Jim Henson was dead: to begin with.

But that wasn’t the only thing that had changed for the Henson company in the eight years since the Muppets took Manhattan: Frank Oz had become a successful film director; the company had expanded into new live-action series, Saturday morning cartoons, and creature creation for non-Henson films; an attempt was made to sell the company to Disney…

And then, on a random day in May of 1990, at the age of just 53 years old, the company’s founder, Jim Henson, suddenly and tragically died of complications from a case of walking pneumonia that no one knew he had.

In the aftermath, the Henson company, now being run by Jim’s son Brian Henson, had only one thing on their mind: Jim’s legacy, and the idea of the Muppets continuing beyond his death. They pitched ABC on the idea of a 2-hour Christmas special that would be a Muppets adaptation of the Charles Dickens holiday classic, but it would be Walt Disney Pictures who would give the project the greenlight, not as a television special but the first theatrically released feature film since 1984, resulting in THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL hitting theaters nationwide in December of 1992. 

Joining Nick and Scott to discuss the start of the post-Jim era for the Muppets is musical aficionado Ripley Green (they/them/muppet).

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