What? Sesame Street is not Jim Henson’s

The Muppets have become such an integral part of the identity of Sesame Street that many people don’t realize it was not created by Jim Henson specifically for the Muppets. In 1969 Jim Henson was approached by Joan Ganz Cooney and the Children’s Television Workshop to do a few parts, or skits that would be integrated in between the reality segments done by the human players.

The characters for these skits were Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie (a mirror of Henson’s relationship with Frank Oz), Cookie Monster, Big Bird, and Kermit who first appeared as a roving TV reporter. So, in the initial stages of Sesame Street, the Muppet characters were going to be used independent from the human more realistic segments of the show, as a sort of comic relief. But after a test screening in Philadelphia showed poor results, the Muppets were not only integrated with the more human segments, they took over to the point that the human players became merely support for them.

Jim Henson, and the Muppet characters that had been developed before the beginning of Sesame Street, did commercials for TV. But because of the huge success of Sesame Street, he was able to leave the world of TV commercials--something he said “it was a pleasure to get out of…” The show has been so successful that in 1990 Cooney and the Public Broadcasting Service called Henson’s work “the spark that ignited our fledgling broadcast service.”

Some of Jim Henson’s other pursuits after leaving the world of making TV commercials have been a series of TV specials for children called “Tales from Muppetland”. These specials are hosted by Kermit the Frog and they include titles like: Hey Cinderella!, The Muppet Musicians from Bremen, and The Frog Prince. They are farcical, comic renditions of Fairy Tales.