This is the fourth and final installment our Q&A with Muppet writer, Jim Henson Legacy president, and Muppets Character Encyclopedia author Craig Shemin. Don’t forget to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!
TP: Were there any characters that were going to get cut that you fought for?
CS: Most of them. Sam & Friends, we did fight for that. There were a couple of things that got saved accidentally. Splurge was not meant to be in the book. I made a mistake, because I was listing all the characters, and instead of “Blotch” from Swamp Years, I wrote his name as “Splotch.” When I started getting the spreads, they would put them side by side, and it was alphabetical, so to change the order was problematic.
They had a character that should have been Blotch and it was “Splotch,” and then they decided they couldn’t use it anyway. That left a big hole in the “Sp-” page, and Splurge was the next character down — with a big red line: “Do not put in.” I said to DK, “You know, we could do Splurge, and it’ll fill up my mistake of ‘Splotch.'” They said okay, and they checked with Disney, and we were able to get Splurge in, strictly by accident. But there were a lot of characters that I really hated to see go.
TP: Even though Waldo was a Jim Henson Hour character, he’s in MuppetVision, and we were surprised that he didn’t show up in a Disney publication.
CS: He was on the initial list, and I think that may have been an issue of “He’s not a three-dimensional, physical puppet.” There’s not a lot of art on Waldo, aside from frame grabs and a couple of group shots that were done especially for PR. He was on the initial list, and he was ruled out, and I think it has to do with a combination of reasons.
TP: How about 80s Robot?
CS: 80s Robot was on the list, and the page was laid out, and it was cut out fairly close to when the book was finalized. I think it may have been that they don’t consider him a Muppety enough character; I’m not sure. There may be some weird reason — maybe some of his parts were taken from a copyrighted chassis. There have been a lot of weird things I’ve heard during the process of this book about items that may or may not be covered by copyright, and Disney’s concerns over that. Maybe if the book gets an expanded edition someday, we can put him back.
TP: How about Droop?
CS: Droop, that was a discussion we had. Since Nigel was in it, the powers that be thought that having Droop in it would make it a little confusing. I believe I mentioned Droop on Nigel’s page as a way of including him.
TP: The Country Trio? We were hoping to see them, but not surprised they’re not there.
CS: They were on the original list, but there was a concern about including characters that were based on actual people. That’s one of the reasons that there’s also no Spamela, and there’s no Elvises. Disney does not have permission to use Jim’s name and image, so any time they do needs to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Again, I think it has to do with the time crunch we were on.
There are a couple of things in the book that I look at and I cringe, because I didn’t get to see all of the laid-out pages before it went to press. They would send me the layout, I would send them text. If there was a question, I would get the layout back again and they would say, “Can you change this, can you change that?” Some of those choices they made themselves, and they did a great job on the book, but there were some jokes that got lost in the way that the lines were edited. Again, one of the reasons that happened was the accelerated schedule we were on. Any changes that I would make would have to go back to Disney to get approved again, so when I did get a page back, I would let them know about some of the problems.
They know that there’s no image of the leader of the jugband, Lubbock Lou. There was also a discussion of having a page for the other jugband, the Gogolala Jubilee Jugband, but everybody decided, “Okay, one jugband’s enough.” Again it comes down to photo sources, and if they didn’t have the picture, they didn’t have the picture.
TP: It sounds like there was no talk of ever expanding it to other Henson or Sesame characters.
CS: No, and that really would have been a very difficult thing to do. Also, Sesame is not as big in England, and DK is an English publisher. All the editorial and the graphics team on this book were all in England. That’s why, on the page for Angus McGonagle, the Argyle Gargling Gargoyle, “Argyll” is spelled the way that the place Argyll is spelled, as opposed to the way we spell argyle socks. I’m hoping that someday the Sesame people will do this, but the Sesame characters aren’t as big in England.
If you’re paging through this book, and you come across an incongruous spread of a character, it’s usually because the character that was originally on that spread had to be dropped for some reason. You can’t move everything over because all the spreads are done, and this book is being published in different languages, so they had to keep in mind the translations, and all this stuff. You pull out one Jenga piece and the whole thing collapses.
TP: The Tales from Muppetland characters — are those Henson?
CS: They are, and they were all — the king, Featherstone, Taminella — on the original list that I submitted to Disney. I think they felt that since those shows are not currently in circulation that the newer fans would not necessarily relate to them. I’m hoping this is not the last edition, that we’ll be able to revise and expand it.
TP: You obviously did a lot of research into the old shows, but you also added a lot to their stories. Where did you draw the line between actual continuity and creating new continuity?
