The Jim Henson Company
BiographyThe Jim Henson Company was established in the 1960s by Jim Henson (1936 – 1990), an American artist working primarily in puppetry, and master builder Don Sahlin. Their designs, which pioneered a shift from the hard materials traditionally used in the theatre to the more flexible media of fabric and foam, revolutionized puppet design as a feasible art form for the burgeoning television industry. By the 1970s, the Henson workshop, headquartered in New York City, was in high demand, producing characters for popular shows such as The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Saturday Night Live. Henson’s first foray into filmmaking, The Dark Crystal of 1982, exhibited years of exploration in experimental puppetry design and related performance techniques. A second production facility, which became known as Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, was subsequently established in the Hampstead district of London, England, helmed by Henson’s illustration partner, Brian Froud. This subsidiary most famously produced the classic fantasy film, Labyrinth of 1986, which featured musician David Bowie. Between 1983 and 1987, both the London and New York workshops collaborated on the development of Fraggle Rock, which pioneered an animatronic innovation that became known as the Henson Performance Control System; this highly adaptable system, which could imitate subtle nuances in expression and behaviour, earned the company an Academy Award in 1992. Following Henson’s passing, his son, Brian Henson, relocated the Creature Shop to a larger facility in the Camden Town district of London. This team produced a series of notable projects, including The Muppet Christmas Carol of 1992 and the Academy award-winning Babe of 1995. A third facility was established in the Burbank district of Los Angeles, California, which produced the television series Dinosaurs (1991 – 1994) as well as Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009). The Burbank facility also houses Henson Recording Studios, a second studio for the Creature Shop, and state-of-the-art soundstage and postproduction studios.
