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

Last year, we asked everyone we met the ever-popular question, “Who is your favorite Muppet?”  But this year, we decided to make things much more topical by asking, “What are you most looking forward to from the new Muppet movie?“  We were able to ask a bunch of our friends from the world of Muppet and Fraggle Rock comic books, a couple superheroes, and even a few honest-to-Frog Muppeteers!

Watch the video here, and let it get you all excited for the new movie in just a few more days!

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our video, including David Petersen, Eric Jacobson, Amy Mebberson, Jeff Stokely, Superman (Alex Rae), Katie Cook, Dave Hulteen, Joe LeFavi, Grace Randolph, Tim Beedle, Kevin Clash, Nichol Ashworth, James Silvani, Batman (Bruce Wayne), and Peter Linz!

Click here to look forward to Animal ripping apart the villains of the city on the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

Part 1: Kevin discusses the documentary, dealing with talk show hosts, and his thoughts on Clifford.

And Part 2: We ask Kevin about Dog City, playing Splinter in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, and his response to the Elmo backlash.

Big thanks to Mr. Clash for taking the time to talk to us, and to the Being Elmo folks for making it happen!

Click here to be Elmo on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com

Michael Earl was nice enough to join us in a Q&A about his puppetry career, and mostly his tenure at Sesame Street. Let’s see what Michael has to say, shall we?

ToughPigs: How did you get started as a puppeteer?

Michael Earl: When I was five my father took me to a street fair in San Francisco where I saw my first puppet show. In that moment, I knew I wanted to be a puppeteer when I grew up. I began asking for puppets as gifts for my birthdays and Christmas. By the time I was eight, I was making puppets and putting on shows at home. At 13, I began putting on birthday party puppet shows and apprenticing at the puppet theater at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, CA, where I met Lewis Mahlmann who introduced me to the San Francisco Bay Area Puppetry Guild. There I met Mike Oznowicz, Frank Oz’s father. No one told me that Oz was his son, however.

TP: How did you first get involved with The Jim Henson Company?

ME: When I was 17 I attended a National Puppetry Festival in San Luis Obispo, CA. There I met Kermit Love whose week-long class I was taking. When I registered for the class, Caroll Spinney was the teacher, but he dropped out and Love stepped in to teach. At the end of the week workshop, I approached Love and asked him how someone gets a job with the Muppets. He told me I didn’t want to work for the Muppets because it was very political. Being a teenager in 1977, I didn’t even know what “political” meant. Love looked at my puppets, liked them and invited me to come to New York to help build puppets for a project at Radio City Music Hall. At lunchtime, I was sitting with Mike Oznowicz who asked me what my plans were now that I was out of high school. I told him I was thinking about moving to LA to work for Tony Urbano or Bob Baker (I loved marionettes) or, perhaps New York since Kermit Love had just offered me a job there. It was not until Jim Henson’s funeral did I know that Mike had called Jim and Frank telling them about me, urging them to hire me, which they did, sight unseen for The Muppet Movie. I had just turned 19.

TP: What was it like taking over a character like Mr. Snuffleupagus from the legendary Jerry Nelson?

ME: Jerry was my favorite Muppeteer. He was very fatherly, in a good way. Very helpful to me as a young Muppet performer. Nevertheless, when it came time for me to do the voice of Snuffy on my own, with Jerry in the studio, I was extremely nervous. This was his character I wanted to do it justice.

TP: Likewise, what was the process in passing Mr. Snuffleupagus along to Marty Robinson?

ME: There was no process for me. I was not privy to Marty’s hiring prior to my exit. I didn’t meet Marty till we both were on the set of The Muppets Take Manhattan, where we shook hands for the first time and told each other how we each had heard stories about the other; he heard stories of me on Sesame Street and I heard stories about him at Bil Baird’s Marionette theatre where Marty had preceded me.

TP: What were some of your least favorite parts about working on Sesame Street?

