Interview: Brian Henson on Puppet Up!, the Future of Muppet*Vision 3D, and Restoring His Muppet Christmas Carol

Whether expanding the legacy of Kermit and friends through films like The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, or teaching his puppeteers how to do improv, Brian Henson, son of puppetry pioneer Jim Henson and chairman of the Jim Henson Company, has spent his life’s work helping to further the form popularized by his late father.

This month, Puppet Up! — Uncensored, Henson and Patrick Bristow’s long-running puppetry improv show, comes to Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre for a two-week run, July 16-27. It promises to never be the same show twice.

Here, Henson talks about the origins of both the show and the title, his ongoing efforts to make the full-length Muppet Christmas Carol permanent, and shares his thoughts on the closure of Muppet*Vision 3D, his dad’s final project.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tell me about the origin of Puppet Up!
In the old days, when film was on film, it cost a fortune. They would call first positions, the puppeteers would hold the puppets up, the cameras would roll, you’d wait for the sound and camera departments to call speed, and then the director would call action. All of this would happen very quickly because you didn’t want to burn film.

The problem was, by the time the director called action, the puppeteers were already pretty tired. So, in the Jim Henson Company, we added one more cue: the first AD would out “Puppets Up!” before the director called action. That’s the history of the term.

How does that morph into a stage show?
In the mid-to-late 2000s, I felt the puppeteers were getting a little stale. This was very much against the grain of my dad and Frank Oz and Richard Hunt and Jerry Nelson. Those guys would ad-lib and that was the magic moment.

I was bemoaning the fact that we would train 20 puppeteers and maybe two had the ability to ad-lib. And Mia Sara, who I was dating, said “You know, you can train that. It’s called improv comedy.” She took me to a Groundlings show, and I said “Wow, they’re really good ad-libbers.”

Mia introduced me to Patrick Bristow, who is a world-renowned improviser and trainer of improv, and we started talking about how to get our puppeteers to improv. At first, he didn’t know if it was going to work because improvisors have to watch each other’s eyes all the time to try and read each other’s minds. In the Henson Company, it’s all about the camera. We watch a monitor to see what the puppets are doing. We’d never look at each other.

We started doing these workshops and what we discovered is that it worked really well. The puppeteers could watch the monitor and read each other’s minds like in improv. Patrick had the idea of inviting friends and family to watch a presentation, and a producer from the comedy festival in Aspen was in the audience. He told us to bring it to Aspen, so we did, and then a producer from the Edinburgh Fringe asked us to take it there.

That’s when we named it Puppet Up! — Uncensored, and it’s been evolving for 17 years. It’s been so successful that it’s actually the only way we train puppeteers now in the Jim Henson Company. We train them in improv and puppetry simultaneously, and then they try to get company level in Puppet Up!, and then they’ll be offered auditions for our TV shows and movies.

How do you keep it so fresh after all this time?
We don’t take a suggestion that we’ve had the night before or even two nights before. We’ve also learned that changing out a member of the cast and mixing them up a bit freshens the show again. At the Kirk Douglas, we’ll be running four casts through the two weeks, so there will be different performers on different nights.

I say that, but also in the show, there are set pieces and four or five scenes that my dad created way, way back. Any night, you will see two of those. We do some cool video techniques and we also have a digital puppetry scene where you get to see how the Henson Company utilizes the digital puppets.

We call it two shows in one because there are two big screens on either side of the stage. It shows what the camera is seeing, but then the audience gets to see what the puppeteers are doing underneath the shot to pull it off, which is impressive and funny and absurd. It adds to the value.

And if you want to pay a little extra for the VIP experience, we’ve set up a whole space with some Dark Crystal characters that people can take photographs with, they can meet some of the puppeteers, and I’ll do a little question-and-answer.

