In November of 1990, The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson aired on CBS. In the one-hour special, Fozzie Bear has been given instructions from Kermit the Frog to put together a production number in honor of their own creator, Jim Henson, who had passed away earlier that year. Over the course of the special, the Muppets struggle with one major obstacle to this task: They have no idea who this Jim Henson fellow is, or why he matters to them. Being a Muppets special, it of course features a suitable roster of guest stars like Carol Burnett and Harry Belafonte. The whole thing also ends with a big musical number, a showtune by Larry Grossman and Hal Hackady from Snoopy!!! The Musical, “Just One Person.” The song was a favorite of Jim’s. It had previously been performed by Bernadette Peters on The Muppet Show and had also been used to close out at a pair of human memorial services held for Jim a few months prior, with just about everyone who ever knew him singing it together at the dais.
I was eight years old, so having been a child of the 1980s, the Muppets had my heart on lock. I had worn out my VHS tapes of classic The Muppet Show sketches, I laughed at the jokes in The Muppet Movie that were too adult for me to actually get, and I had a weird crush on Red Fraggle. As such, the death of Jim Henson stands out to me as the first time I was fully aware of the idea that someone who makes a thing you like can die and how that can fundamentally change that thing. But the tribute special is also a core memory for me and one I later came to understand as a moment where the Muppets also fundamentally changed me.
What I distinctly remember about watching that special is that I didn’t expect to see Kermit the Frog in it. At the start of the show, Kermit’s instructions are left for Fozzie to read while the famous frog is away traveling. At eight years old, I did not have a deeply intimate understanding of just who each Muppet performer was and which Muppets were theirs. I was not yet the girl whose ex would call her “too sensitive” for being sad when she’d learn that Jerry Nelson had passed away. Nor was I the gal who would cry real human tears when Dave Goelz performed as Gonzo before a Muppet Movie screening at the Hollywood Forever cemetery.
But I did know Jim Henson was Kermit. And even in an era when I wasn’t plugged into a world wide web of constant updates and production information, I knew there was a real sense of cultural uncertainty about whether or not Kermit the Frog would continue to exist in a world that Jim Henson had departed. They’d talked about it on the news! Jim Henson was dead. Was Kermit dead too!?
Spoilers, I know, but Kermit did not die. He arrives at the tail end of “Just One Person” and quietly watches the rest of the Muppets sing. It’s a moment that mirrors The Muppet Family Christmas, where Jim himself watches the Muppets, Fraggles, and Sesame Street gang sing Christmas carols. The “Just One Person” number and Kermit’s appearance is something that even now, decades later, can still bring me to tears if the clip surfaces on YouTube. It’s the moment that established one of Jim’s most personal creations as a being unto himself who would continue to exist beyond the loss of his maker.
For almost a full hour in 1990, an eight-year-old girl believed it was a very real possibility that she’d never see Kermit again. But then the rest of the Muppets turned and saw their friend, and welcomed him right back into the mix. Kermit was still real because the Muppets made him real.
In his 2013 biography of Jim Henson, Brian Jay Jones writes extensively of a young Jim Henson and his fascination with television. Henson created his first televised puppet series, Sam and Friends, for a local station while he was still in high school. According to the Jones book, Henson was a pioneer in putting puppets on television because he understood that the frame of the TV itself allowed someone to create the universe for the audience. Prior to Henson, puppets on TV tended to be marionettes and ventriloquist dummies, ostensibly transferring live stage performances to the small screen. Henson was a pioneer in developing puppets specifically for the medium of television, wanting them to hold up the scrutiny of a camera close-up.
Personally, I believe the genius of Jim Henson and the Muppets goes even one step further than that. There’s a magic trick to the Muppets that goes beyond the technological tricks of a TV screen filling in for the puppet theater proscenium of a Punch and Judy show. Even when human actors do join the Muppets in a production, they almost seamlessly slip right into the Muppet reality, despite being present in a studio or stage space where the performers are present.
