Those Marvelous Muppets

By John Skow

Stop giggling and pay attention, because we are going to discuss what may be the only adult show on television. Children may stay in the room if they do not squeal excessively. Now then: What is small and green and surrounded by confusion, and is applauded each week by more people than there are in the entire U.S.?

No, not the wobbling dollar, but a more cheerful and indeed more bankable asset: Kermit the Frog. He is the gallant and slightly desperate master of ceremonies of a weekly eruption called The Muppet Show, which in its third season on the air has become what is almost certainly the most popular television entertainment now being produced on earth. The Muppet series is seen by at least 235 million people in 106 countries. Those who have not met Kermit will ask, in thank-you-not-today tones, "A frog?" And they will ask, "Adult?" The answer to the first question is a confident yes, and the answer to the second is a ringing yes, but...

A phenomenon has been observed: children trap their parents in front of the terrible tube and force them to watch the Muppets. The parents become habituated, and thenceforth on Muppet night somewhat sheepishly remind the children to close their calculus textbooks and turn on the set. In the last stage of addiction, the parents are sheepless and do not require the presence of child stooges.

The air is full of Muppet stories. One is told by Lew Grade, the English entertainment mogul, who says that some months ago, he flew to Paris to persuade Sophia Loren to appear in one of his films. He had exactly an hour for the conference, so he launched directly into his serenade, enumerating the reasons why Sophia alone could make his project take wing. Soon he noticed that she was paying only the faintest attention. Eventually the great actress explained: It was the Muppet hour, and she absolutely must see them. A blow to his ego, admitted Lord Grade with a shrug of his cigar, though not an unendurable blow, since Grade's ACC organization finances The Muppet Show. (Grade, who is short, bald and whimsical, by no coincidence strongly resembles Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the mad scientist of the Muppets.)

For those who have been out of touch with this aspect of reality, what, exactly, is a Muppet? The word was coined from "marionette" and "puppet," says Jim Henson, 42, the skinny, bearded Zeus from whose brow the creatures began to spring 20-odd years ago, when he was a teen-ager hooked on television. He is the rarest of creatures in the imitative and adaptive world of entertainment, an originator. His brilliant central perception was that puppets could throw away the Punch and Judy box that had confined them for centuries and let the television set be their stage. The camera demanded the use of closeups, and abruptly the old single-expression puppet was obsolete. The Muppets were new, and they were pure television creatures. Today they are the stars of Sesame Street, as well as of Henson's global hit The Muppet Show.

Like other geniuses, Henson is a sly fellow whose sound artistic instinct is to resist critical analysis. If you peel art away, layer after layer, what you have at the end is all peelings and no onion. For years Henson, who plays Kermit, insisted that the character was not a frog but "a froglike creature." Peel that, you peelers. Now he backtracks and says that "muppet" was simply a word that sounded good to him. The sound combination of puppet and marionette is merely an explanation that happens to sound logical.

Logic peeling aside, a Muppet is (most of the time but not always) a largish arm puppet, whose body contains the arm and whose head surrounds the hand of its operator. When the operator's thumb and fingers come together, the Muppet's mouth closes; when thumb and fingers separate, the mouth opens. If the Muppet's face is pliable, as Kirmit's is--he is not much more than a green felt sock that fits over a human hand, with a wide pink split for the mouth and what look like glued-on halves of Ping Pong balls for eyes--the clenchings and wrigglings of the operator's fist can change the expression with considerable subtlety. Not simply smiles, but wistful smiles are possible. If the face is relatively stiff, like that of Kermit's formidable friend Miss Piggy ( her head is carved from a block of plastic insulating foam), then, although a certain degree of meaningful nose crinkling is possible, expressiveness is largely an illusion created by body movement and voice. In either case, the puppeteer can synchronize the figure's lip movements to its speech, a technique Henson originated early in his career. Muppet jaws do not move with each syllable--that would make bigmouthed figures look too agitated--and it takes long practice to learn the knack of mouthing the important syllables of a sentence.

