Word: muppets
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...full of Muppet stories. One is told by Lew Grade, the English entertainment mogul, who says that some months ago, he flew to Paris to persuade Sophia Loren to appear in one of his films. He had exactly an hour for the conference, so he launched directly into his serenade, enumerating the reasons why Sophia alone could make his project take wing. Soon he noticed that she was paying only the faintest attention. Eventually the great actress explained: It was the Muppet hour, and she absolutely must see them. A blow to his ego, admitted Lord Grade with a shrug...
...phenomenon has been observed: children trap their parents in front of the terrible tube and force them to watch the Muppets. The parents become habituated, and thenceforth on Muppet night somewhat sheepishly remind the children to close their calculus textbooks and turn on the set. In the last stage of addiction, the parents are sheepless and do not require the presence of child stooges...
...those who have been out of touch with this aspect of reality, what, exactly, is a Muppet? The word was coined from "marionette" and "puppet," says Jim Henson, 42, the skinny, bearded Zeus from whose brow the creatures began to spring 20-odd years ago, when he was a teen-ager hooked on television. He is the rarest of creatures in the imitative and adaptive world of entertainment, an originator. His brilliant central perception was that puppets could throw away the Punch and Judy box that had confined them for centuries and let the television set be their stage...
...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...
Logic peeling aside, a Muppet is (most of the time but not always) a largish arm puppet, whose body contains the arm and whose head surrounds the hand of its operator. When the operator's thumb and fingers come together, the Muppet's mouth closes; when thumb and fingers separate, the mouth opens. If the Muppet's face is pliable, as Kirmit's is?he is not much more than a green felt sock that fits over a human hand, with a wide pink split for the mouth and what look like glued-on halves of Ping Pong balls...