And appropriate for the characters, I think.  I could see that.

BE: Yes.  But the under-bodies, we never treated them as we did the faces. I loved the engineering, if I do say so myself.  I was very pleased with the shapes that came out, because they were very different.

I thought they were funny guys… I guess part of it is because I thought of them going past the Yale Club.  Every time I would work late, which was often when we were preparing for Muppet Show stuff, or any of those projects, I would go home at night in a cab if it was really late – thank you, Jim – and we’d go past the Yale Club, and I would look in there, and I would picture these guys sitting there, with their brandy, and their cigars, and the big portraits hanging on the wall.  I just did a rough sketch and gave it to Jim, and I think it was almost a year later when Jim said, “I think we should do these now.”  They were starting to look for ideas for Sex and Violence and all these pilots that they were trying to do.

TP: So your design actually came before the script.

BE: Absolutely.  A long time before.  Often when some of us were building these things, there were no sketches.  We went right to the material.  Miss Piggy – there were three pigs that I did, and they came right from the foam.  Maybe some very rough ideas of what the profile should be, but they weren’t ever drawn until they existed.  So people came to designs in different ways.

I loved caricatures, so the two old men and the Country Trio were really great fun.  I designed [the Country Trio]; I built Frank Oz and Jim, and Don Sahlin did Jerry Nelson, and it was just such a kick to see the guys wearing their puppets and doing this thing.  I have a picture, just a snapshot of Jim going (smiles) with his mouth open and the puppet’s mouth open. I don’t think anybody really knew exactly where they’d use them.  There were just times when we were able to experiment a little bit.

TP: So you were able to go through all the nuts and bolts of building a puppet without having a production attached to it?

BE: Sometimes.  When we started out playing around with carving foam, I think the first thing we did, Jim and I worked on a thing for The Ed Sullivan Show called the Glutton. We built it out of patterned foam, but we started carving things like noses, and the little one was carved of a solid piece.  We started playing around with that and seeing the possibilities.  The next thing we were actually able to use that process on was, again, a combination of flat patterns and carving, and that was The Musicians of Bremen.  I did all those humanoid figures. The cartoon and caricature nature of it was what I really liked. I started realizing that those caricature pieces were what I really had some interest in, and some skill with.  Then we started expanding and other people started doing that too, but the process could be really frustrating.

Here’s a challenge: Statler. I had him almost done, and it means that you carve a block of foam, you scissor it until you have it the shape you want, you’ve added separate pieces for the nose, the ears, you’ve done them all separately, you start gluing them together, you’ve already made the hole inside for the puppeteer to be able to get in and move it, and you try to make it so when one finger moves, a certain part of the anatomy of that face will move, so that it’s predictable in what they can do with it… Once you have that all done, and before it’s all finished, you sand it.  And you sand it on a big belt sander, but you have to hang on to it, because the minute you lose your concentration, it will grab that piece of foam.

I went up to the sander, and I had just this one little spot that I wanted to finish on Statler… and I lost my concentration for just a second, and it took the head and went right through the sander, and ended up in the room on the other side, with a hole right through the middle of this complicated puppet… It was very frustrating, and I had to start all over again.

The fact that we could make these things as smooth as we did without casting them was really interesting, and time-consuming, but it really made a difference in how everything looked.  And of course Jim was always interested in “how it lit.” How it looked on television, how the camera would see it.  That’s why he loved the Scott foam, because it dyed beautifully, it picked up the light, the pores somehow grabbed that light and just made it lively. The same thing happened with things that were flocked, so his eye for the lighting and the camera angles and what he would do was also part of it. Every time I think of the things that he had in mind as he was doing the designs, I’m just more and more impressed.  And that he could be a nice guy as well, was pretty amazing.  It was fun to work for him, and it made everybody feel good because the stuff was looking good.

I remember being very, very frightened of spending some money on some elegant fabric for the king for something we were doing – I think it might have been Frog Prince.  I had forgotten to tell him how much it was, and I was just sweating bullets. I thought, Oh my God, I’ve got to tell him, and he just said, “Okay, whatever you need,” and I went, “Oh, right!”

That doesn’t mean he was profligate with money, but he appreciated the fact that people felt they needed to do certain things a certain way, and you could always make the argument. He would say no if he felt it really wasn’t necessary, but I think his opinion was, the more detail you put into something, people may not realize that it’s there, but it builds on the whole perception.  Also, if you’re going to see things again and again, you’re going to find things that you didn’t see the first time.  But the details were very important to him too, and certainly when you see Dark Crystal and see the things that were done that nobody’s going to see the first time around, it’s amazing.