An observation made with some regalarity is that Kermit the Frog is the Mickey Mouse of the 1970s, and that Jim Henson's firm, Henson Associates--known somewhat alarmingly as HA!-- will become the Disney organization of what remains of the 20th century. Maybe so; the Muppets have just finished making an $8 million film in Hollywood, called The Muppet Movie, which chronicles their journey from the boondocks to show business glory. Another film is under discussion; an astonishing variety of Muppet toys and other artifacts, including arm puppets, fills the stores; a theme amusement park of the Disneyland sort has been talked of; Muppets have been visible in TV commercials and in guest appearances on such varied offerings as the old Ed Sullivan Show and the current Saturday Night Live. This week an hour-long TV special, Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas, is on view in the U.S. And, of course, the Muppets Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, who lives in a garbage can, and the renowned Big Bird, who is 8 ft. tall and has not just an arm but an entire person inside him, have presided over Sesame Street since that wonderfully imaginative children's show began ten years ago.

The most convincing reason for taking notice of the Muppets, however, is that they are funny. In fact, with Laugh-In long gone, theirs is, give or take Saturday Night Live, the funniest show on television. This year the Muppets won an Emmy Award as TV's "outstanding comedy, variety or musical series." A gentle but consistent satirical breeze blows through The Muppet Show and saves Jim Henson's creatures from the grisly danger of being too lovable. Mostly the satire turns inward, joshing show business (the assumption that frames the series is that the Muppets are members of a theatrical troupe, trying frantically each week to put on a variety show) and Muppet nature itself.

The Muppet Show opens, always, with a knock at a dressing-room door. Scooter, the company's errand boy, sticks his head inside to announce curtain time. He is a human boy caricatured, and thus is a representative of one of the show's three main species. Human Muppets are featured players: Floyd, the supremely groovy guitarist; Janice, his girlfriend; Zoot, the blue-faced sax player who has seen it all; Animal, the out-of-control drummer who must be chained to the wall; Crazy Harry, the special-effects man who is fond of explosions; the incomprehensible and meatball-brained Swedish Chef; and such peripheral loonies as Lew Zealand, manager of a boomerang fish act.

The stars are the animals: Kermit, the pure and reasonable frog; the ineffable Miss Piggy, every circumferential inch a lady; Rowlf the Dog, a philosophical pianist; Fozzie Bear, the can't-stand-up comic; and The Great Gonzo, the magnificently inferior creature whose inventors insist, despite damning evidence, that he is not a turkey. Monsters are the remaining important category of beings: such enormities as Sweetums, who is about 9 ft. tall and covered with a three-day growth of brownish shag, and Thog, who is a good deal bigger and still growing, lend chaos to the goings-on but don't say much. Other apparitions, such as the 7-ft. carrot with whom Gilda Radner of Saturday Night Live sang a duet from Gilbert and Sullivan, fit messily into miscellaneous.

Scooter's curtain-time alert is for the flesh-and-blood human being who is the weekly guest star: Raquel Welch, for instance, looking scholarly in spectacles as she practices Shakespeare. Scooter guesses that she has decided to change her image, and he says that this is fine; she doesn't need to wear any of those scanty, revealing costumes on The Muppet Show.

"Well, thanks, Scooter..." "... unless you want to."

Immediately, half a dozen heavy-duty monsters thrust themselves through the door to beg in plaintive unison, "Oh, please want to!" The joke works nicely, because these are Muppets, and their voyeurism is acceptable. It is the kind of gag that evokes queasiness when it is given to middle-aged bandleaders on variety shows.

After Floyd, Zoot, Rowlf, Animal and other bandsmen have laid down the Muppet Show Song ("It's time to put on makeup/ It's time to dress up right") for the big every-body-on-stage opening, Kermit gives viewers the high-blood-pressure hello, and Gonzo tries to blow a fanfare on his trumpet. It never works. Butterflies come out of the trumpet. Water comes out or the thing explodes. Each week Gonzo gives it a good try; each week a new disaster. Gonzo looks dazed but not surprised, a tiny Chaplin.

