How Jim Henson’s Muppets Became a Global Phenomenon

When Jim Henson’s Muppets popped up on American TV screens in the 1950s, few imagined just how far these wacky assemblages of fur, foam, fleece and feathers would go.

“American viewers were slow to accept the Henson-style soft, furry menagerie because they didn’t resemble or move like most American puppets,” Natasha Lance Rogoff writes in Muppets in Moscow, her book about bringing “Sesame Street” to the former Soviet Union. “But over time, American audiences grew to love the characters and ‘Sesame Street’ became the most successful children’s television program in America because of the Muppets.”

In time, the rest of the world also came to know and love Henson’s characters as unlikely ambassadors for cross-cultural understanding.

As a young man, Jim Henson wasn’t all that interested in puppetry. He just knew he wanted to work in the new and thrilling medium of television. In 1954, he got his chance. A Washington, D.C., station was looking for puppeteers for “The Junior Morning Show.” Henson, then 17, hastily stitched together a few characters, auditioned and got the job. Although the show only lasted a few weeks, more opportunities followed. In 1955, Henson landed a recurring five-minute slot on the NBC-owned Washington station WRC-TV. The resulting show, “Sam and Friends,” was the playground for Henson’s experiments with puppetry and the medium of television itself.

Yet, Henson still didn’t regard puppetry as his calling. “His talent in the field was apparent—he was a natural,” says Karen Falk, archives director at the Jim Henson Company, “but he had broader ambitions as a filmmaker, not convinced that puppetry would be his primary art form.”

That changed, however, after his 1958 trip through France, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium, during which Henson experienced the richness of European puppetry traditions firsthand. He returned home energized.

By then, he was calling his creations the Muppets, sometimes cited as a combination of the words "puppet" and "marionette." Central to the characters’ appeal was their stylized, simple designs and unique expressiveness. Among the earliest of Henson’s creations was a lizard-like creature sewn from an old spring coat with ping-pong-ball eyes—a primitive version of Kermit the Frog.

Over the next decade, Henson’s early Muppets appeared on television. Their forte: short, chaotic comedy sketches that frequently ended in an explosion or a character being eaten. By the late ’60s, Henson envisioned a variety show for his characters. That dream would eventually become “The Muppet Show” in 1976. But first, Henson had the opportunity to change children’s television forever.

The idea for “Sesame Street” began at a dinner party in New York in 1966. Lloyd Morissett, an executive at the Carnegie Corporation, posed a question to Joan Ganz Cooney, then a young producer with a growing interest in educational reform: “Do you think television could be used to teach young children?”

In the mid-’60s, educators and policymakers were acutely aware of the barriers facing disadvantaged children, particularly in literacy and numeracy. Meanwhile, TV had become a fixture in American homes. Children were obviously transfixed by commercials: short, colorful, catchy bursts of sound and images. What if the eye-catching and persuasive powers of television could be used for good? What if TV could teach young viewers kindness, empathy, numbers and letters?

Cooney assembled and led a team of passionate television professionals, working closely with children’s education experts to develop what would become “Sesame Street.” Among those creatives was Henson, who had already explored the Muppets’ ability to educate in 1962 when he created a public service announcement for the U.S. Information Agency to promote democracy in the Dominican Republic. 

Additionally, early tests showed that preschoolers lost interest in human-only scenes. The solution was to introduce Muppets who coexisted with the human characters. In short order, the Muppets became essential to the development of the series.

When “Sesame Street” premiered in 1969, preschoolers and parents alike were won over by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Grover, Kermit the Frog and the rest—friendly presences who infused the lessons of the show with delight, humor and the Muppets’ brand of amiable anarchy.

The world was next.

It was clear that the concept and principles of “Sesame Street”—and the appeal of the Muppets—could resonate beyond the United States. In 1972, the first international co-productions, “Plaza Sésamo” in Mexico and “Vila Sésamo” in Brazil, premiered. Within a few years, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind the program, worked on numerous international versions of the show, developed in collaboration with local educators and creative teams who intended to serve and reflect each unique community.

Crucially, each international version got its own Muppets. “Plaza Sésamo” features Big Bird’s green parrot cousin, Abelardo Montoya, while the Netherlands’ “Sesamstraat” has the blue-feathered Pino, and Gugu is the resident grouch in “Vila Sésamo.” However, the dialogue between Sesame Workshop and its international partners wasn’t without its culture clashes; the German team, for instance, briefly pushed for “Sesamstraße” to take on sex education. But these differences helped make the show relevant to audiences around the world and led to dozens of international adaptations.

The show's early global reach pushed Henson to imagine an entirely new Muppet project built from the ground up for international audiences. In September 1976, “The Muppet Show” premiered in the United Kingdom. Its humor traveled easily across borders, and the series quickly became an international hit. That show made Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo and Animal into worldwide stars and helped cement a global audience for the Muppets franchise. 

In the early 1980s, Henson conceived of the TV show “Fraggle Rock” with worldwide co-production in mind. The show’s objective was both bold and simple: to promote world peace. 

“Fraggle Rock” revolved around three Muppet communities—the industrious Doozers, the free-spirited Fraggles and the towering, bumbling Gorgs—all trying to get along with one another. The show debuted in 1983 and ran for five seasons during the final years of the Cold War, when cultural exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union were expanding. 

“What the show is really about is people getting along with other people and understanding the delicate balance of the natural world,” Henson wrote in his notes, quoted in Jim Henson: The Works—The Art, the Magic, the Imagination. “These are topics that can be dealt with in a symbolic way, which is what puppets basically do all the time.”

Henson didn’t imagine he could really end all war, but he believed he could instill ideas of harmony, curiosity and interdependence in the minds of children. “Fraggle Rock” aired in dozens of countries and became the first American television series broadcast in the Soviet Union in January 1989. “By the end of the year, the Berlin Wall had come down,” Falk says. “Perhaps the show’s lessons of tolerance, interconnectedness and open communication helped that along.”

Although Henson died suddenly in 1990, the Muppets and the spirit of imaginative idealism behind them would carry on.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Sesame Workshop saw an opportunity to do something positive for the children living through seismic societal upheaval. With support from Congress, the team embarked on a Russian adaptation: “Ulitsa Sezam.”

“We faced enormous difficulties and culture clashes,” says Natasha Lance Rogoff, the show’s lead producer. During production, several Russian television executives were assassinated; soldiers stormed the office and seized scripts, equipment and even an Elmo.

The creation of the Russian Muppets also sparked heated debate. “When we first spoke about creating new Muppets for the Russian series, my Moscow colleagues wanted to feature traditional wood Russian puppets,” Rogoff says. Eventually, three distinctly Slavic Muppets were created: Zeliboba, an oversized blue hound inspired by a Russian forest spirit; Kubik, an orange, nerdy, exacting problem-solver; and Businka, a bright pink whirlwind of joy and mischief.

The show aired across 11 time zones for more than a decade. “Over the past 30 years, young people from Ukraine, Russia, Armenia, Georgia and many other regions tell with great emotion how much ‘Ulitsa Sezam’ meant to their childhoods,” say Rogoff, “and how much they loved the Slavic-style Muppets.”