TP: Do you think Jim had an idea, before the days when you could videotape something or buy a movie on the stand, that people would be watching these over and over again?

BE: I think he did.  At a certain point in time we started saving things.  I remember when we found the Bert and Ernie on the napkin.  And when I left, I had in my portfolio the Statler and Waldorf sketches,  and Al Gottesman, who was the Henson attorney at the time, called and said, “Would you mind giving those back for the archives?” and I said no problem.  They started to build up this wonderful archive of information, drawings, sketches, scripts.  Jim knew that there was a future for all of this.  Whether he knew specifically how that would all play out, I’m not sure, but he was a very positive thinker, and I think he knew there was an afterlife for all of this stuff, one way or another.

TP: We touched on some of these characters you designed… I want to go back and ask a few specifics about them, starting with Miss Piggy. Did you have an idea in those early days that she was going to be as big as she became?

BE: Well, I’ve often said she and I knew, but nobody else did. (Laughs)

But I would say no… Jim came and asked me to do three pigs, because he and Jerry Juhl had written a piece called Return to the Planet of the Pigs.  For that particular one, he wanted three pigs, so I did a female pig and two male pigs.  One ended up being Dr. Strangepork.  One, I don’t think he ever had a name, but he’s just a background pig.  And the other was this female pig.

My mother had grown up in Drayton, North Dakota, and she was a big fan of Peggy Lee.  At the time, Peggy Lee was always referred to as “Miss Peggy Lee,” a wonderful jazz singer, who was also getting on in years, although she was still performing. I started to think in terms of this pig being a “Piggy Lee,”  so for a long time I called her “Miss Piggy Lee.” Eventually we were encouraged to change it to “Miss Piggy” because we didn’t want to offend Peggy Lee, but on the other hand, I really made that naming as an homage to her, and as it turns out, Peggy Lee also had a very strong-willed mind of her own, and so does Miss Piggy.

She existed as a pig, but she didn’t have the big eyes and all of that, initially.  You can look at some of the sketches from Sex and Violence and see she had little button eyes, and she was very cute and perky and all that.  But then we were doing The Herb Alpert Show, and they wanted to do this bit that had a sexy female pig with this big, gruff agent.  Again, it was a time constraint.  So we had some lavender satin, which we threw into a dress.  I had to take the arms off that I had made for her, because she had hooves originally.  I didn’t have time to actually carve fingers or anything, so I wired this purple glove. I put pearls around her neck because I wanted to hide that seam from her neck to her body, all of which ended up being part of her signature for many years to come.  And she got the big eyes — I went to the drawer, I got the big eyes, I got the lashes, and over time you can see her evolution as she became more and more beautiful, and less and less the little pig from the background.

I love the story of it, because if you look at the first season of The Muppet Show, you’ll see she’s in the chorus line, and then she starts getting slightly bigger parts, but it was when finally Frank did that thing with the karate chop that really became the personification of Miss Piggy.  Frank’s investment of the personality for Miss Piggy is what really made her famous.  She and I had no idea when we were first working together that that was going to happen. (Laughs.)  But I’m delighted it has, and certainly again the combination of Jim and Frank — that very special magic, and the comedy team that they were together was phenomenal.  Made it all work.

TP: Were you the one who carved the later Miss Piggys after that first one?

BE: No, I think after I left she was re-carved again in the same way.  I think Mari Kaestle might have been the person who did that, but I’m not sure.  Eventually they found a way to make it out of foam, which is what they have been doing up ’til now.  I don’t know if that’s something they’re going to continue to do, but doing it that way is more fragile.  The pig as I did her, I could probably still put my hand in and move her mouth and all that, but even that was delicate.  Any sharp corners were vulnerable, so I would try to make them rounded wherever I could, because it just seemed to extend the life of it.

We didn’t have a lot of time to make a lot of remakes in that first year or two, because we threw every puppet we had from whatever Jim had done early on — I mean, that’s when Yorick appears again, and all those puppets come out of those boxes and into the show in one way or another.   Fortunately, Jerry Juhl had been a writer for Jim for all those years, so between the two of them they knew the history of what they had to work with in terms of coming up with bits for the early shows.