Some sort of dizzy production number generally follows. One week Eskimo folk songs were promised, and sure enough, there were Miss Piggy and the show's other pigs perched on an ice floe, dressed in mukluks and parkas, surrounded by igloos, walruses and snow. The song they sang was Lullaby of Broadway in a nice, bouncy and entirely straight version. The viewer kept waiting for the joke, thinking, "Let's see, now, Eskimos, Broadway ..." The joke was that there was no joke. It was a surreal moment, and it was very funny. If you wanted to take it that way, it was a devastating comment on what we call entertainment: turn on the tube and watch Eskimos sing Lullaby of Broadway.

In the meantime, two old geezers named Statler and Waldorf are making scornful remarks from their box seats, and terrible things are happening backstage. Kermit works frogfully, but events conspire against him. It is payday, and in the cashbox Kermit finds only "three moths and a washer, more than we usually have." His voice is quavery, his jaw tremulous; he expected to find the moths, but the washer is a welcome plus. Kermit expects the worst, and he accepts it. As he sings now and then, "It's not easy being green." After working with such characters, Lily Tomlin, another human friend, said that the difference between playing a scene with a Muppet and with a human actor is that "when you break the scene you don't both go for coffee. It's sort of sad."

There is a wondrous Muppet workshop at HA! headquarters in Manhattan, where clever trolls build anything from a talking avocado to a dancing camel, or, more routinely, replacement figures for Fozzie Bear and Kermit (a crisis, still not entirely resolved, developed recently when the manufacturer of the green cloth of which Kermit is made went out of business). But the most critical element of what the viewer sees is not cloth or polyurethane. It is character: each of the most successful Muppets has grown, slowly and organically, from exaggerated fragments of its operator's character. Kermit is not Jim Henson, but he is a fascinating piece of Henson. He is the smartest of the Muppets, and he runs things as firmly as it is possible to run an explosion in a mattress factory. Like Henson, he is the absolute boss in all matters artistic and financial. Kermit is, in addition, a lovable, absolutely decent fellow. Henson's employees agree, with complete unanimity, that Henson is that sort of boss. He had no plan to make The Muppet Show M.C. a self-portrait, but when he used another puppet, Nigel the Bandleader, in the role in an early version of the show, the character did not jell; and Kermit, who had been in and out of Henson's skits for 20 years or so, got the job.

Mel Brooks, who is an impassioned Muppet fan, says that "the message they telegraph is The meek shall inherit the earth.' " Mostly this is true. Kermit is meek; he is thankful for each day during which the sky does not fall. Gonzo is meek, and Rowlf tinkles the ivories with a dogged smile. Fozzie Bear is a Teddy. Except for Animal, who wrestles alligators when he is let off his chain, the only alarming character in Muppet society is Miss Piggy, she of the iron fists in the lavender gloves. "She wants everyone to treat her like a lady, and if they don't, she'll cut them in half," says Muppeteer Frank Oz, 34. He should know, since it is his right arm that wriggles Miss Piggy through her black-belt coquetries.

When The Muppet Show began, Miss Piggy was a nobody, a mere member of the porker chorus. In less than three years, by a dazzling combination of talent, beauty and physical violence--when batting her eyelashes doesn't bring surrender, she lashes out with a karate chop--she has become a star. Her finest moments now may be when she plays the ingenue role in the show's arrestingly torpid "Pigs in Space" series, a send-up that is funny because it assumes, correctly, that the viewer is very bored by astronauts. Aboard the spaceship Swinetrek, she is every bit as lard-witted as Captain Link Hogthrob and the sinister Dr. Strangepork, and she is greedy for her rightful attention.

She is also greedy for Kermit, and once, under the pretext of doing a wedding skit, she managed to maneuver him in front of a fully loaded preacher (he escaped the pit of matrimony by the desperate stratagem of summoning Lew Zealand, who had been hanging around backstage waiting for his lucky break, to bring on those tacky and awful boomerang fish). Miss Piggy has a wandering eye, however, and if the week's guest star happens to be a good-looking man, she latches onto him. After dancing the stirring pas de deux from Swine Lake with Rudolph Nureyev, she stalked the poor fellow into a steam bath and drove him forth with his towel askew.

