Jim Henson Was America's Greatest Surrealist

Before he was Kermit, Jim Henson was Brunel.

With apologies to Man Ray and Busby Berkley and many others, I submit that argument and this hypothesis: the amount of time you spent as a child watching Sesame Street and the Muppets is directly proportional to your taste for the comic, the avant-garde, the absurd and the surreal. Jim Henson, the lead instructor of this viewers-like-you-fueled education, would have turned seventy-five this week had he not died in 1990, sucking away a collective head trip that was, ultimately, firmly planted in a felt flowerbed of weirdness.

A career that closed with the wyrd visions of Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth arguably began its strange streak with the 1966 short “Time Piece.” It took Henson two years to make and should take you nine minutes to watch. But allow another few hundred to let it sink in. (A nicer version of the MoMA-debuted film can be had on the iTunes.)

A year later, Henson created this short film for “Expo67” in Montreal, Canada. The architect is played by Sesame Street writer/director Jon Stone, and the soundtrack is by Raymond Scott.

Three years later, in February 1969 Henson and co-writer Jerry Juhl convinced NBC to air the live teleplay “The Cube,” as part of a weekly program called “Experiment in Television.” A Serling-meets-Sartre meditation on the nature of reality, scientific paradigms, self-reference, insanity, social projections, and race relations, it’s the story of a man who suddenly finds himself trapped inside an 8 foot by 8 foot cube. Sesame Street would debut later that year. About 53 minutes in there are some very strange filler cartoons.

In 1979, Henson showed “Limbo (The Organized Mind),” on Johnny Carson’s show, bringing the Muppets into his bizarre equation. The music was scored by Scott.

Henson’s earliest television appearances began on the Jimmy Dean show, with Rolf the Dog; by the time he was working on “Time Piece,” he was on Johnny Carson. In 1965, he introduced a drunken puppet.

Two years later, Henson debuted Cookie Monster in an inexplicable corporate video for IBM. (Read more about it here) The mere fact of the video is surreal enough, but Cookie also eats a computer.

Java was a bit on the first “Muppet Show,” “Exploding Hats” was a prototypical Beaker skit. And “Jabberwocky” adapted that Lewis Carroll jam.

Gonzo’s introductions were particularly uncanny.

Some of the more outré segments on the Jim Henson Show included “Visual Thinking” and “Windmills of the Mind”:

And then there was that geometric color lesson with a Philip Glass score: