The first Kermit was half a ping-pong ball and Mom's old coat
Jim Henson built the earliest Kermit from a table tennis ball cut in two, fabric from his mother's discarded coat and a denim sleeve from old jeans. Soft, flexible puppets like that let him rethink how television filmed puppetry, and led to the Muppets, Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock.
Henson's story starts in Greenville, Mississippi, on September 24, 1936. His father was an agronomist with the US Department of Agriculture, and the family moved from Leland, Mississippi, to Maryland near Washington in the late 1940s. He called the arrival of the family television the biggest event of his teenage years, and studied the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and early TV puppeteers such as Burr Tillstrom.
His first television job, in 1954 at 17, was working marionettes on a Saturday children's show at WTOP that was cancelled after three weeks. Another station, WRC, then gave him and fellow student Jane Nebel a nightly slot for Sam and Friends, a puppet show lasting only a few minutes. It ran until December 15, 1961 and included an early version of Kermit. Henson was studying at the University of Maryland at the time, and eventually graduated in home economics.
The real innovation was technical. Rather than pointing a camera at a fixed puppet stage, Henson treated the frame itself as the stage. He swapped carved wood for foam rubber and gave the performer direct control of the mouth, so characters could lip-sync and show a wider range of feeling. He argued that stiff puppets waste the natural flexibility of a human hand. Although he explained the word Muppet as a blend of marionette and puppet, many were in fact hand or rod puppets.
Doubts about a puppetry career faded during six weeks in Europe in 1958, where he found puppets treated as seriously as painting. That November he and Nebel founded Muppets, Inc., now The Jim Henson Company, and they married in 1959. Sesame Street followed in 1969 and The Muppet Show ran from 1976. He was negotiating a sale to Disney when he died on May 16, 1990, of toxic shock syndrome caused by a streptococcal infection; the deal collapsed afterwards.
Source: Jim Henson