"She's lusty," says Oz. He feels that at heart she is true to Kermit. "She loves that little frog. She wants her frog and her career. She's torn, like everyone else." Oz is conceded to be, after Henson, the most gifted of the Muppet performers. He taught Miss Piggy all she knows, and he plays Fozzie Bear, Animal, Sam the pompous American Eagle and, on Sesame Street, Bert and Cookie Monster. Holding his naked right hand in the air, Oz demonstrates the basics of Muppet acting. "You can do proud": his hand sways and struts upward. "Sad": the hand, with its closed fingers forward, as a Muppet's mouth might be, droops at the wrist and the fingers float downward. "Confusion": the hand pauses, looks one way, looks another, pauses, seems to be glancing over its shoulder.

One morning on the set of The Muppet Movie, Oz stood among the camera cables, waiting to do a shot with Henson/Kermit. He considered Miss Piggy's psyche: "She's had her consciousness raised, but she still likes diamonds. She's a very '50s lady, and that's part of the problem." As he talked, his hand slipped into its working position inside Miss Piggy, who was due on-camera. She twisted this way and that, looking for Kermit, eager to get on with the movie.

After a take, as Director Jim Frawley (Kid Blue) yelled, "Cut!" Miss Piggy patted Kermit on his little green behind. Kermit, who is not comfortable with bawdiness, swatted at her hand and jumped aside. Miss Piggy then complained teasingly about "the man who is always following me around," referring to Oz, and coyly peeked under the green flap at the bottom of Kermit's costume, exposing Jim Henson's arm. "Oh, you've got one too!" she said. It was the kind of off-camera byplay that goes on more or less constantly.

Making a full-length Muppet movie was a gamble. Could the loopy, slapdash spontaneity of the television program be sustained through a long film narration? Could Frawley frame his shots so that it would not be painfully obvious that most of the characters lacked workable feet? How would Muppets look outdoors? To settle that point, Frawley last spring took a super-8 camera to England, where the Muppets' TV show is taped, and did a test with Henson and the others in a meadow. As he was shooting, a cow wandered over to have a look at Fozzie. The results were amazingly good; the brown cow and the puppet covered with burnt-orange fake fur looked as natural together as Newman and Redford.

The shooting for the film was slow and difficult. The first scene called for the camera to swoop down on a Georgia swamp, where Kermit is discovered sitting on a log in the middle of a pond, playing a banjo. The decision had been made to try for the realism of actual photography, rather than to fake scenes with process shots. So a watertight tank was built, and into the tank went a small television camera and all 6 ft. 3 in. of Jim Henson. (Muppet performers often cannot see directly what their hands are doing or what the other Muppets are up to, but TV monitors give them a precise check on scenes as they progress.) The tank was lowered to the concrete bottom of the movie set's swamp, the log was fitted on top of it, and Kermit was perched on the log. Air was fed to Henson through a hose, and electric cables brought him Frawley's instructions and the TV picture. Divers stood by to rescue Henson in case the tank leaked. Through a rubber sleeve at the top of the tank, Henson manipulated Kermit's head, and, using a stiff and nearly invisible black wire, made Kermit's right hand strum the banjo strings. Another Muppeteer onshore worked a radio control that allowed Kermit's left hand to do the chord changes. Now and then, between takes, someone would row over and pass a cup of iced tea down to Henson through the rubber sleeve.

The swamp scene was by no means the most complicated. The script calls for a Hollywood talent scout (played by a hu man actor, Dom DeLuise) who has strayed into the swamp to paddle by, discover Kermit and show him a copy of Variety that contains, by chance, an ad urging "all frogs who want to become rich and famous" to come to Hollywood. But down the road lurks Doc Hopper (played by Charles Durning), who wants this particular talented frog to shill for his fast-food chain, which specializes in French fried frogs' legs. Kermit encounters all of his Muppet Show pals and such assorted human characters as Elliott Gould, Carol Kane and Telly Savalas on his journey to Los Angeles. At one point the Muppets are riding in an old Studebaker, with Fozzie at the wheel, several others in .he front seat and another bunch in the rear. Jammed under the dashboard and behind the back seat with all of their cables and TV monitors lie half a dozen puppeteers. In addition to Henson and Oz there are Jerry Nelson, who does Floyd and Dr. Strangepork, and can project nine different voices; Richard Hunt, a young, curly-headed, outgoing fellow who does Scooter and Sweetums; Dave Goelz (Zoot, Gonzo), a former industrial designer who got started when he saw Ernie on Sesame Street and made his own Ernie doll; and squeezed in somewhere, a Muppet newcomer named Steve Whitmire. The Muppet people work under conditions that would not be acceptable to tunnel rats.

