Jim Hill
Page 1 of 3

When You Wish Upon a ... Frog?!
Teaching Mickey Some Manners

As Jim Hill continues his series about the convoluted relations between the Walt Disney Company and Jim Henson Company, he discusses the rise of Brian Henson as well as the lawsuit that Henson was forced to file in order to get the Mouse to behave himself ...

It's not enough to know what you don't want to do. In order to really succeed in this life, you also have to have a plan. Some sense of direction. A notion of where you want to go and what you want to do.

In December 1990, the folks working at Jim Henson Productions didn't really have a plan. All they knew was that they didn't want to be a part of the Disney machine anymore.

But breaking free from the Mouse's grasp wasn't going to be all that easy for Miss Piggy & pals. After all, Mickey had already spent millions of dollars in preparation of numerous proposed Disney / Henson collaborations: movies, TV series and theme park attractions. And senior Walt Disney Company officials were still expecting to receive some significant return on the cash they'd invested.

Meanwhile, over on the Henson side of the the street, money was quickly becoming a major concern as well. As in: Without those millions of Disney dollars, how was Kermit ever going to cover his bills?

Why was the Jim Henson Company suddenly having cash flow problems? You see, in order to get the Muppets ready to be handed over to Disney, Henson officials spent most of 1990 dissolving the company's lucrative character licensing deals (Since -- of course -- once Disney took control of Jim Henson Productions, the Mouse would want to cut all of its own licensing deals for the Muppets). So -- at the start of January 1991 -- with virtually no Muppet licensing money coming in, the Jim Henson Company suddenly found itself on pretty shaky financial ground.

Obviously, the thing to do to get cash following again was to quickly get the Muppets back to work. But on what? A new movie? A TV series? And who exactly would this new project be produced for.

It was this point that the senior staff at Jim Henson Productions realized that there's something more pressing than dealing with the company's cash flow problems. The Muppet family now desperately needed someone to step into Jim's role and give the company a real sense of purpose and direction again.

David Lazer had known this day was coming. After Henson had tragically passed away in May 1990, Lazer -- a longtime friend of Jim's as well as an executive vice president at Henson Associates -- temporarily agreed to step into the company's leadership role. But only because David knew that he was the placeholder for the man who would eventually take charge of Jim Henson Productions: Jim's 27 year old son, Brain.

Now the idea of turning control of a multi-million dollar firm over to a man in his 20s may seem ludicrous to some. And I'm sure that there are those of you out there who are reading this and thinking that this has to be this textbook definition of nepotism. Let me be blunt here, folks: That's really not what happened when Brian Henson assumed control of Jim Henson Production.