CS: A lot of it had to do with what we knew existed. There are a lot of characters that only appeared in one or two episodes, and we really don’t know much about them. I looked at as if they were actual actors who had a couple of good jobs, and what would they be doing now. Owning Timmy’s Treats in Wisconsin, or going into choreography. I didn’t want to get into “Oh, he’s not around anymore, he’s in a box.” I wanted to keep them alive, but we had to explain why they may not have been around recently, so I wanted to explore their backstory a little bit. The whole goal was doing that and doing it in a funny way. I didn’t want to just create a backstory, I wanted to make it something that would have a bit of a punchline that would be funny on its own, and not just an interesting factoid.
I would do these in batches of ten at a time. There was a time when I was doing ten at a time just to keep up on the deadlines. I’d get caught up, and then I’d get an e-mail with ten more layouts. I would send my pages to Jim [Lewis], and Jim would go over it with a very light touch — he would just make some suggestions on punching up things. He really didn’t mess around too much with it. There’s one of them where we say one of the characters is from Boonton, New Jersey, and that’s a tribute to Jim, because Jim Lewis and I grew up only about ten miles away from each other in New Jersey.
It was just trying to keep the characters real, trying to explain where they’ve been in a funny way. The more we knew about a character, the less I had to create. With Lew Zealand, I was able to fill in the blanks with stuff I had talked to Jerry [Nelson] about for years. I had written one of Lew Zealand’s early biographies, and I called Jerry and I said, “I need a biography for Lew Zealand for press.” He and I talked for a while, and he said, “I always imagined him growing up on the Jersey shore, and his parents were circus people,” so I was able to get that in here to fill out Lew’s bio in a way that I knew Jerry would be comfortable with.
All of Fozzie’s jokes on the two-page spread are actual jokes from The Muppet Show, some of them from the first season openings. So basically, I used real stuff when there was enough real stuff, and then I just had fun making it up.
TP: So you were pretty much given free rein to make stuff up.
CS: Yeah. Then Jim would look at it, and Disney would look at it, and DK. I can’t remember any really big things that they asked us to change. There are always some issues… I noticed comments on the forum about not seeing the show called Sex and Violence. I saw that for the first time when I saw some of the pages come back laid out. That I think was just an issue of not wanting to say “Sex and Violence,” so they just called it “The Muppet Show pilot.”
TP: Well, it’s a great book. It’s the kind of thing that anyone could pick up off the shelf and leaf through it…
CS: Most encyclopedias are there to not be read. You don’t sit down and read the whole book. We wanted to do something that looked like an encyclopedia that you can actually sit down and read. Jim e-mailed me about where he laughed out loud, and that was the goal, to try and do something where people would actually laugh out loud. I’m really happy with it, and proud of it.
TP: To close that out, I just want to say how awesome it is that there’s a two-page spread with both Nigels.
CS: One of the things that would surprise me is what Disney said yes to and what they didn’t, in terms of the original character list. There were characters in there that I was really surprised they kept, and some that they didn’t… But at the end of the day, it’s their sandbox and I’m just playing in it. Once the decision of which characters to include was made, I was given an enormous amount of freedom to play around. Every once in a while, we had to change things because they found a better picture. I wrote to an older picture, and they said, “We have this really nice scan that just came in. Can you do a new joke for it?”
By and large, I’m really proud of it, and it’s nice to have my name on a book with Muppets that wasn’t one that I ghost-wrote with Miss Piggy.
TP: Can you tell us what you’re working on now with the Legacy? Or outside the Legacy, or with Muppets?
CS: There’s nothing Muppety right now, but we’re just getting ready for 2015. It’s going to be a big year for all the permanent exhibitions. We’re hoping the Museum of the Moving Image will open their exhibition in 2015, and the same for the Center for Puppetry Arts.
Right now, we are continuing to do what we hope will be monthly screenings and events at the Museum of the Moving Image. We’ll help them host a screening of I Am Big Bird sometime, when the filmmakers are ready to do it. The whole year will be devoted to keeping awareness high. Right now our focus is on getting those exhibitions open. Much of what the Legacy does as a public entity we will be doing through the Museum of the Moving Image, the Smithsonian, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. In the future, there will be fewer things that will be just coming out from the Legacy. The whole Henson family has been very much involved in finding a home for the characters, so I think a lot of what we do will continue, but it’ll be through those institutions.
TP: Thank you very much for sitting down with us. And everyone should go buy The Muppets Character Encyclopedia.
CS: I’d go further than that. Buy two!
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by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