ME: Snuffy was very hard on my voice. I was studying singing at that time and my voice teacher one day asked what I was doing to my voice. She could hear the hoarseness in it. I told her I was Mr. Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street, that it was my job to talk in that low, raspy, nasal sound. I never did learn how to produce that voice in a healthy manner. And the puppet is very hot when you’re inside. Two people breathing, sweating, moving around under the studio lights. Not pretty. They were always asking me if I wanted to step out and cool off. I usually would opt for staying in and getting it over with as quickly as possible.

TP: Can you talk about the process it took to create characters like Forgetful Jones and Polly Darton?

ME: Aside from Caroll Spinney doing Big Bird and Oscar, Brian Muehl and I were doing most of puppetry on Sesame Street in 1978-80 as the main Muppeteers were in London most of the year doing The Muppet Show. Jim, Frank, Jerry and Richard would come once a season to do Muppet inserts, a week of just puppet pieces for Sesame Street, where all the sets would be built up off the floor so we could stand. What a joy, because the rest of the year, Brian and I would have to crawl around on our hands and knees performing various Anything Muppets. So the writers invited us to one of their meetings and began to write specifically for Brian and me. They asked us what kind of voices we could do. I said I did a pretty good southern accent. Soon Forgetful Jones was born. I wanted a “hook” for my character the way Cookie Monster and the others had saying they always said. For Forgetful, it was “Oh yeah, I forgot.”

TP: How did it feel to see the characters you originated live on in the hands of other puppeteers?

ME: Well, it wasn’t the same, you know. Each puppeteer does it a little differently.

TP: Who were your favorite characters to perform?

ME: I enjoyed the two other characters I inherited from Jerry Nelson: Slimey the Worm and Poco Loco. They were both really fun! I actually went to a pet shop and studied parrots in preparation for playing Poco Loco. I also enjoyed doing right hands for Ernie and Cookie Monster.

TP: What were your responsibilities on the set of The Muppet Movie?

ME: I got to be one of the 12 main Muppets in group scenes. I am in Fozzie Bear in the close-up in the ghost town scene where Kermit is confronting Doc Hopper. Boy, that was an interesting day. I remember sitting in the puppeteer trailer next to the screenwriter who was rewriting the scene we were about to shoot, freehand. The scene was shot on the same street they shot High Noon on. They spent most of the day digging a big hole in the street for us to get into, and then they had these big fans they threw dirt into to create a dust bowl effect. By the end of the shooting day we were all black with dirt. It was fun though. Also, that was the same day that Jim Henson was away for much of the day at Edgar Bergen’s memorial service where Kermit the Frog gave the eulogy. One of my main memories of that movie shoot was the finale, with 150 extra puppeteers. I was lucky enough to be given Big Bird to play in that scene. At the wrap party, the shop foreman asked me if I was aware of the politics surrounding me. I said I was not. He told me Kermit Love had threatened not to send “The Bird” for the finale unless I performed him. Yikes! I had no idea. Years later, Kermit confirmed that with me.

TP: What did you do on Muppets Take Manhattan?

ME: Group scenes. I’m in Cookie Monster in the finale.

TP: How about on The Dark Crystal?

ME: I feel very privileged to have been part of the development of this amazing project. Jim asked me, another puppeteer, and two dancers to work together for a few weeks. Our task was to figure out body combinations that could become unique puppets in the film. Then Brian Froud would come in and sketch “skins” on us in his sketchbook. It was thrilling!

TP: Did you have any other favorite moments when working on other Muppet productions?

ME: I got to play a giant singing carrot in an episode of Little Muppet Monsters. It was a love song between the carrot and an old lady Muppet, play by Kathy Mullen. Totally wacky and fun!

TP: What led to your departure from Sesame Street?

