A Peek Inside Jim Henson's Creature Shop, Where 'Sesame Street' Characters and Other Whimsical Puppets Are Designed
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The Creature Shop is located in Queens, inside the former Standard Motors building, a two-block-long behemoth with high ceilings and freight elevators capable of accommodating even the biggest birds.<br>Jim Henson's Creature Shop
Standing in front of a small crowd of Muppet enthusiasts, actress and Sesame Street veteran Jennifer Barnhart demonstrated how to perform with three different types of puppets.
First came Tillie, a small hand-and-rod puppet with an orange mane and a passion for gardening, despite her seasonal allergies. A rod puppet shaped like a hot dog popped up next, lamenting the winter gear he’d packed for his trip to New York City—and his lack of foresight about the rats and pigeons. But Bob, a spotted bear, was the real showstopper. A live hand puppet, Bob was the biggest of the group and required assistance from a member of the audience. An excited 6-year-old volunteered, thrusting her arm inside Bob’s left hand and trying her best to match Barnhart, who was moving Bob’s right hand and head while checking the monitor at her feet.
“Then we can also do a nice big expansive gesture,” Barnhart instructed her young pupil. “So try to match my hand. You go out away from the body, then we go into the body. That was good!”
This interactive tutorial is included in every tour of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the New York City site where Sesame Street characters and other whimsical creations are designed, molded and dressed. The workshop is open to the public for the first time in its 63-year history, offering fans a peek behind the fleece. The Creature Shop is in Queens, inside the former Standard Motors building, a two-block-long behemoth with high ceilings and freight elevators capable of accommodating even the biggest birds.
The whole place is covered in scraps of the various materials the builders use to craft characters.
Jim Henson's Creature Shop
A traveling workshop
But this is hardly the studio’s first home. Henson moved his office and workshop to New York in 1963, having built a name for himself in Washington, D.C. as the co-creator, with his wife, Jane, of WRC-TV’s Sam and Friends. The late-night series, a lead-in to The Tonight Show, was where Henson introduced Kermit the Frog and workshopped the type of sketch comedy he would integrate into Sesame Street in 1969 and The Muppet Show in 1976. Henson landed these projects—and, eventually, several Muppet movies and the 1983-87 series Fraggle Rock—after becoming a fixture on television, the emerging medium that fascinated him as a boy. By the early 1960s, his creations appeared not just on Sam and Friends, but on variety shows and in popular commercials he and Jane created for clients like Wilkins Coffee. Those ads usually ended with one puppet, Wilkins, blowing up or bashing another puppet, Wontkins, for refusing to try the product.
Henson’s puppets “had the zany humor of the counterculture. They were not tied to all of the marionettes and the more wooden, traditional puppets that somebody who studied puppetry would have grown up with,” Ryan Lintelman, curator of the entertainment collection at the National Museum of American History, explains. “Instead, they were made for television.”
Oscar the Grouch may be sporting his trademark scowl, but he’s left space next to his trash can for fans to take photos.
Kristin Hunt
To keep building on his early television success, Henson first chose workshop space on 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, just blocks from the studios where the Today show and other nationally syndicated series filmed. Henson’s creatures were already making regular appearances on several variety and talk shows, and the puppeteer “wanted to be convenient to where he was doing the work,” says Karen Falk, archives director for the Jim Henson Company.
Some of Henson’s earliest collaborators, including Frank Oz, Jerry Juhl, Jerry Nelson and Don Sahlin, followed him to this workshop. By the time they were ready to graduate to longer-form projects like TV specials, however, they had outgrown the 53rd Street space.
The expanding company next moved into an old carriage house at 227 East 67th Street. That also soon proved inadequate as Sesame Street became a popular hit following its 1969 debut. Henson’s old friend Jon Stone, who was tapped to direct the children’s series early in its development, had urged his boss, Joan Ganz Cooney, to incorporate the Muppets into the program. So Henson leased additional space up the block at 201 East 67th Street in 1973. Then, just four years later, he bought an entire building on East 69th Street that would become known as “Muppet Mansion.” It featured, among other custom pieces, an elaborate reception desk with gilded Miss Piggy figurines and a stained-glass window depicting Henson and Oz...