Read Jim Henson: The Biography for Free Online Page A

bits of technical wizardry that Kovacs used to enhance sight gags, like superimposed or reversed images. But one of his best and most memorable tricks—in which items removed from a lunchbox seem to roll horizontally across a table and into someone’s lap—had a deftly simple solution: Kovacs sharply tilted the entire set, then tilted the camera at the same angle, making the on-screen image appear perfectly horizontal. Jim may have roared with laughter at the gag, but it also taught him an important, if obvious, lesson: look through the eyepiece and know exactly what your camera is seeing—because that’s your audience’s reality. It was a lesson Jim would come to appreciate, and apply masterfully, in only a few short years.
    There were plenty of kids’ shows to watch as well
—Howdy Doody
, in fact, had been one of the very first shows broadcast on television nationally, starting in 1947. Young Marylanders could take their pick not only of
Howdy
, but also of shows like
Life with Snarky Parker
, a cowboy piece featuring the marionettes of Bil and Cora Baird, and
The Adventures of Lucky Pup
, with puppets by Morey Bunin. “I don’t think I ever saw [
Snarky Parker
],” Jim admitted later—little surprise, considering he was well beyond the age group of its target audience. He did, however, remember seeing the Bairds perform their marionettes on other shows. “What I really knew of Bil and Cora Baird’s work was their variety show stuff,” Jim said. “They were doing a CBS morning show, in opposition to the
Today
show. They were just [performing to] novelty records and little tiny short bits and pieces.”
    He was more familiar, however, with the work of a talented puppeteer whom he would later count as a friend: Burr Tillstrom, who performed the puppet stars of NBC’s enormously popular
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
. There were few people, in fact, who
weren’t
fans of Tillstrom’s work. Launched as a kids’ show in 1947,
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
had quickly attracted more adult fans than children—it counted among its admirers John Steinbeck, Orson Welles, and James Thurber—and by 1949 it had already been featured in
Life
magazine.
    The brainchild of the Chicago-born Tillstrom,
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
featured two of Tillstrom’s puppets—the well-intentioned Kukla and the rakish dragon Ollie—interacting with the show’s sole human cast member, Fran Allison, a former schoolteacher with a quick wit and no small amount of charm. The real magic was in the genuine chemistry between Allison and her puppet costars as they bantered, conversed, sang, and laughed together—and all without a script, ad-libbing the entire show. Tillstrom’s artistry was so endearing, in fact, that when Tillstrom had an ill Kukla blow his nose on the curtain of his puppet theater, hundreds of concerned fans mailed in handkerchiefs.
    But there was much more going on for Jim in 1950 than just television.In March of that year,
The Christian Science Monitor
published one of the many cartoons he had submitted, a major source of pride for the thirteen-year-old Jim and his family—and especially to Dear, who had encouraged Jim with her own pencils, pens, and paints. The cartoon—credited to Jimmy Henson—shows two chefs pondering a large soup pot on a table in front of them. “Shall we toss it and call it salad?” asks one chef of the other, pointing down at the mess of ingredients, “or cook it and call it stew?” One chef is rail thin—almost looking as Jim himself would look in several years—while the other is plumper, his hat slightly crooked, setting up the study in contrasts that Jim always found hilarious and would use to great effect later in designing characters like Ernie and Bert or
The Muppet Show
’s Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker.
    Cartoons and comics were, in fact, another important part ofJim’s creative life. Like most young people, Jim would open the newspaper almost instinctively to the comics section each day.