ME: Karen Prell called one day and said she had just been let go from Sesame Street, and that I should call Jane Henson to make sure I still had a job. So I called Jane who assured me I did. Two weeks later I got a call from Muppets asking me to come into the office. There I was told there were budget cuts and that Richard Hunt was coming back to Sesame Street. I asked if Richard would be taking over Snuffy. I was told, no. “So you’re going to have to hire someone else to play Snuffy? What about the budget cuts? This makes no sense.” Unsatisfied with her reason, I headed over to CTW to ask some questions. I spoke with producer Lisa Simon who told me that I hadn’t improved enough; that Jim or Frank needed to help me more but they were always in London so it was a catch 22 situation. Then I walked down the hall to producer Dulcy Singer’s office. I had known Dulcy at the Muppets before she took the job at CTW. I asked her to level with me. She lowered her eyes and paused. Then she said Jon Stone (the director) put pressure on Henson to get rid of me due to the fact I wasn’t taking direction well enough. In my defense I was 20 years old and had very little coaching along the way. And there was never a warning. Just a layoff as they called it. Ah ha! Politics had gotten the best of me…just as Kermit had predicted. The good news was I was also told that this decision did not come from Jim, who told them to tell me that even though Sesame Street didn’t work out for me, that I would always be welcome at the Muppets. Thank you Jim for 12 more years of freelance employment!

TP: What are some of your favorite non-Muppet performances?

ME: Dr. Ticktock in Ticktock Minutes for Mississippi Educational Television. That was a series of 50 PSA’s I got to write the scripts and lyrics for that aired on PBS. Ticktock Minutes (available on CD and DVD from Sony/BMG) ultimately received 12 regional Emmys, one National Emmy, two Parents’ Choice Awards and numerous other honors. I myself was honored with a Best Performer Emmy, as well as three Best Collaborative Composers Emmys that I share with collaborator, Randy Klein.

TP: What are you working on these days?

ME: Puppet School is my passion these days. After a 30-year career in TV and film I now teach the new generation of puppet performers. Actually, I’ve been teaching them all along. For example I coached and mentored Drew Massey and Camille Bonora back in the day. And many others successful puppet pros. But Puppet School is a new venture, only one year old this month. I started it with my friend and now business partner, Roberto Ferreira. Together we are building a fun place that produces smiles and lots of “Muppet-style” puppetry. We have two additional teachers: Christian Anderson who was in Avenue Q on Broadway and on tour for 4 years – he teaches a theater puppetry class for us; and Derek Lux teaches a Professional Puppet Making class at Puppet School. And we have recently been hired to co-produce a new web-series called Larry & Lydia which is fun, funny and a joy to work on. So watch for that!

TP: Finally, is there a message you’d like to pass along to all the Muppet fans out there?

ME: I share your enthusiasm for the new Muppet Movie’s Thanksgiving release date! In fact, Puppet School is organizing a group in LA and in NYC to go, with puppets, to see the movie together! Come join us! And if you’re interested to learn how to puppeteer for TV and film – “Muppet-style” – we have new classes starting soon in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle!

Many thanks to Michael for joining us for this chat! And thanks to Dave Hulteen for his additional help!

Click here to get political on the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

As we mentioned in Part 1, the episode they were filming on the day of our visit involved Bert and Ernie sleeping over at Gordon and Susan’s apartment. Beyond the adorableness of that situation, that tells us one important thing: Steve Whitmire is in the house. Along with Eric Jacobson and Matt Vogel (who was performing Ernie’s right hand), these three gentlemen represent the second wave of Muppeteers, taking responsibility for the characters created by Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and someday (in Vogel’s case) Jerry Nelson and Caroll Spinney.

We had the unique opportunity to have an extended discussion with Whitmire, Jacobson, and Vogel, culminating in one of our proudest moments as Muppet fans. And as always, the greatest pleasure comes with being able to share our experience with you. So happy viewing, and thanks to Steve, Eric, Matt, and everyone else at Sesame Workshop for helping to make this happen!