TP: Do you have any opinions on the current look and design of Miss Piggy?  Some of the fans on our forum have had some criticisms, like her ears are the wrong shape, or her eyes are the wrong size…

BE: People age. (Laughs.) People change.  Even pigs.  You know, I think so much of it is the group effort — the writers, the performers — and there are people who are looking at Miss Piggy today who never saw her as the original…

I don’t have a problem with things changing.  I just want them always to look as good as they can, to perform as well as they can, and to be interesting to watch, and as whimsical as they were initially.  If they can do that, I don’t have a problem.  Of course I will sit back and go, “Hmm… Now, I wonder…” but I think if they have a life and they’re successful, that’s fine with me.  Why shouldn’t everybody else have a chance to have fun?

But I would say, making duplicates is probably not as much fun as doing the originals or starting with something new, and I’m hoping that there will be really wonderful additions and things coming up, because you know, all these characters will be out for everybody to see again in November with the new movie.  I’ll be watching the blog to see what everybody thinks about that!

Note: As you’ve no doubt deduced by now, this interview was conducted before the release of The Muppets. Thanks to Bonnie Erickson for her time, insight, and memories! Click here to lose your concentration on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com

Tough Pigs: You were in costume design before puppet design… How did you get started with costume design?

Bonnie Erickson: When I first came to New York, I had a lot of different jobs, but I came from a background in theater and art. I went to the Art Students League, and while I was there working in the city, I was making clothes and hats and accessories for small boutiques.  A costume designer saw them, called me, asked me if I would be interested in working on a project with her because she knew that I had a theater background. I said absolutely.

I was coming from a performing standpoint; I hadn’t really done a lot of costuming work.  She hired me after I told her I’d had some experience, and she’d seen the work I’d done in the boutique, and I went in the first day, and sewed on the machine backwards.  She came in and said, “You know you’re sewing backwards?” and I said, “Oh yeah, I always do that.” I was not going lose this job!  I worked for this designer, whose name was Patricia Quinn Stuart, for seven years doing a lot of off-Broadway, Broadway and Lincoln Centerprojects, for which I would mainly do specialty items.  I would do masks, and things like that, and then I did a lot of freelance work at the same time.

It was during that time that I had a friend who called me and said, “Jim Henson’s looking for a costume designer,” and I went, “Oh, sure, right!”  I knew Jim from the Tonight Show, Today Show, all the sort of bizarre, abstract stuff he did that I thought was hilarious. I was an admirer and a fan.  I didn’t really believe it, and so this second call came and said, “He really is looking for somebody,” so I did call.  I went up with my portfolio, and he said to call the next day, and this is when I met with Jim and his producer Diana Birkenfield, and they said, “We’d like you to come in and work on Frog Prince.”  So that was the very beginning of it, and I came in initially to do costuming.

TP: Do you remember what the first thing was that you did for Frog Prince?

BE: I was costuming for Featherstone and the king.  And I found out that not only was I hired to make the costumes, I was making bodies too.  Jim had seen that I had a sculpting background, so I think that’s one of the reasons he gave me the job of costume designer for the puppets.  They had just come back from doing The Santa Claus Switch, so it was Caroly Wilcox, John Lovelady, and Don Sahlin.  Kermit Love was in and out – he was working part of the time.  Faz Fazakas was in on a project-by-project basis.

When I was originally hired, it was as a freelancer, and I loved doing freelance work; that was the way I liked to work.  The variety was incredible.  I went in and did all the puppet costumes, and it was really a relief not to have to worry about a dancer’s inseam or their arm-stretch. I was working with puppets. But it had its own problems.

TP: What kind of adjustments did you have to make, making costumes for puppets versus people?

BE: I was lucky that Don Sahlin was a mentor for me at that point.  When I first came in, Jim sat me at his table – I have to tell you a very funny story. I’ll wander and you can cut out what you think–

TP: We want you to wander!

BE: (Laughs.) I had been doing some experiments on soft foam, because that’s what they used underneath all of this fleece that they used. They had just finished the first year’s taping of Sesame Street, so they had all these fabrics and materials and they were just playing around with them. And there was this big mound of foam that had hairs sticking out of it, and it had feathers, and all kinds of stuff, and it was just this big thing sitting on the table.

