Chapter 12: Bold New Directions (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Jim Henson: Storyteller, an authorized biography by Jay O’Brian.
By January of 1983, Jim was settling in to his new executive position at Disney, a job that was bringing him both great creative satisfaction and great frustration.
Disney’s World of Magic was a critical and commercial success, though not the breakout hit he and Ron Miller had hoped it would be. 1982 had been a mixed bag, with
Tron being a passion project that made a good profit but never the less did not perform up to expectations and
A Muppet Mystery! badly underperforming against the blockbuster
E.T. Furthermore, interference and stonewalling from the Executive Committee and other entrenched conservative managers continued to impede the creative freedom he sought. 1983 promised to be a fresh new start.
The year would see some exciting new directions for both Henson and Disney. Exciting new movie deals were moving forward.
Trenchcoat,
Never Cry Wolf, and
Splash promised to bring new adult gravitas to the flagging studio. HAW had begun developing special creature effects for both
Revenge of the Jedi (as it was called at the time) and
Return to Oz. Following on the success of
Time Bandits, Fantasia Films partnered with Terry Gilliam and George Harrison’s HandMade Films to produce an Orwellian-inspired quasi-sequel to
Time Bandits, tentatively titled
1984 & ½. Jim and Ron Miller also continued pre-production on a hybrid live-action and animation film based on the novel
Who Censored Roger Rabbit? with some promising test footage voiced by comedian Paul Reubens.
Meanwhile, Ron Miller, now CEO and President, was moving full speed ahead on the Disney Channel, a premium cable subscription service (the first channel aimed specifically at families) that Miller felt would reinvigorate the Disney brand. The project was intended to be a showcase for all new programming rather than a home for syndication, and if it was going to succeed, it needed a flagship show. When the channel’s partners, Group W Satellite, dropped out of the project, causing Disney to absorb all of the costs, the flagship show’s importance became even more critical. To this end, Ron asked Jim if he had any ideas. He did, or, more accurately, he and his friend, writer Jerry Juhl, had an idea. It was a consciously international show with brand new Muppet characters which had the modest little goal of “bringing an end to war”.
Original Michael K. Frith artwork (source: “muppet.fandom.com”)
Originally called by the working title “Wobble World[1]”, the show would focus on three interconnected species who, despite their differences, lived in a symbiotic relationship. The show would address themes of conflict resolution, diversity, tolerance, hard work, creativity, the environment, and social and emotional intelligence. The show centered around the three species: the playful, free spirited “Waggles” (renamed from the earlier “Wobbles”), who would represented the values of imagination and creativity; the studious and hardworking “Gozers[2]”, who represented the values of hard work, industry, and productivity; and the giant, gregarious Krogs, who represented providence and the finical nature of the divine. The three species lived in a circular symbiosis whereby the Krogs grow the radishes that the Gozers and Waggles harvest, the Gozers produce their myriad construction projects from the radishes that the Waggles eat (and thus keep from overgrowing the caverns), and the Waggles’ wild digging play creates new space for the Gozers to build and expand while also encouraging the periodic flooding of the Deep Spring, which in turn provides the well water to the Krogs to grow the radishes. Centered around a secret world only accessible from our world (called “Outer Space” to the Waggles) through a hole in human host “Tinker Dan’s” workshop, the central underground world of the three species would give the show its final name, Waggle Rock, a reference to both Plymouth Rock and to the rock & roll inspired score and soundtrack.
Still more or less like this… (Image source “LA Times”)
Waggle Rock would notably be the first Muppet-based creation not helmed by Henson himself, with Jerry Juhl serving as head writer and show runner and Bernie Brillstein serving as Producer. Henson would serve as Executive Producer, direct a handful of episodes, and star occasionally as the recurring characters of “Clamm the Convincing” and his spiritualist brother “Shantus the Storyteller”. Meanwhile, outgoing Chairman Card Walker would even be tapped at Jim’s request to provide the voice for recurring character “Chairgozer Dross”, the well-dressed, comically stoic leader of the industrious Gozers. This voice casting choice would lead to an ongoing fan theory that, on some metatextual level, the Waggles represented the chaotic Henson crew, the more numerous Gozers represented the studious Disney crew, and the Krogs represented the fickle audience who were at once both the providers and the threat to the others, though Henson denied that this was the case.