Click here to sit on a couch with the ToughPigs forum!

by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com

After the cast and crew finished taping the sequence that took place in Susan and Gordon’s bedroom, they began shifting the cameras around and preparing for the next scene, in which Maria and Luis go to the basement of 123 Sesame Street to fix the pipes, only to find Oscar scuba-diving. While this was going on, Muppet performers Carmen Osbahr and Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, fresh from playing dancing sheep, graciously agreed to talk to us on camera… even after the lights went out! Watch the video below to hear all about the GLOPs, Andy Samberg and the Shape-o-Bots, and to hear me completely fail to know the difference between Jason Mraz and James Blunt.

Hey, isn’t that Jim Martin, Caroll Spinney and Emilio Delgado milling around in the background? Why, yes. Yes it is. As far as I could tell, Martin was directing the scene, and Spinney and Delgado were playing Oscar and Luis, as you might expect.

As luck would have it, shortly after we talked to Ms. Osbahr and Ms. Carrara-Rudolph, we ran into two very special Sesame Street cast members: Abby Cadabby and Rosita. They were happy to chat with us, despite not even knowing what the word “chat” means. Watch the video here for the scoop on Flying Fairy School and the astounding true story of what happened to Rosita’s wings.

Are those two great, or what?

But that’s not all! Keep an eye right here on ToughPigs.com for the third and final installment of our Sesame day, in which we sit on a couch!

Our thanks to Carmen Osbahr, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, Sesame Workshop’s Pam Hacker, and the rest of the Sesame Street gang, and a tip of the hat to Steve Swanson! Click here to learn the nose flute on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com

On the day we visited the set, production was under way on an upcoming street story featuring a whole heap of Sesame characters, includingBert and Ernie, Susan and Gordon, Maria and Luis, and Oscar. In other words, it was a pretty darn good day to be there. We managed to slip into the makeup room between takes for a video Q&A with Emilio Delgado (Luis) and Roscoe Orman (Gordon). Everyone reading this probably already knows which actor plays which character, so I don’t really need theparentheticals, eh?Oh well… I’ll leave them in case my dad is reading this. Anyway, I’ll let Messrs. Delgado and Orman tell you a little bit about the plot of the episode, as well as what it’s like acting with Muppets, memories of working with John-John, and more:

By the way, the question of whether they’re taping season 42 or 43 was clarified later, when we learned that during this production period they’ve been working on street stories for both the coming season and the season after that. Either way, that’s a lot of seasons.

The episode was about Bert and Ernie’s apartment getting flooded, requiring them to stay somewhere else while Maria and Luis attempt to fix the pipes, and while Oscar scuba-dives in the basement. When we arrived on the set, they were preparing to shoot a scene in which Ernie and Bert are staying over at Susan and Gordon’s apartment, and naturally, they bring their beds into Susan and Gordon’s bedroom. We didn’t get to see a script, but my best educated guess is that Ernie has trouble sleeping and invites some sheep (likely related to the Boogie-Woogie Sheep) over so he can count them.

When you watch Sesame Street on TV and you see a set like Susan and Gordon’s bedroom, it never occurs to you to think about how much space it takes up, or the logistics of “building up” to allow the puppeteers to work without doing a contortionist act. This set was built up, so before they could start, Roscoe Orman and Loretta Long (Susan) had to climb up a set of stairs to get into the bed. The whole set was built on the same stage as the main set, just a few feet away from 123 Sesame Street.

Here’s a look behind the scenes of one take from this street story:

For those of you keeping score at home, the sheep are performed by Carmen Osbahr, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, and Joey Mazzarino, and Ernie is being right-handed by Matt Vogel. (Ernie and Bert are performed by Steve Whitmire and Eric Jacobson, respectively, as usual.)

We’ll have more cool videos from the set of Sesame Street coming soon, so keep an eye on this here website. Our thanks to the Sesame gang for the hospitality, and a tip of the hat to Steve Swanson!

Click here to dance with sheep on the Tough Pigs forum!

by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com