June 9, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Brian Jay Jones, author of Jim Henson: The Biography, tells the story of how some of America’s most beloved characters—the Muppets—got their start in advertising and television commercials.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we return to our American stories. Joining us now
is Brian J. Jones giving us a little insight on
how some of America's most beloved characters came to be.
And we're talking about the Muppets and the Muppets Creator
the Man, the driving force, the driving creative force by
and the Muppets. Jim Henson, take it away, Brian.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Coffee commercials back in nineteen fifty seven are very different
than they were now. Usually they were about ten to
fifteen seconds. Normally, what they would do is they would
put a picture up on screen of coffee and coffee
coming with steam and this beautiful shot of coffee beans
and they would just say, you know, enjoy a great
cup of coffee in the morning from Senka, And that
(00:57):
was essentially the commercial. You've got about ten seconds to
get the message. So, while Jim is performing Sam and
Friends on television in Washington, d C. He's approached by
a local coffee company called Wilkins about doing commercial work
for them.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
The Wilkins people were big.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Fans of Jim and the Muppets, and they asked Jim
if he would like to develop advertising for Wilkins Coffee.
So what Jim does is creates two characters called Wilkins
and Won'tkins. And in Jim's idea, Wilkins is the character
that will drink Wilkins coffee and Wonkins is the character
that won't drink Wilkins coffee. And if you look at
(01:34):
Wilkins and Wilkins, it gives you a very early idea
of Jim's sort of sense of comedy and building in
that you've got Wilkins who's sort of tall and skinny,
and Wonkin too's sort of triangular and squatty, and that's
Laurel and Hardy. It's tall and skinny versus short and
fat up against each other.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Jim love that you see that. For example, in Ernie
and Burt.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
You know, we've got the sort of uptight character that's
very horizontal character in Ernie it's Bunting and Beaker from
the Muppet Show against sort of the roundness of Bunting
and the tall, skinny Beaker. So Jim loves that style
of building. We see that very early on with Wilkins
and Wilkins. And the joke he's pulling off is in
ten seconds is what will it take Wonkins to drink coffee?
(02:18):
And the answer is quite a lot. What happens in
his very first commercial is you've got Wonkins staring down
the barrel of a cannon, and Wilkins says, you know, hey, buddy,
do you like Wilkins coffee? And Wolkins says, I never
tasted it? And he fires the cannon at him, blows
him off screen, then immediately whirls the camera toward the
viewer and says, now, how about you.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Okay, buddy, what do you think of Wilkins coffee?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I never dressed it? Now?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
What do you think of Wilkins?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And that's the end of the commercial, And it goes
by so quickly that you almost don't realize what you've
just seen is being threatened. If you don't want to
drink Wilkins coffee.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
We're here to persuade people to drink more Wilkins coffee.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
What's the clube for?
Speaker 1 (03:01):
To get their attention?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It's a gigantic hit. Jim starts getting more and more
adwork for Wilkins Coffee. I think he does Wilkins commercials
for something like nine or ten years, maybe even longer,
and coffee companies around the country start asking him to
do the same commercials for them, and Jim, because he's
such a professional, doesn't dub in the names of other companies.
He goes and refilms them over and over again with
the puppets saying the names of the actual coffee companies.