Speaking of, I’m going to ask you some other random Muppets questions now that I’ve been thinking about.
I may not have the answers. I may have to go to the fan websites to get them. [Laughs]

There was a Muppets musical concept presentation about a decade ago. Do you know why it didn’t happen? 
I don’t know which that would be. Disney did do a very nice night with the Muppets at the Hollywood Bowl. It had big musical pieces. I think, for a little while, they were trying to figure out if they could tour that, and I think they decided it was just going to be too expensive.

What do you know about the Electric Mayhem rollercoaster that’s being developed for the theme park?
You’d have to ask them. I don’t know what they’re telling people.

Is Muppet*Vision 3D gone from the theme park for good?
They wrapped it up in the way Disney does, where everything is recorded for historical purposes and all the animatronics are packed away perfectly. So, theoretically, they could bring it back out if they wanted to at some point. From the get-go, they designed it so that 500 people could go through every 25 minutes. It was one the most highly experienced attractions, I think, that Disney ever made. And I was very sad to see it getting wrapped up.

Muppet Christmas Carol is one of my favorite movies. That’s a statement, not a question.
You have to watch it on Disney+ and select the full-length version with the cut song [“When Love Is Gone”]. It makes it a much stronger story and it makes Michael Caine’s performance that much better. I’m trying to pressure Disney to make the full-length version the only version available.

Why was it cut to begin with?
The little secret in our group was, “Don’t tell Disney we’re making a drama.” We’d always get notes saying, “It seems a little dark.” “It could be funnier.” They were scared when the film went to test audiences, but audiences loved the movie. After one of those screenings, Jeffrey Katzenberg said to me, “You can see the very young kids in the audience get antsy during that love song. Would you consider cutting it?”

I looked at it and it wasn’t as good [without it]. Scrooge is at his low point, looking back at when his fiancée left him when he was a young man. And he said “Look, Brian, you don’t want kids going to the bathroom at that point in the movie. If you cut it for the initial theatrical release, the song will go back in after, forever.” So, I agreed.

They created a master [from the theatrical release] and lost the scene. That’s what people rented on video. As soon as it came time to make a new high-definition master, they couldn’t find the scene. Boy, did I harass them. Year after year, I harassed them. And I have to say, they really, really looked for it.

It was about three or four years ago now that they found a first run interpositive. That’s the highest quality positive that you’ll ever get. They didn’t find the negative, which is actually ok, because you destroy on frame on either side of the negative when you cut it. Even if they had found the negative to reconstitute it, it would have had a little bit of a bump and wouldn’t have been quite what I intended. They found the reel with the song and that was even better than if they had found the negative, and they were able to put the whole thing back together again.

My original arrangement was that this will be the version forever, and they were reticent because Disney+ is in like 35 languages. I’m still pressuring them. I keep saying, “I know you’re thinking it’s going to be hard to dub that scene in 35 languages, but it’s the only time the character sings.” They just need to find a great singer for each language and do the song. They don’t have to dub the whole reel. They’re just dragging their feet saying it’s too hard. I really want to get it so that nobody ever sees the movie again without that song.

There’s an internet meme that Christmas Carol and Treasure Island work in part because Michael Caine is playing Scrooge so seriously and treats the Muppets like actors, and Tim Curry treats himself as Long John Silver like he’s Muppet. What are your feelings about that?
Well, they were both delightful to work with, and very, very different. Michael is first-take guy. He could do an entire movie where he never does a second take. Whereas Tim would always say “Once you think you’ve got it, give me one more take.” I’d say half of Treasure Island, at least, is that extra take.

Michael didn’t play the comedy. He knew playing it straight would make the best screen dynamic. Christmas Carol is all about the contrast between the Muppets and Charles Dickens. His Scrooge is purely Charles Dickens, and then Kermit playing Bob Cratchett is pure Muppets. The whole movie celebrates that contrast. When you look at it now, it almost feels like “I’m sure that’s what Charles Dickens was thinking: Scrooge needs the Muppets to help him be reborn.”