About This Quiz
Even if you're a die-hard fan of "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," you can't possibly know all there is to know about Jim Henson and his work … or can you? Take the challenge and find out!While Kermit was the first recognizable Muppet to appear on TV, it was only a local show. Rowlf was first created for a Purina dog chow commercial.
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Strange but true -- theater design, art and the other types of classes Henson took at the University of Maryland were part of the Home Economics department in the 1950s.
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Jim Henson made suggestions and consulted during the creation of Yoda, but Frank Oz brought the little guy to life.
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Lots of news outlets reported that Henson died of strep, but it was actually the bacteria that can cause strep -- as well as lots of other infections -- that led to organ failure.
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Head writer Michael O’Donoghue quipped, “I don’t write for felt” -- and the abstract characters weren’t popular with the audience, either.
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Other Henson projects won Academy Awards, but his first nomination came with a a surrealistic, nine-minute short film about an Everyman and the passage of time.
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Jim Henson worked on other local children’s shows, but “Sam and Friends,” which began in Washington, D.C., in 1955, was his first long-running gig as a puppeteer.
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While Henson performed lots of one-off and minor characters and was involved in the creation of others, his two main characters were Ernie and Kermit the Frog.
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Henson tried unsuccessfully to convince networks in the U.S. to produce “The Muppet Show,” but nobody got the humor and considered him a children’s performer.
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Many people assumed that Brian Henson took over Kermit, and others have voiced Kermit on rare occasions, but Steve Whitmire is the only other person to perform Kermit.
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Henson used to tell interviewers that he combined “marionette” and “puppet” to form Muppet, but he rarely used marionettes and admitted that he just made the word up.
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He was more of a lizard than a frog, and he started out turquoise instead of green because Henson made him from one of his mother’s old coats, but a version of Kermit appeared in the mid-1950s.
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Jane Henson did the puppeteering for lots of Muppets on early Henson projects until quitting in the early '60s, but she only performed nonspeaking Muppets.
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The name “Muppets” and most of the characters are owned by The Walt Disney Company; Sesame Street Workshop owns the characters that appear on “Sesame Street.”
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Not one of the “core” group, Convincing John, performed by Henson, lived away from the rest of the Fraggles -- probably because he usually tried to convince them to do crazy things.
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Although a popular Russian newspaper called “Sesame Street” imperialistic in the early 1970s, by 1989, enough inroads had been made to allow an airing of “Fraggle Rock” on Russian TV.
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A “Sesame Street” comic strip ran from 1971 to 1975, but oddly enough, there were no Muppets in the first few years of the strip’s run.
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All of Henson’s children have worked in various capacities in his productions, but Brian was the first to appear on-screen, in animated shorts his father directed for “Sesame Street.”
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Audiences were already wary of this dark movie from Henson that didn’t have any Muppets in it -- going up against one of the most successful sci-fi films ever didn’t help!
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The screenplay, written in the 1960s and '70s, couldn’t be made into a film due to its unusual story, broad scope and existential nature.
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