(03:25):
He does ads for bread companies. After that, he creates
characters to sell bread. What you eating a sandwich made
with closings bread?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Want a bite?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Sure, here's a sharp salesman. He's selling tea. He's selling
all sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
The Muppets are actually built on the back of advertising.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You know.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
The ad work that Jim does.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
With Wilkins and Wonkins very successful, gets him a lot
of work, and he does it for a long time
on on throughout the nineteen sixties. Effect he's still doing
ad work, and that permits him to become the creative
that he really wants to be because he doesn't have
to worry about keeping the lights on. He's got enough
resources coming in from advertising to let him sort of
(04:07):
go out and be Jim Henson and do new and
different things. Jim Henson always knew the Muppets could hold
their own. He had done enough variety show appearances throughout
the sixties that he was fairly confident that if given
the opportunity, they could flesh out the characters, they could
flesh out the scenarios and give them up it's their
own variety show. So that was something he was pitching
(04:29):
for a long time. If you look into his archives,
there's pitches for The Muppet Show as far back as
nineteen sixty five, I think. So this was something that
Jim knew would work. You know, He's on one of
the biggest shows in the world, was Sesame Street, and
he's developing at the same time sort of these early
versions of The Muppet Show. He initially pitches them as
TV specials. He has a big fan in a young
(04:52):
executive at ABC named Michael Eisner, who gets Jim. I mean,
Jim's lucky that he gets Eisner. Eisner sort of understands
him and green light a Muppet TV special which is
sort of meant to be a pilot for The Muppet Show.
So the first version is called The Muppets Valentine's Day Shows.
It's an hour long variety show with their special guest
(05:12):
is Mia Farrow. Jim's not quite sure what to do
with it yet he does. It's we're not sure as viewers.
Where it's set. It's in a conservatory maybe, but it's
an artsy version. It doesn't have walls, it's kind of
framed up, and the host is somebody we don't really know.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Nobody looks familiar in it, but the Muppets.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Valentine's Day Show does okay in the ratings, does well
enough that Michael Aiser says, you know, let's do another one.
So Jim does a second pilot, this time calls it
the Muppet Show Sex and Violence, which Jim just thinks
it's hilarious.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
It's starting to look a little more familiar.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
It's the first time we see Doctor Teeth and the
Electric Mayhem show up on this. You know, so You've
got Animal and the Sweetish Chef shows up at it.
Miss Piggy is there, but she's a background character in
a sketch. But again we don't really know where it's set.
It looks like it's maybe in a TV control room,
and it's hosted by Nigel who's not again not Kermit.
Kermit's in it, but he's not the host. So there's
(06:11):
still something off. Still doesn't feel right, and it does
okay again, but not enough to get his own show.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
So Jim sort of got two strikes.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Already for a Muppet show in the United States, and
at that time he's also doing variety shows, and he
he makes an appearance on the Share Show with a
director named George Slotter, who was one of the sort
of masterminds behind Laughing, and George Schlatter tells him, you know, Jim,
let's put together a pittriol for you, and I can
take it to CBS and let's put together sort of
(06:41):
a highlight reel of Muppet performances.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
And then at the very end of this thing, Jim
does something brilliant. It's about two minutes of this.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Pitch man looking right into the camera and calling out
executives by name and telling them, you're gonna want to
buy the show. The show's as American as apple pie.
And then you're gonna want to buy this show. The
careers of the men who made the decision to put
this show on the.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Air will skyrocket.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
People like Bob what, Lee Curlin, Harry Lafferty, Oscar Cats,
and even Tom Schwapford will become stars in their own right.
It's just hilarious and when you watch it, you can't
believe that CBS would pass. But CBS passes, so you've
got sort of three strikes on this already. But Jim
is so sure this is gonna work that he's just like,
(07:26):
it's a real study and stick to itiveness here. Eventually,
what happens, He's approached by Lord Lou Grayd who runs
a TV studios in London, who, again serendipitously, sort of
like Michael Eisner, Lord Grade really gets Jim. Lord Grade
came out of vaudeville. He did something almost similar to
(07:47):
what Jim did with television, understanding how the audience perceives
the screen. When Lord Grade was dancing in vaudeville, he
would dance to Charleston on this oval table, but he
would turn the skinny in toward the audience, so it
looked like it was really hard, even though the surface
area of the table hadn't changed any at all. The
audience thought it was this really teeny table. So you know,
(08:08):
really really sort of understands Jim. They're sort of cut
from the same cloth. And Lord Grade. So the one
who says, you know, i'll give you the money you
need for this, Shim, I'll give you one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars an episode, which was a phenomenal amount
of money in nineteen seventy five for a half hour show.
