Jones offers a meticulously researched tome chock-full of gems about the Muppets and the most thorough portrait of their creator ever crafted. Henson’s story, from his birth in the Mississippi Delta, to his first forays into puppetry as a teenager, to his sudden death in 1990 at the age of 53, is documented in depth.
We’re taken along to the creation of iconic characters, the birth of “Sesame Street,” the strain in Henson’s marriage, friction with revered children’s authors Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak, and unending merger talks with Disney. We learn Henson’s first choice to cast in the central goblin king character of “Labyrinth” was Sting, not David Bowie, who he was swayed to choose by his children. We’re told of Henson collapsing in fits of laughter on the set of “The Muppet Show,” of him spending hours underwater to film the “Rainbow Connection” scene of “The Muppet Movie,” and how the puppets were so real they could be disarming to crew members.
It is, in a word, exhaustive, and at times, exhausting. At its low points, the book drags, reading like an old datebook of Henson’s, chronicling every Christmas, every vacation, every minor project, every critic’s review.
But at its best, it gives a glimpse of the silliness on Muppet sets, of Henson’s drive and his soft-spoken genius that in such a short life managed to create so much.
It is a better world with the Muppets. And we are better off with this careful account of their master.