I was sitting there, and I was sketching the designs for Frog Prince, and Don was there, sitting across from me, and he was sewing away… and I thought I saw this thing move. I looked at it, and it didn’t do anything, so I thought it must be my imagination.  So I went back to drawing, and I could have sworn I saw it move again!  I looked at Don, and he’s still sewing away, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.  Finally I saw it move and I reached over and grabbed it, and saw that Don had drilled a hole in the table and put an eyehook up inside the top of the head, with a string down through the table to a hook on the shelf of the table, and tied it to his shoe. He was sitting there and making this thing move and driving me crazy.  And that was my introduction to Muppets.

I was thinking about this later and realizing, you know, so many people have been so loyal to Jim, and to the work, and people have hung in there for so long. And I realized that we do it because it made us happy.  We were happy people working on those projects in those early days. It was a small crew, which grew, and I think when I finally left to start my own business we had gone from about seven people to about 27.

TP: And that was in the Muppet Show days?

BE: That was ’76.  And then of course there was a large group of freelance people who would come in and work on special projects, because Jim was always interested in artists who were doing interesting things that he could adapt to what he was doing.

It was interesting because not everyone who worked at Muppets was a puppet person. I came in and I had never really done puppets, but I had been a sculptor and I had done costumes, so that was my intro.  There were other people who had graphic backgrounds, like Michael Frith who came in later and was an illustrator. There were people who had simply been performers – Fran Brill, for instance, came in as an actor and had never done puppets before. Dave Goelz was an industrial designer and became a puppet builder and a primary puppeteer.

[Jim] made it really important to adapt all these skills and bring them in to inform the puppetry that he was doing. He didn’t start out as a puppeteer either.  He did it because of his interest in the technology of television, and film as well, as you know from his films like Timepiece and all that.  That’s sort of the direction he was headed until fame and fortune took him a different direction.

TP: I want to back up a quick second to Don Sahlin.  You worked pretty closely with him?

BE: I worked closely with him. I adored him.  I think we all did.

TP: I don’t know if we know much about him.  From what we’ve seen it seems like he was a very quiet, distinguished kind of guy.  He didn’t try to take the spotlight very often.

BE: No, he didn’t. He was shy, but he was a beautiful, generous person.  He was really so clever and so dedicated, and he was a purist in every way.  He did work for Burr Tillstrom. He was a stop-motion animation specialist.  If you look at the original Time Machine, one of the ways they describe what’s happening in terms of time passing is, they show this window with a clothing mannequin, and it changes as the period changes.  That’s Don Sahlin, making those changes in the clothes.

He worked with Jim also on his stop-motion animation things that later became part of the pieces that he did for Sesame Street and the pieces that appeared on the variety shows.  Don took a lot of those designs and really engineered them to be beautiful, movable objects.

One of the things I had to learn was how to design puppets, because I had never done that before.  I could always do the shapes, and I understood the movement, and I certainly loved posing things, but to actually have to have something that moved, that fit on somebody’s hand, to be comfortable — Don was the one who really showed me how the mechanics could work.

He was also a great cook.  He would have dinners.  And he was a fabulous marionettist. He had a marionette called Salome, and he used to invite us over for dinner, and then do this incredibly seductive dance with Salome.  He was also a big opera fan, and his favorite composer was Rameau, the French composer.  I’m not sure if people even realize, but he did a three- or four-foot tall marionette of Jupiter for one of the Rameau operas, and I think that marionette is now up at the University of Connecticut.  It probably belongs to Don’s family, but they have it on loan there. I’m not sure if it’s on display now.

Donald was an excellent carver.  He could work with foam, he could sew, he was just so multi-talented, and he could take any drawing, the roughest sketch — those sketches Jim did of Bert and Ernie.  Give them to Don, and he’d transform them into these most incredible devices for the personalities that Jim wanted to perform.  And the combination of Jim, Frank, and Don was the perfect triumvirate for those beginning years.

TP: Do you feel like there’s a philosophy, or a “Muppet style,” as far as what makes a Muppet a Muppet, that’s been passed on since then to the current group?

BE: I think there are a lot of elements in that, but you know, nothing has stayed the same.  For instance, when I came in, everything was done with a soft foam innard, and then it was covered with fabric.  Well, we ran out of the fabric, so then Jim and I started playing around with carving the foam. Before that, everything had to be covered, but once Jim actually discovered flocking — which was also another funny story — he took us out to see a guy who had come up with a way to do flocking by hand.