Waggle Rock would go on to be a smash hit, driving Disney Channel subscriptions in the US, appearing all around the world via satellite, and even being licensed to stations in countries where the Disney Channel wasn’t yet available. Waggle Rock would also achieve a monumental milestone when it became the first western TV show to be broadcast on Soviet television[3]. Other shows on the Disney Channel didn’t perform quite as well, but a few stood out.
Dreamfinders, a children’s variety show co-produced by David Lazer and hosted by Professor Dreamfinder and the animatronic Figment, became a popular after-school show that explored the possibilities of the imagination—it also served as a back-door advertisement for the new Journey into the Imagination ride at EPCOT. Lazer called it “Howdy Doody on steroids”.
Mousterpiece Theater became a repository for Disney Shorts, both old and new, and was popular with all ages. And
Good Morning Mickey offered a child-centric alternative to the endless
Today Show rip-offs of the era. More success would be brought in when a certain Cheeky Little Engine joined the channel later that year.
Other shows on the new network would prove less successful.
The New Mickey Mouse Club[4], which mixed Muppets with young human actors, was a critical and audience dud. Audiences found the mix of the ‘50s/‘60s retro and ‘80s “MTV modern” jarring. Some compared it unfavorably to both the original show and to
Sesame Street. Disney and Muppet fans today like to point out the irony that an almost identical reboot show launched in the 2000s was celebrated as a fun and nostalgic mix of the old and new, but 1983 was a different time with different tastes.
(Image source: “logos.fandom.com”)
The Disney Channel began taking more and more of Jim’s time during early 1983. Subscriptions would reach 7 million by the end of the year[5]. Working closely with founding channel President Alan Wagner, he recruited Bernie Brillstein and David Lazer, both TV veterans themselves, to execute the day to day operations of the channel. At Jim’s urging, Wagner also approached Lord Lew Grade for an executive position, but Grade turned them down, wanting to remain in his native England.
Henson felt that he owed it to Grade, who’d greenlit
The Muppet Show when no one else wanted to touch it and who had been a longstanding champion of Henson’s efforts. Grade had, just two years earlier, been ousted from his own company, Associated Communications Corporation (ACC), by financier and sometime corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court. At first presenting himself as a White Knight there to rescue the failing company, Holmes à Court had subsequently orchestrated and executed a boardroom coup, ousting Grade and taking control of ACC himself[6].
Grade thanked Jim for the effort on his behalf, and expressed that the best thing he’d ever done for Jim was to sell the Muppet rights to Disney in 1980. “You seriously don’t
ever want to work for Homes à Court,” he said, bitterly[7].
[1] “Woozle World” in our timeline. The original inspiration for what became Fraggle Rock in our world came in 1980 when someone at a dinner party suggested to Jim that he make a deliberately international show. Small butterflies have resulted in slightly different results than in our timeline.
[2] This name became a running gag among fans when
Ghostbusters debuted the next year featuring a villain of the same name.
[3] This was the case with
Fraggle Rock in our timeline.
[4] Invented for this timeline.
[5] This is far more than the paltry 611,000 subscribers from our timeline, but still far short of the 10 million subscribers that Ron Miller projected over the same time period. By comparison, HBO had about 12 million subscribers at this point. The smash success of
Waggle Rock, analogous to the equivalent success of
Fraggle Rock in our timeline, is largely driving the viewership, as is the near-exclusive rebroadcast of
The Muppet Show, which was still very popular at this point in our timeline and in this one alike.
[6] This happened in 1982 in our timeline, but in 1981 in this one.
[7] Admittedly, Grade is highly biased in this regard. That said, recall that in our timeline Henson discovered this first hand. Where Grade had given Jim a lot of free creative reign, Holmes à Court regularly interfered with the productions, in particular
The Dark Crystal, leading Jim to buy back the rights to the movie for $15 million out of pocket.
