‘Jim Henson Idea Man’ Director Ron Howard Imagines the Muppets’ Future Had Their Creator Lived Longer
variety.comMichael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Perhaps the toughest takeaway from Ron Howard’s documentary “Jim Henson Idea Man” is the fact that his sudden death in 1990, at just age 53, robbed us all that “The Muppets” creator might have created in the computer age.
Henson was already experimenting with technology before he died — and we can only imagine what he might have done with the tools we now have. “It would have been fantastic,” Howard says. “And he would have been cutting-edge.
He would be learning to use those tools and then adapting them both to his sensibility, but also to the sensibilities of his key collaborators — and to what audiences were responding to.” There’s also the question: Where might the Muppets be today?
Now owned by Disney, the intellectual property has seen its presence in popular culture rise and fall several times in recent decades. “I would say that Jim was an outlier, and he might have kept the Muppets going for sort of practical reasons and because he liked them,” Howard says. “But he also would have just moved on to other things.
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