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Let's hear you sing the offer, but you might not know this, but you can thank this guy for teaching you your A B CS.
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My name is Jim Henson.
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I'm a puppeteer.
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Jim Henson.
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He was the most prolific puppeteer of all time.
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Yeah, my dad never really wanted to be a Children's entertainer, but the whole industry was trying to say, Jim, stay there in preschool because that's where you belong.
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Hey, just wouldn't take it.
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Jim Henson brought together an all star team to create a film that would showcase his creations for an older audience.
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The film was called Labyrinth Think, Eighties Eyeliner and Illusions, and it was the biggest box office failure of Jim's career.
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So why, 30 years later, is it a major cult classic?
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I believe in you as a puppeteer, you have to learn to focus your whole performance through your hand.
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My dad, Jim Hansen, he held Children's entertainment in high esteem, but that was exactly what was making him bristle was that people would look at his Muppets and they'd say, That's so cute.
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I bet kids love that.
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Jim Henson wanted you to know his work wasn't just for kids.
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Labyrinth is by far the biggest project I've seen from you.
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True, it's one of the biggest things we've tried to do.
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Bringing in George Lucas and Carrie Jones and David Bowie thes very big, heavy hitting talent was something he was excited about at that point when she hadn't really done before.
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That movie follows Jennifer Connelly's character, Sarah, through an enchanted labyrinth to rescue her brother from the Goblin King, played by David Bowie, and she finds friends along the way.
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But that's close enough.
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One of them is named Hoggle.
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I played Hoggle.
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The plan was not for me to voice the character, so it's one of the worst kind of British accents ever done.
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I said.
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Where is it Door?
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What do Jim's creature shop would innovate in big ways.
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Most Muppets had one or two puppeteers behind them, but in Labyrinth, some characters had eight or nine puppeteers working together to make one characters seamless performance.
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It was so technically complicated that we all had to think is one.
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Hoggle was a complex character.
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He had four puppeteers, motors in his face and an actress named Sheri Wiser inside the outfit, and she was 3 ft two inches tall.
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So sherry spaces inside Hagel's mouth, all painted black so that hopefully you can't see her in there.
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But you couldn't see anything unless the mouth was open.
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And because of that, that's why ha go makes all the crazy sounds they mix.
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He's always going to be, Oh, he's always talking to himself.
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But the truth is, if he didn't do that, how will we keep walking into trees?
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The work that the Creature Shop was able to pull off impressed the entire industry, but that wasn't enough to make it a success.
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I never really got to fully understand why the movie wasn't successful.
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The budget of Labyrinth was 25 million, and it only ended up earning half of that in the box office.
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The movie was quickly pulled from theaters.
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It hit my dad real hard.
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This was Jim's last feature film that he directed before he died, four years after the film premiered.
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But after his death, a cult like following started to grow around his fantasy eighties musical.
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Interestingly, I believe the movie made more money every year than the year it was released in the theater, so the movie just got more and more and more popular and successful.
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My dad would have gone well, I knew I knew that it would.
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That labyrinth was gonna work.
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Of course it would eventually.
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So my question for you is our puppets just for kids.
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No, Puppets are not just for kids.
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Puppets air for the kid In all of us, the audience has no baggage.
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When they're watching puppets, they can't make all their assumptions by their accent and age and the color of their skin.
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Which is really important, because if you could talk to an adult and get past all the assumptions, you can tell them powerful stuff about themselves, and they won't get mad at you.
