Websnark

« On death and dementia and things Positive. | Main | In class, we also sometimes learned from claymation and other stop action photography. This was our multimedia, damn it! »

Wednesday: He also looked an awful lot like Dave Broadfoot, later on. I just noticed that today.

Writing about famous, recently dead people with whom one is not acquainted is a bit on the tricky side.

Pigeonholes make rotten gravesites. Of course, you're in something of a quandry anyhow, going down this road; what do you know this person for? Chances are it's for one high-profile job. You're somewhere around Barstow, at the edge of the desert, when the tri-ox begins to take hold. Suddenly, there's a terrible roar, and the sky is full of caped guys flying out of their wheelchairs, all swooping and screeching and diving around your car, which is going a hundred miles an hour towards the Experience down in Vegas. And you hear a voice reciting the lyrics to London Calling. Over and over and over again. And you'd like to call for help on the shoe phone, or possibly the finger phone, or the coconut phone, but you figure there's no point in mentioning this to anyone. Penny's probably blogged it all by now anyways.

Which brings us to Jerry Juhl, who died this past Monday from cancer complications.

Some of you are going, "Who?" Stop that. Right now.

Juhl was the writer behind an incredible quantity of Muppet material. He started out more or less behind the puppets -- covering the pregnant Jane Henson on Sam and Friends, co-piloting the LaChoy Dragon, and such -- but found his strengths were better suited to writing. He co-wrote most of the cinematic Muppet movies; he worked on specials like The Muppet Musicians of Bremen and Hey, Cinderella!; he wrote for shows like Fraggle Rock, The Jim Henson Hour, and Sesame Street. Second head writer on the Show. Creative producer on the Fraggles. He worked on the Meeting Films. His fingerprints -- his handprints -- are all over the Muppet oeuvre. His involvement with the Muppets predates even that of Frank Oz.

(Also? He worked on The Cube. That's versatility right there.)

Untangling specific moments where you can point and say, "Juhl did that bit right there," isn't easy. You can cover how profoundly he influenced the core Show characters out of the gate, but things start getting slippery beyond that. It's not all down to the usual problem of a group effort getting chiefly attributed to a single driving force, which you get a lot of with the Muppets and Jim Henson in anything coming out after Henson's death. (Henson was charismatic and very hard-working, but he was never a Joss Whedon.) Even before that, though, the emphasis on documenting Muppet lore has very often been with the performers and technical staff. This is fair enough, since that's the sort of material fans tend to be after, but this makes learning about the very tangled writing process for all of the Muppet projects a bit frustrating. Right now, for example, I'm having a really hard time turning up an obscure note on Gonzo's early history.

No, not Muppets From Space, the script for which was Kirk Thatcher's instead of Juhl's at the end of the day. Before that.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume I saw it in Of Muppets and Men, a book I read into the ground as a child and would perform terrifying acts of derring-do to own today. (Our family begged the local library to let us just buy it and have done with it. I'd have it on constant renewal, for months at a time, until the librarians would yank it forcibly back and beat me with novelty clubs.) I'm positive it turned up in magazine articles from the era as well, and possibly in passing during documentaries. (My R2 disc of the accompanying special is in another country. I can't check that particular one right now.)

We know that Gonzo's chicken fancying comes from an ad-lib Dave Goelz made concerning passing poultry: "Nice legs, though." His nature, though, was never so clear. Up until Muppets From Space, he was a "whatever" or a "weirdo." If you asked further about this, though, it'd come down to Gonzo's mother.

No, we don't know what Gonzo's mother was. But we knew what one of her pastimes was, while she was pregnant with him.

Gonzo's mother enjoyed sitting in the Nevada desert. She enjoyed watching the pretty lights in the beautiful night sky.

The pretty lights from the nuclear testing.

That informed Gonzo for me, growing up. My family didn't care for him so much -- too bizarre, too flagrant -- but, once I realized exactly how you end up looking like a tweaking Grover with a twisted beak, I had no issues at all. He fell into place for me. And if he wanted to run away to Borneo to launch his Bollywood career, or swing with semi-anthropomorphized hens, hey, great. When the kids at school are throwing rocks at your head for whatever's wrong with you this week, and no one's bothered to show you an X-Men comic? Muppet mutants are pretty compelling stuff.

But I can't remember whose idea that was. Goelz? Juhl? Chris Langham? I want to say Juhl, obviously, to point to that and a slew of other character details and say, "he did that." I could probably do that with Fraggle Rock if I had the interviews from the R1 series 1 boxed set to hand, but I don't have them, either.

Which is probably missing the whole point of writing about what Jerry Juhl did for the Muppets. Reading interviews with him, you get the sense of a very communal workflow which he worked hard to shape and direct. (This is, of course, the way of television, but one gets the impression it was much more so.) Pointing to moments becomes an exercise in playing with one of those weiner-shaped water balloons, the ones which are all wrapped in upon themselves and slip out of your hands when you squeeze them with any force.

The Muppets are in a curious state these days. Recent and upcoming video releases have the old material in sharp focus, but new developments are a bit alarming. The team suffers from a certain amount of attrition and flux. Richard Hunt died two years after Jim Henson. Many of Frank Oz's characters have been handed over to Eric Jacobson, and a number of Henson's have been split between Bill Barretta and Steve Whitmire; Barretta is now going through the same mastery process it took Whitmire considerable time to deal with, with more key characters at once. If you had the principal credits from anything up to Manhattan stashed away in your head, something's going to give if you look at them today. Even as Kermit prepares a fiftieth anniversary world tour (and, make no mistake, I'll go and find him in whichever major city I can reach), the Muppet Holding Company are auditioning new puppeteers to play the original cast on cruises and at theme parks. No matter how one feels about the state of play these days, it becomes increasingly obvious that one needs to cherish what one had. They're building on a legacy, but they're still starting somewhat from scratch.

Boiling Juhl's work down to a soundbite would be a disservice. He was woven all through the Muppets. He doesn't have that one first book, or that one unforgettable role, or that one song. With his stuff, you just can't point at all; you have to make broad, sweeping gestures with your arms.

And you'll look really silly when you do that, too. "He did that!" you say, swooping dramatically. And then you fall over, possibly down a flight of stairs. With cakes.

And that? That's the right thing to do, right there.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at September 29, 2005 9:01 PM

Comments

Post a comment