bzarcher | My brane hurtz

But it's a good pain. Really.

Per our marching orders from

yukon_jack, Alex and I met him down at the Dube in the late afternoon for a pleasant dinner, traditional alcohol (Sanford and I had Black and Tans, Alex had a Car Bomb), and then a jaunt down to the Wexner Centre, where they kicked of the first of two nights celebrating Jim Henson's career as an artist.

Tonight we saw 2 programs, adding up to a bit over three hours of stuff.

The first was Muppets 101, covering his early work from age 18, to Sam and Friends, his work in 8 second commercial spots, and how the Muppet phenomenon expanded from there. (Hint: It mostly involved blowing things up. :>) There were also some really cool, rarely seen footage of his early work making the Muppets part of Variety Shows in the late 50s and early 60s, including a really trippy sketch where Henson, Frank Oz, and Jerry Jansen performed muppet versions of...Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and Jerry Jansen! They even dressed identically to the outfits on the muppets for purposes of the sketch!

We also got to see some really neat clips from the original pitch reels for Sesame Street and several versions of The Muppet Show (which was actually pitched about 5 different times before Lord George picked them up and asked them to produce the show in England), and internal training and promotion films he made for companies like Wilson Meats, IBM, and Marathon.

The Muppets 101 presentation finished with clips from the English version of the show that didn't make it to the states for various reasons (mostly that English TV was required to have less commercials, so there was room for an entire sketch, plus a promo teaser for the next week's show, that had to be cut for US audiences). We saw the early first season opener for the show that was later replaced by the opener everyone knows and loves, some of the intensely zany episode promos (Muppet improv by Oz and Henson - their only scripted lines were "The Muppet Show, with music and comedy for the whole family! Next week featuring _______" everything else was completely batshit random!), and an absolutely hiliarious music sketch never aired in the US, featuring The Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker (yes, Beaker), performing Danny Boy. Perfect for St. Pats. :>

There was also some contextual background for each set of clips provided by the Wexner F/V curator for this exhibit, who created it in a partnership with the Henson Foundation. In fact, quite a bit of the material came from stuff recovered by the Henson Foundation from internal archives, a couple of board member's VCRs, and in one case, some coal miners! (Seems like a lot of old TV tape from the 1950s-70s got put in mineshafts. I remember them finding old Dr. Who episodes thought lost in similar ways.)

The second presentation was called Commercials and Experimentation, and it was just that. Not all (in fact, very little) featured the Muppets proper, but it was an interesting look into how Henson kept approaching chances to work in advertising, live action TV, and short films. (Hint: Lots of things blowing up.)

Did you know he wanted to plan a constantly revolving, psychadelic nightclub where faceted screens and reflective surfaces would be showing constantly changing animations and ryhtmic patterns, including dancers wearing white bodysmocks which would pick up the images from the walls and turn them into living canvases? Craaaazy, man.

They ended the showing with a film he created that was actually an academy award nominee called TimePiece - bascially a really trippy stop-motion look at a guy's life. I really wasn't sure what I thought of it on my way out, but I think I liked it.

Very fun, very odd day, and it left me on a big Jim Henson/Muppets kick that I decided to indulge - the Wexner gift shop was selling copies of the first season of the Muppet Show for pretty close to the Amazon price, so I bought it before I left. :>