But I need you to come over and use my
film studios at Elstree and film it there. Jim doesn't
(08:28):
even ask his wife doesn't even ask Jane. He accepts
right there that they've got their deal, and the Muppet
Show is born out of this relationship between Jim and
lou Grad who both understand each other, and for five
years Jim lives and works in London creating The Muppet Show,
which turns out to be one of the biggest, most
successful shows in the world. It's one of the first
(08:50):
shows sort of made explicitly for syndication. Every market in
the United States picks it up. At one point they
said joke that their producer, David Laser, would be claiming
a viewership larger than the actual population of the planet.
It just got bigger and bigger every time David Lasier
would talk about it. You know, wins the Emmy Award
for Best Comedy I think in nineteen seventy seven. So
just the biggest show in the world, and everybody wants
(09:12):
to be on it. Every performer wants to get on
The Muppet Show, and then when they get on there,
they want to do something crazy and different, whether you're
you know, balancing spoons on the n your nose, or
you're dancing with a with a seven foot carrot like
Gilda Radner does, or you know, everybody wanted to do
the show. It got to the point where they had
people like Kenny Rogers writing them letters saying, please let
me come on and do the show. Everybody wanted to
(09:33):
be on The Muppet Show, a gigantic, hugely successful show.
You know. I had to sort of laugh maybe ten
years ago now when the Muppets were in a commercial
during the Super Bowl, I think for Toyota, and people
were wringing their hands, saying, my god, the Muppets are
selling out there doing commercials on what would Jim Henson think.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Jim Henson must be rolling in his grave.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
No, the Muppets have been selling things since about nineteen
fifty seven.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
So the Muppet or.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Reanization is built on the back of coffee commercials and
then later on out of merchandising.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
At a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericott and what a story you
listen to. And this is the genius of America and
how art and commerce intersect, and indeed, so much of
the storytelling we do here in our American stories is
the business of creativity, show business, the movie business, the
(10:27):
intellectual property business. The story of the Muppets, the story
about American perseverance, American creativity. No other country has created
something like the Muppets, the Muppets story here on our
American Stories,
And we return to our American stories. Joining us now
is Brian J. Jones giving us a little insight on
how some of America's most beloved characters came to be.
And we're talking about the Muppets and the Muppets Creator
the Man, the driving force, the driving creative force by
and the Muppets. Jim Henson, take it away, Brian.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Coffee commercials back in nineteen fifty seven are very different
than they were now. Usually they were about ten to
fifteen seconds. Normally, what they would do is they would
put a picture up on screen of coffee and coffee
coming with steam and this beautiful shot of coffee beans
and they would just say, you know, enjoy a great
cup of coffee in the morning from Senka, And that
(00:57):
was essentially the commercial. You've got about ten seconds to
get the message. So, while Jim is performing Sam and
Friends on television in Washington, d C. He's approached by
a local coffee company called Wilkins about doing commercial work
for them.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
The Wilkins people were big.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Fans of Jim and the Muppets, and they asked Jim
if he would like to develop advertising for Wilkins Coffee.
So what Jim does is creates two characters called Wilkins
and Won'tkins. And in Jim's idea, Wilkins is the character
that will drink Wilkins coffee and Wonkins is the character
that won't drink Wilkins coffee. And if you look at
(01:34):
Wilkins and Wilkins, it gives you a very early idea
of Jim's sort of sense of comedy and building in
that you've got Wilkins who's sort of tall and skinny,
and Wonkin too's sort of triangular and squatty, and that's
Laurel and Hardy. It's tall and skinny versus short and
fat up against each other.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Jim love that you see that. For example, in Ernie
and Burt.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
You know, we've got the sort of uptight character that's
very horizontal character in Ernie it's Bunting and Beaker from
the Muppet Show against sort of the roundness of Bunting
and the tall, skinny Beaker. So Jim loves that style
of building. We see that very early on with Wilkins
and Wilkins. And the joke he's pulling off is in
ten seconds is what will it take Wonkins to drink coffee?
