La Choy and More!
The La Choy Dragon breathes fire.
As 1966 rolled around, Jim and Muppets, Inc., were handling more new ad clients than ever before, particularly with Rowlf’s immense celebrity helping to push them into household name status. And I watched a whole slew of them for today’s post, beginning with the commercials he filmed for the Wilson’s Meats company, featuring Skip and Scoop, two more Muppets who largely seem to be in the Wilkins/Wontkins mold of one character being more excited by the product than the other, however at least from the ads I got a chance to see, are actually a bit closer to the Bert and Ernie dynamic in that there seems to be less physical violence between them
Read MoreEven More Ads!
Today we have even more Muppet commercials! If you think this seems like a lot, I’ve only been able to scratch the surface due to their sheer volume and the fact that most aren’t available online. Firstly, we have a Cloverland dairy products ad featuring a rather jovial red cow singing a jingle while sometimes clapping her hooves together in excitement. What might be most interesting about her is how positively primitive in design she looks compared to later Muppet cows, such as Gladys from Sesame Street:
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More Ads & Tinkerdee
Before we reach the next major milestone in Jim Henson’s career there are again a bunch of smaller projects to cover. The first one is actually one of the most interesting we’ve seen yet, featuring the robot puppet with moving gears and smoke that we first caught a fuzzy, black-and-white glimpse of in the Food Fair footage from Hamburg, Germany, although in color and with full detail visible, it looks a bit less steampunk than I had first thought.
Anyway, what’s fascinating about this is that AT&T–which was then the Bell Company–actually hired Jim in 1963 to make the following short film as part of a presentation to air at a seminar for business owners on the new subject of Data Communications, the point of the film being to comment on the continual evolution of the relationship between man and machine, and as you can see below, Jim captured the subject with a wicked sense of humor:
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The Birth of Rowlf
Rowlf
Later in June of 1962, at the age of 25, the same month that Jim filmed the Tales of the Tinkerdee pilot, he was named the youngest-ever president of the Puppeteers of America, an amazing indication of how much respect he had already begun to gain for his puppeteering, which was only gaining more and more visibility in the public eye. Over the course of the rest of the year, the Muppets were booked as regular guests on a variety show called Mad, Mad World that unfortunately never made it past a pilot, as well as on NBC’s Today Show.
And then in late 1962, Muppets, Inc. was hired by Purina Dog Chow to make commercials for them, and in response, Jim
Read MoreShort Projects
Jim animating “Drums West”.
Today, before proceeding with Jim Henson’s next large project, the Tales of the Tinkerdee pilot, I thought I would briefly cover a number of shorter creative endeavors Jim pursued, some of which overlap with the Sam and Friends time frame. I also hadn’t touched on some of the things going on in Jim’s personal life at the time, and this post will cover some of that, as well.
So, to rewind a bit, in 1960, Jim graduated from the University of Maryland and Jane gave birth to their first child, Lisa Marie Henson. That same year, Jim attended the Puppeteers of America convention, where he met Don Sahlin, a brilliant puppet builder who would come to work/collaborate with him for many years. Around this time,
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