There are some effects and reasons for this, for example, a Muppet’s eyes are usually painted with pupils slightly inward to give the appearance of the character focusing on whatever they’re “looking” at. And of course, the Muppet performers are usually kept out of the line of sight of actors so that the Muppets themselves are the focus. But it is no small thing that every single Muppet is kind of, well, weird-looking. Even the most “boring” and “stuffy” humanoid Muppet has that distinct puffy face, with exaggerated features.
The true magic of the Muppets lies in this weirdness. Whether someone is an actor joining them onstage, a child seeing them for the first time, or a humble, obsessed fan working her way through a full rewatch of the original The Muppet Show, the experience of watching the Muppets involves a buy-in to a short-term social contract. When you see a small green felt figure with painted ping-pong-ball-style eyes say hello to you, you accept that, actually, this is a frog, and his name is Kermit. And oh yes, you also accept that frogs can talk. In fact, lots of animals can talk. And they can sing, dance, tell bad jokes, heckle those bad jokes, fire themselves out of cannons, and display a shocking level of emotional depth.
When you watch the Muppets, there’s a subconscious moment where you agree with them that yes, these creatures are real. By doing that, you’re conceding mentally that of course some frogs are vaguely anthropomorphic and made of fabric, and of course they’re just members of our society; you’ve also bought into everything they’re selling. After peace with this cognitive dissonance, suspension of disbelief isn’t even a concern anymore.
By accepting the absurdity of the Muppets’ existence, you’ve bought a ticket to a ride, and will accept almost anything else they’ll throw at you while you’re on it. Kermit and Fozzie are identical twins, unless Fozzie is wearing his hat? Sure. An obsessed frog leg restaurant magnate will relentlessly pursue Kermit across the country to force him to dance in his commercials? Absolutely. Two old men will return to the balcony seat of a theater every single show despite seemingly hating every second of it? Absolutely. The Muppets’ existence has given us permission to believe it all, and in doing so, we get to live, just for a little while, in the space where the Muppets are possible.
The pudding that holds the proverbial proof of my belief is not an official Muppet production, but a parody of one. The Broadway show Avenue Q, created by Jeff Marx and double EGOTer Robert Lopez, shook up the Muppet paradigm by moving the puppeteers out from their hiding spaces and allowing them to walk around onstage with the other actors, holding their puppets in plain sight. Avenue Q actually began life as a Muppet pitch, a musical parody of Hamlet called Kermit, Prince of Denmark. The story goes that the Henson team was concerned about putting the Muppets performers onstage, for fear that it would break the immersion, and ultimately passed on the pitch. Marx and Lopez shifted their idea into a Sesame Street parody with lessons for adults, and went on to beat Wicked at the Tony Awards that year.
It turned out that audiences had no problem with the puppets and actors appearing onstage together. Once we accept that puppets like Sally Monster are real characters with stakes in the story, the human performers physically holding their puppet just sort of fade from our perception. Avenue Q was such a proof of concept that the Jim Henson Company adopted a similar move when they produced their own live Muppet events, The Muppets Take the Bowl and The Muppets Take the O2 in Hollywood and London. While the Muppet performers remain hidden in the TV format, such as The Muppets Mayhem or The Muppets Haunted Mansion, performers can be seen in live appearances, like Matt Vogel being onstage at the 2021 D23 expo while performing Kermit. Despite the clear presence of Vogel’s hand directly up a sleeve in Kermit’s nether region, we can still comfortably say, yes, this is a frog and he happens to talk, and he’s here having a nice little chat.
It’s fitting, then, that Henson’s beloved “Just One Person” would serve as the tribute to his passing. The lyrics state that if just one person believes in you, deep enough and hard enough, then maybe a second person can too, and then maybe three, or four, or even more. If all those people can believe in you, the song, then maybe you can believe in yourself. It’s hard to think of a more succinct way to bid adieu to Henson, who, through his creations, invited generations of people to believe in something magical, and in doing so, to accept a little magic within themselves.
© 2026 Riley Silverman