(02:18):
And the answer is quite a lot. What happens in
his very first commercial is you've got Wonkins staring down
the barrel of a cannon, and Wilkins says, you know, hey, buddy,
do you like Wilkins coffee? And Wolkins says, I never
tasted it? And he fires the cannon at him, blows
him off screen, then immediately whirls the camera toward the
viewer and says, now, how about you.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Okay, buddy, what do you think of Wilkins coffee?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I never dressed it? Now?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
What do you think of Wilkins?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And that's the end of the commercial, And it goes
by so quickly that you almost don't realize what you've
just seen is being threatened. If you don't want to
drink Wilkins coffee.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
We're here to persuade people to drink more Wilkins coffee.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
What's the clube for?
Speaker 1 (03:01):
To get their attention?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It's a gigantic hit. Jim starts getting more and more
adwork for Wilkins Coffee. I think he does Wilkins commercials
for something like nine or ten years, maybe even longer,
and coffee companies around the country start asking him to
do the same commercials for them, and Jim, because he's
such a professional, doesn't dub in the names of other companies.
He goes and refilms them over and over again with
the puppets saying the names of the actual coffee companies.
(03:25):
He does ads for bread companies. After that, he creates
characters to sell bread. What you eating a sandwich made
with closings bread?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Want a bite?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Sure, here's a sharp salesman. He's selling tea. He's selling
all sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
The Muppets are actually built on the back of advertising.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You know.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
The ad work that Jim does.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
With Wilkins and Wonkins very successful, gets him a lot
of work, and he does it for a long time
on on throughout the nineteen sixties. Effect he's still doing
ad work, and that permits him to become the creative
that he really wants to be because he doesn't have
to worry about keeping the lights on. He's got enough
resources coming in from advertising to let him sort of
(04:07):
go out and be Jim Henson and do new and
different things. Jim Henson always knew the Muppets could hold
their own. He had done enough variety show appearances throughout
the sixties that he was fairly confident that if given
the opportunity, they could flesh out the characters, they could
flesh out the scenarios and give them up it's their
own variety show. So that was something he was pitching
(04:29):
for a long time. If you look into his archives,
there's pitches for The Muppet Show as far back as
nineteen sixty five, I think. So this was something that
Jim knew would work. You know, He's on one of
the biggest shows in the world, was Sesame Street, and
he's developing at the same time sort of these early
versions of The Muppet Show. He initially pitches them as
TV specials. He has a big fan in a young
(04:52):
executive at ABC named Michael Eisner, who gets Jim. I mean,
Jim's lucky that he gets Eisner. Eisner sort of understands
him and green light a Muppet TV special which is
sort of meant to be a pilot for The Muppet Show.
So the first version is called The Muppets Valentine's Day Shows.
It's an hour long variety show with their special guest
(05:12):
is Mia Farrow. Jim's not quite sure what to do
with it yet he does. It's we're not sure as viewers.
Where it's set. It's in a conservatory maybe, but it's
an artsy version. It doesn't have walls, it's kind of
framed up, and the host is somebody we don't really know.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Nobody looks familiar in it, but the Muppets.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Valentine's Day Show does okay in the ratings, does well
enough that Michael Aiser says, you know, let's do another one.
So Jim does a second pilot, this time calls it
the Muppet Show Sex and Violence, which Jim just thinks
it's hilarious.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
It's starting to look a little more familiar.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
It's the first time we see Doctor Teeth and the
Electric Mayhem show up on this. You know, so You've
got Animal and the Sweetish Chef shows up at it.
Miss Piggy is there, but she's a background character in
a sketch. But again we don't really know where it's set.
It looks like it's maybe in a TV control room,
and it's hosted by Nigel who's not again not Kermit.
