• March 15, 1999

Jim Henson

A Gentle Genius Changed Forever the Way America Looks at Talking Frogs—and Children's Television

Joan Ganz Cooney, the founder of Children's Television Workshop, still remembers the day she first set eyes on Jim Henson. A gangly guy with a scraggly beard, he had slipped into the back row of a New York City seminar that she was giving in 1968 on TV and child development. "This was the time when radical hippies were blowing up buildings," she says. "I remember whispering to the person next to me, 'How do we know that man isn't going to throw a grenade?' " Instead, Henson, who died unexpectedly in 1990 of pneumonia at 53, ignited the world of children's television.

Nearly 30 years after the premiere of Sesame Street, it is impossible to imagine a universe without Henson's beloved creations. Big Bird. Cookie Monster. Most memorably, Kermit the Frog, the green alter ego that enabled the shy, self-conscious Henson to perform without having to face an audience. The key to Henson's success—including his three Muppet feature films and The Muppet Show, which during its run from 1976 to 1981 reigned as the world's most popular syndicated program and made the formidable Miss Piggy a star—lay in his distinct humor. It amused but never stung, teased but never ridiculed. "He would never do any humor that would make another character feel bad," says his daughter Cheryl, 37, a vice president at Jim Henson Productions, which carries on the Muppet magic. Indeed, he would never do anything to make anyone feel bad. "If he didn't like something, he'd just say, 'Hmmm,' " says Carroll Spinney, 65, who plays Big Bird. " 'Lovely' was the word you just died to hear."

Henson's five children spent almost as much time at his Manhattan workshop as they did at their home in Greenwich, Conn., where there was always some artistic project underway. "I loved his relentless creativity," says daughter Lisa, 38, who heads her own film production company in Los Angeles. "There was no distinction between work and play or home and job." Henson once wrote: "I believe in taking a positive attitude toward the world. My hope still is to leave the world a little bit better than when I got here." He did.