{"id":1957,"date":"2010-05-17T21:42:53","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T21:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1957"},"modified":"2010-05-17T21:42:53","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T21:42:53","slug":"really_twenty_years_naaah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2010\/05\/17\/really_twenty_years_naaah\/","title":{"rendered":"Really? Twenty Years? Naaah&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/images\/jim-henson_frank-oz_sesame-street-behind-the-scenes.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"jim-henson_frank-oz_sesame-street-behind-the-scenes.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/images\/jim-henson_frank-oz_sesame-street-behind-the-scenes-thumb.jpg\" width=\"400\" height=\"528\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>SamuraiFrog <a href=\"http:\/\/samuraifrog.blogspot.com\/2010\/05\/has-it-been-20-years.html\">reminds us<\/a> that yesterday, May 16, was the 20th anniversary of Muppet-master Jim Henson&#8217;s sad and far-too-early death. <i>Twenty years<\/i> since that spooky day when my entire university campus seemed to fall into a deep depression. Few individuals have that kind of effect on an entire generation. And the thing I admire so much about Jim is that he did it with nothing more than whimsy and sly humor, and the imagination to turn feathers and foam and random bits of <i>stuff<\/i> into characters that still seem to live and breathe in our collective consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>Still&#8230; <i>twenty years<\/i>? I&#8217;m really having a hard time wrapping my mind around that one!<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, the photo above is one I ran across quite a while ago; I&#8217;ve been waiting for a good reason to post it, and this seems as good a time as any. I&#8217;m sorry to say I don&#8217;t know who the man on Jim&#8217;s left is; the gentleman to his right is, of course, Frank Oz, Jim&#8217;s friend and co-conspirator during what I would call the &#8220;golden age&#8221; of The Muppets: the pre-Elmo <i>Sesame Street<\/i>, <i>The Muppet Show<\/i>, and <i>The Muppet Movie<\/i>. It seems to me that Frank, like Dan Ackroyd after Belushi, lost some minuscule but crucial animating spark after Jim&#8217;s death. Perhaps that&#8217;s presumptuous of me, considering I don&#8217;t know the man, but that is nevertheless the sense I get when he talks about the old days.<\/p>\n<p>I think a lot of us feel that way, actually&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SamuraiFrog reminds us that yesterday, May 16, was the 20th anniversary of Muppet-master Jim Henson&#8217;s sad and far-too-early death. Twenty years since that spooky day when my entire university campus seemed to fall into a deep depression. Few individuals have that kind of effect on an entire generation. And the thing I admire so much [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies","category-in-memoriam","category-the-glass-teat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}