50 years ago, Sesame Street showed this clip of Kermit the Frog and a little girl named Joey singing the alphabet song, with Joey goofing it up. What is amazing is that though Joey could see Jim Henson crouched down below the camera level and manipulating and voicing Kermit, the power of his performance is so great that you can see that Joey interacts with Kermit as if he is an autonomous agent.
I have seen Jim Henson and Frank Oz being interviewed on talk shows and talking through their characters and even adult interviewers seem to get caught up in the magic and talk with the muppets and not the humans behind them.
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I loved watching Sesame Street with my children and especially enjoyed the segments with Muppets which were often hilarious. This particular one has become iconic and is absolutely adorable.
“I have seen Jim Henson and Frank Oz being interviewed on talk shows and talking through their characters and even adult interviewers seem to get caught up in the magic and talk with the muppets and not the humans behind them.”
Many years ago (’85) I was a runner in a facility with a studio and some edit suites. We had the Muppets in for a shoot. The Muppets seemed to be extensions of the puppeteers’ limbs and if you talked to any of them while they were still attached to their Muppet, it would open and close its mouth in sync with its operator.
It was a good day. One of the clients in the edit suites were big Henson fans, and Henson was a fan of theirs… I ended up pointing a camera at The Great Gonzo while he cried.
30 plus years ago my then little stepson (now a grown up librarian) watched Sesame Street every morning, and of course so did his mother and I, or at least we heard it. I still find my brain playing the “sunny day” intro song as I wake, and there are still a couple of sesame-isms that have become a permanent part of our discourse. “Put down the ducky!” On Sundays we still watch Monsterpiece Theater (though sadly, Alistair Cookie is no longer there). And in this season when we look out the window, it’s still ukiuq out there.
Bunraku lives.
I heard that the technicians on talk shows had a habit of putting the mic on the puppet instead of the puppeteer.