They’d been doing flocking as manufacturing for a long time. When you saw jewelry cases that looked like velvet but weren’t, that was flocking, but it usually meant big belts of material going through and being flocked electrostatically.  This guy had figured out a way to do it with a hand shaker.  Jim took us all to his studio, which was built over a stream, because that would help the electric charge.  We were all fascinated with this. For about three weeks we flocked everything in sight.  Eventually we realized that we had to have special things, to wear glasses, things like that. But we were so enamored of this whole process.

That’s when we realized that we could [avoid] one of the problems with the soft puppets, the soft foam heads – if you cast them, you automatically had a skin on it, and it wrinkled.  If you wanted to have somebody make an expression, if you did it in the latex it would make ugly wrinkles.  It didn’t soak up the motion.  But if you carved it, then those little pores stayed open, and they would expand and contract with the motion and give an expression without making those wrinkles. Because of the flexibility with the glue we were using, we could color it, and we could match it with a flock that was very short, very fine denier, so that it almost looked like real skin, and it didn’t inhibit the movement at all.

So it was like the perfect combination, but all of that came from a lot of experimentation, and a lot of new materials that were constantly being adapted.

So when you say, “Is there a Muppet look?” there are many Muppet looks.  Any time something came up as a new material, we tried very hard to refine it as much as we possibly could, to make it look as seamless as we possibly could, and make it adaptable to a performer, because that, of course, is the whole point.  For a long time I used to heat up a tube and push it through the foam, because it created a nice sort of stickiness, actually, for puppeteers to put the fingers in… and then we realized how toxic some of these things were! So, artists beware! Really get to know your materials before you use them.

There’s a Muppet stitch, which of course is the stitch that’s been around for a long time, but Jim used it to such great effect, and I’m sure that that was in part some of Don’s contribution because he came with that kind of a background. When we first started,  I called what my own company, Harrison/Erickson, was doing “soft engineering.” It was using soft materials to try to make them work, be strong, and last.

When they learned finally to use foam and cast it for the movies and things like that, it worked very nicely, it looks beautiful, but it doesn’t last long. You have to have several versions because it’s very delicate. So we were trying for not-too-deliciate… Miss Piggy lasted the whole first year of The Muppet Show before they had to redo her, and I think we still may have the original head in some shape or form in the collection. So the look was something that developed and evolved.

Then of course the look became totally different with Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, but that was an extension of what we did with Saturday Night Live, when Jim first decided we were going to use taxidermy eyes. We were all going, “What?! No buttons?  No ping-pong balls?”  But then that became a Henson look, so really it was constantly moving, which is really the way things should stay alive and up to date.

TP: A puppet from something like The Jim Henson Hour is completely different from one from the early productions.

BE: Right. And now, when you look at CGI – they’re using CGI, but in a very different way, so that becomes a whole other area, which the company is exploring now.

TP: You were the head of the Muppet Workshop for a while.  In addition to being able to experiment with these things, and actually physically building the puppets, what were your responsibilities with that position?

BE: For a lot of things when we were doing productions, it was overseeing packing in, packing out… It was still close enough that Jim was often in the workshop.  In fact, we worked together on the Swedish Chef.  He would come in and work with everybody who was doing projects and be involved, giving his opinion, checking in, but as things got busier, certainly after Muppet Show when part of the group was in London and part of it in New York, that changed.

I would say, as far as overseeing things, my job was to make everybody comfortable.  I had a great group of people to work with. It was an amazing time. I don’t think anybody ever made a puppet without going to somebody else and saying, “What do you think about…?”  It was a group effort.

There were a lot of theater people there. We had Mari Kaestle, who had come in and was doing things like the Seven Deadly Sins, and everybody was sort of bringing their own style, because Jim at that time would do quick sketches – just an idea of what he wanted, and there was a lot of leeway for the artists who worked in the shop to create something of their own or to add to it, with Jim coming in and giving feedback on what was happening.

I came back later, and worked on Fraggle Rock, and at that time we had an enormous amount of sculptors and costumers and everything else working on that project, and that was a little more specific, because by that time Michael Frith had done drawings which were more detailed.  I think in some ways, a lot of us enjoyed the freedom that Jim’s sketches  had, in terms of just giving us an idea of what the personality was. Later, when they were much busier, they had to be refined a little more, so that was not always so possible.

So I was responsible for making sure that we met deadlines, I was responsible for overseeing shopping and what was being brought in for all the different projects, making sure the colors were working, making sure we were communicating with writers.  The whole process was an ensemble group.

Our thanks to Bonnie Erickson for her time, insight, and memories! Stay tuned for part two! And click here to flock everything in sight on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com