![]() ![]() “There is a naughty troublemaker that was at the center of my dad’s sense of humor and sensibility.” He had honed a creative ethos in those years, but that show solidified his national reputation as a children’s entertainer, since, of course, puppets are “for kids.” That assumption “really rankled my father,” said Jim’s son Brian Henson, director of the upcoming R-rated puppet comedy The Happytime Murders. Henson worked in puppets and other media professionally for years before the creation of The Muppets and, later, Sesame Street. That was the Henson that Frank Oz, the iconic Muppet performer, knew. Though his public persona was that of a hip, latter-day Walt Disney, Jim Henson once responded to a viewer’s criticizing letter with a simple “What the fuck are you talking about?” The prurient goof doesn’t align with the sensibility that drove his TV shows or movies, yet these kinds of backstage stories are prevalent. Henson “clearly loved yanking people’s chains,” Jones told me, but the X-rated extent of this ruse would baffle any casual Henson fan. The pitch meeting was a prank to get a rise out of Kenworthy, a Cambridge graduate and a future BAFTA chairman. Everyone broke character the entire office was listening in behind the door. After asking a clearly exasperated Kenworthy for his opinion on the project, Henson “exploded into his high-pitched giggle, unable to contain himself longer,” as Brian Jay Jones describes in his biography of the Muppet creator. Henson, stone-faced, stroked his beard and listened, probing the filmmaker further on the prurient particularities of how the creatures would be used. ![]() As he continued to describe the project, it became clear that this was not an adaptation of George Orwell’s novel, but a pornographic film where the puppets would have, um, a starring role. The filmmaker wanted Jim Henson Creature Shop to build fantastical-yet-lifelike animals for a movie called Animal Farm. One day in 1985, while Jim Henson was wrapping up Labyrinth, a young Swedish filmmaker entered a boardroom to pitch Henson and his straight-laced British producer Duncan Kenworthy on a new movie. ![]()
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