Word: kermit
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...wobbling dollar, but a more cheerful and indeed more bankable asset: Kermit the Frog. He is the gallant and slightly desperate master of ceremonies of a weekly eruption called The Muppet Show, which in its third season on the air has become what is almost certainly the most popular television entertainment now being produced on earth. The Muppet series is seen by at least 235 million people in 106 countries. Those who have not met Kermit will ask, in thank-you-not-today tones, "A frog?" And they will ask, "Adult?" The answer to the first question is a confident...
Like other geniuses, Henson is a sly fellow whose sound artistic instinct is to resist critical analysis. If you peel art away, layer after layer, what you have at the end is all peelings and no onion. For years Henson, who plays Kermit, insisted that the character was not a frog but "a froglike creature." Peel that, you peelers. Now he backtracks and says that "muppet" was simply a word that sounded good to him. The sound combination of puppet and marionette is merely an explanation that happens to sound logical...
...mouth and what look like glued-on halves of Ping Pong balls for eyes?the clenchings and wrigglings of the operator's fist can change the expression with considerable subtlety. Not simply smiles, but wistful smiles are possible. If the face is relatively stiff, like that of Kermit's formidable friend Miss Piggy ( her head is carved from a block of plastic insulating foam), then, although a certain degree of meaningful nose crinkling is possible, expressiveness is largely an illusion created by body movement and voice. In either case, the puppeteer can synchronize the figure's lip movements...
...observation made with some regalarity is that Kermit the Frog is the Mickey Mouse of the 1970s, and that Jim Henson's firm, Henson Associates?known somewhat alarmingly as HA!? will become the Disney organization of what remains of the 20th century. Maybe so; the Muppets have just finished making an $8 million film in Hollywood, called The Muppet Movie, which chronicles their journey from the boondocks to show business glory. Another film is under discussion; an astonishing variety of Muppet toys and other artifacts, including arm puppets, fills the stores; a theme amusement park of the Disneyland sort...
...stars are the animals: Kermit, the pure and reasonable frog; the ineffable Miss Piggy, every circumferential inch a lady; Rowlf the Dog, a philosophical pianist; Fozzie Bear, the can't-stand-up comic; and The Great Gonzo, the magnificently inferior creature whose inventors insist, despite damning evidence, that he is not a turkey. Monsters are the remaining important category of beings: such enormities as Sweetums, who is about 9 ft. tall and covered with a three-day growth of brownish shag, and Thog, who is a good deal bigger and still growing, lend chaos to the goings...