Chapter 33: When Jim Henson left Disney (Cont’d)
Excerpt from In the Service of the Mouse: A Memoir, by Jack Lindquist
You can blame it all on me.
People still question the decision, given the magnitude of Jim’s legacy, but I stand by it even today.
It all started one late July day in 2000, not long after he announced his retirement plans to us, when I encountered Jim in Disneyland. He was staring long and hard at the bronze statue of Walt and Roy near the Castle. I surmised, incorrectly, what he was thinking.
“It will never be your face on that statue,” I told him, much as I’d told a thousand employees over the years, from new hires to retiring executives.
“Thank God for that,” Jim said with a smile.
After a few silent moments he asked me about Walt’s last years, and I told him, frankly, what Walt had said and done. I told him about Walt’s dreams for EPCOT – the true E.P.C.O.T., the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow – and how even as he lay dying in the hospital he spoke about his “tomorrow” plans, never quite willing to admit that there was any other alternative. I spoke of Walt’s legacy, and I spoke frankly about how Walt had told us “I am no longer Walt Disney” when the benevolent and timeless “Uncle Walt” public persona began to eclipse the all too human man behind it.
“When I die, I want to have my ashes scattered,” Jim told me, “Somewhere quiet and magical, far from the city.
“I don’t want to be Lenin,” he added.
At the time I took the comment as the most bizarre of non-sequiturs. From Walt’s statue to Jim’s funeral plans to…the father of Soviet Communism? Was this a weird corporate reference? He’d never spoken about politics before, at least not in such gross terms.
It was only later, while watching a special on the evolving Union of Sovereign States and its complicated post-Soviet legacy, that I got what he meant. When Lenin died, he was placed in a glass sarcophagus in a marble temple, like Sleeping Beauty, there to be observed and worshiped. They built a thousand statues in his likeness. When the Soviet Union fell, so did most of the statues.
No, Jim was saying to me that he didn’t want to become an icon. He didn’t want his name and face plastered on a hundred buildings. He didn’t want a huge bronze statue on a marble column. He wanted to go out the way that he lived: simply, joyously, and surrounded by friends.
When he retired, the Disney employees overwhelmingly wanted to mark Jim’s time at Disney in some big way, something to capture the magnitude of the impact that he’d had on the company. “Second only to Walt,” was the familiar mantra.
Some of the Imagineers drew up plans for a bronze statue of Jim, standing tall, perhaps standing by Walt, perhaps holding hands with Kermit. Others wanted a humbler statue, Jim with Kermit on his arm, seated nonchalantly on a bench in Muppetland.
I vetoed all of it. Jim, as I knew he would insist, got only a window on Main Street, just like everyone else.
It read, simply, “Jim Henson, Storyteller”.
(Image by @Denliner)
Life’s like a movie,
Write your own ending,
Keep Believing,
Keep Pretending
We did just what we set out to do……
Thanks to the Lovers,
The Dreamers,
And YOU.
- Finale to “The Rainbow Connection (reprise)” by Paul Williams
Thanks again, to all of you. To those who’ve been here from the first post and to those who have started after I submitted this last post, and to everyone in between, I couldn’t – and indeed wouldn’t – have done this without your continued support. Thank you all for the likes/loves, the suggestions, the comments, the corrections, the contributions, and simply the enjoyments that made this timeline remain a Work of Passion, not a Work of Effort for me.
And a massive Mount Rushmore-sized Hat Tip to you all!
Excerpt from In the Service of the Mouse: A Memoir, by Jack Lindquist
You can blame it all on me.
People still question the decision, given the magnitude of Jim’s legacy, but I stand by it even today.
It all started one late July day in 2000, not long after he announced his retirement plans to us, when I encountered Jim in Disneyland. He was staring long and hard at the bronze statue of Walt and Roy near the Castle. I surmised, incorrectly, what he was thinking.
“It will never be your face on that statue,” I told him, much as I’d told a thousand employees over the years, from new hires to retiring executives.
“Thank God for that,” Jim said with a smile.
After a few silent moments he asked me about Walt’s last years, and I told him, frankly, what Walt had said and done. I told him about Walt’s dreams for EPCOT – the true E.P.C.O.T., the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow – and how even as he lay dying in the hospital he spoke about his “tomorrow” plans, never quite willing to admit that there was any other alternative. I spoke of Walt’s legacy, and I spoke frankly about how Walt had told us “I am no longer Walt Disney” when the benevolent and timeless “Uncle Walt” public persona began to eclipse the all too human man behind it.
“When I die, I want to have my ashes scattered,” Jim told me, “Somewhere quiet and magical, far from the city.
“I don’t want to be Lenin,” he added.
At the time I took the comment as the most bizarre of non-sequiturs. From Walt’s statue to Jim’s funeral plans to…the father of Soviet Communism? Was this a weird corporate reference? He’d never spoken about politics before, at least not in such gross terms.
It was only later, while watching a special on the evolving Union of Sovereign States and its complicated post-Soviet legacy, that I got what he meant. When Lenin died, he was placed in a glass sarcophagus in a marble temple, like Sleeping Beauty, there to be observed and worshiped. They built a thousand statues in his likeness. When the Soviet Union fell, so did most of the statues.
No, Jim was saying to me that he didn’t want to become an icon. He didn’t want his name and face plastered on a hundred buildings. He didn’t want a huge bronze statue on a marble column. He wanted to go out the way that he lived: simply, joyously, and surrounded by friends.
When he retired, the Disney employees overwhelmingly wanted to mark Jim’s time at Disney in some big way, something to capture the magnitude of the impact that he’d had on the company. “Second only to Walt,” was the familiar mantra.
Some of the Imagineers drew up plans for a bronze statue of Jim, standing tall, perhaps standing by Walt, perhaps holding hands with Kermit. Others wanted a humbler statue, Jim with Kermit on his arm, seated nonchalantly on a bench in Muppetland.
I vetoed all of it. Jim, as I knew he would insist, got only a window on Main Street, just like everyone else.
It read, simply, “Jim Henson, Storyteller”.
(Image by @Denliner)
Life’s like a movie,
Write your own ending,
Keep Believing,
Keep Pretending
We did just what we set out to do……
Thanks to the Lovers,
The Dreamers,
And YOU.
- Finale to “The Rainbow Connection (reprise)” by Paul Williams
Fin
Thanks again, to all of you. To those who’ve been here from the first post and to those who have started after I submitted this last post, and to everyone in between, I couldn’t – and indeed wouldn’t – have done this without your continued support. Thank you all for the likes/loves, the suggestions, the comments, the corrections, the contributions, and simply the enjoyments that made this timeline remain a Work of Passion, not a Work of Effort for me.
And a massive Mount Rushmore-sized Hat Tip to you all!