The 100 days of shooting ended when all of the scenery fell down, as planned, in a movie-within-the-movie that Kermit and his friends were trying to make. Their fake, Styrofoam rainbow lay in pieces, but through a jagged hole in the soundstage roof, a real rainbow was seen to shimmer. Happy ending. Quick, sweep the stage and pack the Muppets in their boxes, because taping for the new season's TV series begins in London in five days.

Muppets live in suitcases, and Muppet people live out of suitcases. Jim Henson gave up the key of his rented Mulholland Drive hacienda, with its obligatory indoor-outdoor clover-leaf-shaped pool, and flew to Manhattan. There he rallied the support troops at HA! headquarters and conferred with his increasingly large staff of business people.

Henson is clearly a gifted businessman, and on the point of becoming a very wealthy one, but he is secretive as a nesting hen when asked to talk figures. The Muppet Show, considered separately, is listed on the books as making no profit, in part because Henson keeps putting money back into the program. Help is on the way. "The long-range profit for this show is down the road, when it's syndicated and sold to the stations," says Henson. "It's a couple of years away." Lord Grade adds with satisfaction that the take from this "strip syndication"--the sale of a show for the same time slot several days a week--will be split equally between HA! and his ACC group and will mean "millions of dollars." Until then HA! is supported handsomely by fat merchandising contracts with such outfits as Fisher-Price Toys and Hallmark Cards, Inc. Muppet faces appear on coffee mugs, T shirts, yo-yos, playing cards, pillowcases and anything else that will take an imprint. Henson is good at big money deals and smart enough not to boast about them. "It's important to me that the audience doesn't think of us in terms of figures," he says. "I don't want people looking at the Muppets and thinking, 'How much are they worth?' It's just not us. It could be destructive to the show."

Henson has little time for brooding, even about money. After a few days of business talks in New York, he packed his winter clothes and a new tube of toothpaste and flew to London, where, according to his contract with Grade, the TV series must be taped. Within hours of his arrival, shooting had started. Several of the pig Muppets had started an off-camera fight but had been quelled. Guest Star Harry Belafonte had overcome his initial queasiness at working with shaggy short people and had sung The Banana Boat Song with spirit, even though Cap tain Link Hogthrob pigged one of the bananas.

In New York City, Costumer Calista Hendrickson worked on a purple chiffon dress for Miss Piggy to use in one of the fall shows in which she dances cheek-to-cheek with Danny Kaye. She began to talk about what puppets mean to people, and that reminded her of the first time the Muppet crew met Edgar Bergen, who was the guest star on one of their early shows. "When he walked into our studio in London, they all gathered around him like children. And then the box was brought in, Charlie's box, and they all sank to the floor and sat in a circle around it. And then Bergen opened the box and Charlie came out and said hello and introduced himself around. He met Fozzie, and the two of them went on and on, all ad-libbed. No one moved an inch." Later, in Holly wood, Bergen did a cameo appearance in The Muppet Movie, and a few weeks later he died. "One of the stagehands on the movie couldn't understand why every body was so affected by Bergen's death. 'You'd think Charlie McCarthy had died,' he said. One of the puppeteers whirled around and said, 'But he did! Don't you see? And so did Mortimer Snerd! And if Henson goes, Kermit goes!' "

Kermit is alive and well, and Charlie and Mortimer were, after all, only puppets. If the world were a wholly rational place, their claims on it would be small. But the fact is they do make claims, and strong ones. Kermit, rueful and dithered frees a part of our own natures so absurd and defenseless that we would never let a human actor hold it in his hands. This freedom is wonderful, but there is a price What these puppets mean to the millions of people who have watched them is al most embarrassing to express, because the feeling they evoke is nothing less than love . -- John Skow

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