Jim Henson

I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends; we're all good friends.

I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.

Yeah, we pretty much had a form and a shape by that time - a style - and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put those together myself for the needs of television.

But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.

Yeah, I think we did the term Muppets before we got the show Sam and Friends - a few months after I started working.

Yeah, well when I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

It has always been difficult to get Big Bird to be very pretty. Big Bird in England is much more gorgeous.

When The Muppet Show ended, we all sat around and said, what kind of television show would we like to do. We felt the need these days are for some quality children's programming.

Well, Detroit Institute is kind of a key - probably the largest permanent collection of puppets in the US.

No, there's not much competition between puppeteers in general because everybody's working their own style.

Yeah, I did some small parts in high school and the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery, and then at the University of Maryland I was doing posters for their productions.

I do remember doing shows strictly in black and white, too, so you're right.

There was a little afternoon show that was called Afternoon. Back in those days in television, most local stations had a midday show for housewives that had a series of things. It was like a variety show for midday.

NBC was trying to convert all of their local programming to color right away to encourage the sale of the sets, so I barely remember working in black and white, although I do know that I did do it, but there was not a major difference, though.

At the time of Polaroid - and I did a couple of other commercials just before I stopped doing that stuff - at that point I was at the level where they respect you and your opinion and all that sort of thing.

If anything, there's a difference in working with color in England and the color in the US.

If you're doing a large, complicated character with radio controls, it might take a number of people several months to make it and if you're talking about a quick little hand puppet, it could be made in 2 days, so there's enormous range there, and no real easy generalities.

Somebody like a Piggy or a Kermit, there needs to be several versions and so there will be several of them.