Kermit's in it, but he's not the host. So there's
(06:11):
still something off. Still doesn't feel right, and it does
okay again, but not enough to get his own show.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
So Jim sort of got two strikes.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Already for a Muppet show in the United States, and
at that time he's also doing variety shows, and he
he makes an appearance on the Share Show with a
director named George Slotter, who was one of the sort
of masterminds behind Laughing, and George Schlatter tells him, you know, Jim,
let's put together a pittriol for you, and I can
take it to CBS and let's put together sort of
(06:41):
a highlight reel of Muppet performances.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
And then at the very end of this thing, Jim
does something brilliant. It's about two minutes of this.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Pitch man looking right into the camera and calling out
executives by name and telling them, you're gonna want to
buy the show. The show's as American as apple pie.
And then you're gonna want to buy this show. The
careers of the men who made the decision to put
this show on the.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Air will skyrocket.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
People like Bob what, Lee Curlin, Harry Lafferty, Oscar Cats,
and even Tom Schwapford will become stars in their own right.
It's just hilarious and when you watch it, you can't
believe that CBS would pass. But CBS passes, so you've
got sort of three strikes on this already. But Jim
is so sure this is gonna work that he's just like,
(07:26):
it's a real study and stick to itiveness here. Eventually,
what happens, He's approached by Lord Lou Grayd who runs
a TV studios in London, who, again serendipitously, sort of
like Michael Eisner, Lord Grade really gets Jim. Lord Grade
came out of vaudeville. He did something almost similar to
(07:47):
what Jim did with television, understanding how the audience perceives
the screen. When Lord Grade was dancing in vaudeville, he
would dance to Charleston on this oval table, but he
would turn the skinny in toward the audience, so it
looked like it was really hard, even though the surface
area of the table hadn't changed any at all. The
audience thought it was this really teeny table. So you know,
(08:08):
really really sort of understands Jim. They're sort of cut
from the same cloth. And Lord Grade. So the one
who says, you know, i'll give you the money you
need for this, Shim, I'll give you one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars an episode, which was a phenomenal amount
of money in nineteen seventy five for a half hour show.
But I need you to come over and use my
film studios at Elstree and film it there. Jim doesn't
(08:28):
even ask his wife doesn't even ask Jane. He accepts
right there that they've got their deal, and the Muppet
Show is born out of this relationship between Jim and
lou Grad who both understand each other, and for five
years Jim lives and works in London creating The Muppet Show,
which turns out to be one of the biggest, most
successful shows in the world. It's one of the first
(08:50):
shows sort of made explicitly for syndication. Every market in
the United States picks it up. At one point they
said joke that their producer, David Laser, would be claiming
a viewership larger than the actual population of the planet.
It just got bigger and bigger every time David Lasier
would talk about it. You know, wins the Emmy Award
for Best Comedy I think in nineteen seventy seven. So
just the biggest show in the world, and everybody wants
(09:12):
to be on it. Every performer wants to get on
The Muppet Show, and then when they get on there,
they want to do something crazy and different, whether you're
you know, balancing spoons on the n your nose, or
you're dancing with a with a seven foot carrot like
Gilda Radner does, or you know, everybody wanted to do
the show. It got to the point where they had
people like Kenny Rogers writing them letters saying, please let
me come on and do the show. Everybody wanted to
(09:33):
be on The Muppet Show, a gigantic, hugely successful show.
You know. I had to sort of laugh maybe ten
years ago now when the Muppets were in a commercial
during the Super Bowl, I think for Toyota, and people
were wringing their hands, saying, my god, the Muppets are
selling out there doing commercials on what would Jim Henson think.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Jim Henson must be rolling in his grave.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
No, the Muppets have been selling things since about nineteen
fifty seven.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
So the Muppet or.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Reanization is built on the back of coffee commercials and
then later on out of merchandising.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
At a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericott and what a story you
listen to. And this is the genius of America and
how art and commerce intersect, and indeed, so much of
the storytelling we do here in our American stories is
the business of creativity, show business, the movie business, the
(10:27):
intellectual property business. The story of the Muppets, the story
about American perseverance, American creativity. No other country has created
something like the Muppets, the Muppets story here on our
American Stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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