Henson also made his own short experimental films during this time, including 1965’s Time Piece, which received an Academy Award nomination. In 1958, Jim and Jane founded The Jim Henson Company. During this time, he and his creative partners also did a lot of work in commercials, including a hugely successful series of ads for Wilkins Coffee, featuring the slapstick puppet duo Wilkins and Wontkins (note: the names are puns, just think about it for a moment). Thanks to the popularity of Sam and Friends, Henson and his puppets made appearances on a number of popular variety shows, including The Steve Allen Show, The Jack Paar Program, and The Ed Sullivan Show, on which Sullivan accidentally introduced him as “Jim Newsom.” Among other characters, the show featured an early iteration of Kermit, not quite yet a frog but a sort of unspecified lizard-like creature. Henson attended the University of Maryland and as an undergraduate developed a five-minute Muppet sketch show called Sam and Friends for another local television station with his classmate and future wife, Jane Nebel. The university also offers Jim Henson: Art, Media and Muppets (FILM319J), which centers around the life and history of Jim Henson, as well as international media transitions during the time of his puppetry career from the 1950s to the 1990s.Jim Henson was enamored with television from an early age, remembering the arrival of his family’s first TV set as “the biggest event of his adolescence.” He first took up puppetry in high school, making puppets for The Junior Morning Show, a children’s program on a local news channel in the Washington DC area. The university offers a course called Special Topics in Advanced Theatre and Performance Puppet & Mask Design and Performance (THET428W), which teaches students the art of puppet and mask-making through inspiration from examples by Handspring Puppets and the Jim Henson Company. Photo by Ally ToblerĪrchives UM contains a collection of his works that are open to the public. Brandi Martin showcases her puppetry performance, funded by the Jim Henson Fund for Puppetry, on March 14. In 1955, he started working at WRC-TV, creating a puppet show, “Sam and Friends.” Two years before graduating, he received his first Emmy due to the show’s success. He first developed his puppetry skills in a course within the home economics department his freshman year. Jim Henson started at the university in 1954 as a studio art major, according to the University Libraries website. It doesn’t matter if you’re going back to grad school and you gained thirty pounds.” “It doesn’t matter if you’re in middle school, it doesn’t matter if you’re in college. “This is constant,” said Martin in reference to the unresolved ending of her film and the issues surrounding body image. Martin also showcased her unique take on puppetry performance with her stop-motion film, “Organic.” The short video focuses on the issue of body dysmorphia, featuring a variety of vegetables as characters who secretly envy one another’s physical features. In addition to Scharf, whose performance combined a mix of puppetry and solo acting to portray the life of war squirrel Tommy Tucker and the propaganda of World War II, the Jim Henson Fund also subsidized projects by graduate students Kelly Colburn, an MFA candidate for projection design, and Brandi Martin, an MFA candidate for lighting design. Recipients of the Jim Henson Fund for Puppetry had to apply for the money to fund their puppetry performances by providing a proposal and abstract for their performance, as well as other details such as an itemized budget and a list of their needed visuals. The class of 1998 gifted the statue to the university. You can tell any story you want with it really, and it’s a shame that it’s as just for kids when people think of puppets.” A statue of Jim Henson and his famous creation, Kermit the Frog, sits outside of Adele H. “I think it is such a diverse and versatile art form. “I think fairly recently, started to sort of reinvigorate the puppetry program in the theater school,” said senior theater major Natsin Scharf, a recipient of the Jim Henson Fund this year and last year. Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, was a a UMD alumni who graduated in 1960 with a degree in home economics. And thanks to the Jim Henson Fund Reviving Puppetry, which awards grant money to students through the School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, students can prove that this art form isn’t simply juvenile.
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