The end of this month will see the debut of Jim Henson Idea Man, the new feature-length documentary from filmmaker Ron Howard, on Disney+ Laughing Place was provided access to an early screener of the film, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this film.
I was born in late 1979, near the end of the run of The Muppet Show but still the perfect age that it, along with The Muppet Movie and its sequels, plus Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth were among the most dominant pop-culture influences of my childhood. And The Muppets’ creator Jim Henson’s 1990 death was the first passing of a celebrity that I remember affecting me emotionally, to the point where my life still feels broken up in the sections of before and after he was no longer with us. The story of Jim Henson’s life and career in the entertainment industry has been told in a number of forms through the years– in books and on television– but now Ron Howard (who previously dipped his feet in the documentary world with The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years) has made an effort to boil everything Henson down into less than two hours with the strangely colon-less Jim Henson Idea Man.
The first (and last) person we hear speak in Idea Man is Henson’s close collaborator of 35 years Frank Oz, with whom Howard has scored an insightful new interview about the working relationship between the two. We also hear from Jim’s children, his wife Jane (via archival footage), other Muppet performers like Dave Goelz and Fran Brill, and celebrities who have worked with the Henson Company like Rita Moreno and Jennifer Connelly. But the Oz sound bites come across as the most informative and heartfelt of the talking heads, with the fellow filmmaker and puppeteer at his most vulnerable when talking about his dear departed friend Jim. There are plenty of great clips included as well, of course, such as one I’d never seen before of Henson and Oz being interviewed together (along with Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear, naturally) on an apparently unaired late-70s pilot for The Orson Welles Show.
The film goes through all of the biographical documentary bullet points, starting with Henson’s early life, meeting Jane, starting up a late-night puppet show called Sam and Friends, and then graduating on to Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and the big screen. Again, this is stuff I mostly knew already from having read Brian Jay Jones’s Jim Henson: The Biography from 2013, but it’s presented here with an entertaining and emotional approach that should hold the attention of die-hard Muppet fans and relative newcomers to Henson’s work alike. Ultimately, as you might guess, the film gets to the point where it has to deal with Jim’s death, and I was dreading that moment as I was watching, but I will say that it feels cathartic to hear his close friends, coworkers, and family talk about the untimely tragedy and the celebratory funeral that followed in such an open-hearted way.
My only real issue with Idea Man is that it breezes past some of my favorite Henson output like Fraggle Rock (which recently received an acclaimed and successful revival) and The Storyteller in favor of spending time on perhaps more familiar (and coincidentally Disney-owned) properties. But that’s a minor nitpick of a film that embraces and upholds the Jim Henson legacy in a thoughtful, genuine manner, and in the end all I really had hoped from the project is that it would introduce a new generation of fans to all the magic that he created. Having now seen the film, I think it has a real chance at doing that.
Jim Henson Idea Man will debut on Friday, May 31st, exclusively via Disney+.
My grade: 4 out of 5 ping-pong ball eyes.