This is the first day I can remember. It's not my first memory, by any means. Not by a long shot. There are other times, places, and faces that I can recall happening before this moment. The trick with all these other events is that they fall prey to the spotty, patchwork quilt quality of that brief yet crucial span of time when the human mind is still busy assembling itself into something like a fully fledged consciousness. Before the day I'm talking about, all I have to go on are all just snippets, or bits of fragmented pieces of things I saw. If I had to take a guess, then it might be that this is what the start of everyone's childhood is like. The funny thing about it in my case is that what I recall with anything like crystal clarity isn't the house I grew up in, or things of that nature. Instead, it's all scenes from various movies. The first fragment seems to have been more or less the entirety of
Return of the Jedi. After that it's Christopher Lloyd doing his best Harold Lloyd impression on the hands of a giant clock tower, during the big finale scene of the original
Back to the Future. After that I might have made the acquaintance of an explorer and British expeditionary soldier by the name of
Lawrence of Arabia. Then, all of a sudden, I'm confronted by a musically inclined individual with funny looking hair, who goes by the even stranger, yet somehow fitting name of
Amadeus. Not long after is when I got to meet the first of what I've come to think of as the 80s Uncles. It's a term I use for how I've come to regard all of the major blockbuster directors of that decade.
He's not the one I saw on that first full day in the life that I can recall, yet you can trust me when I say that Don Bluth's American Tail was one of those pictures that left a hell of an impact. You think that film's impressive through through adult eyes? Try watching the whole thing when you're barely more than five years old, sitting on the floor in front of your parents brand new (and long since discarded) bulky 80s Big Screen. I've just learned how to form full sentences, and just like that I'm being introduced to my first and most abiding sense of the Gothic, the Enchanted Sublime, and an idea of the Epic Scope that has remained with me all my life. All of this is an accurate enough description of what it felt like to watch that movie. Yet trust me when I say that I still haven't scratched the surface of the kind of emotional impact a film like that can leave on just the right type of receptive mind at the best possible time. Yeah, all the old cliches of 80s Trauma Fuel apply, yet that doesn't even scratch the surface either. For me, it was like discovering what it meant to be alive. Let's just say there's a whole trove of themes and ideas to a film like that which makes it all worth talking about. It's something I'll have to make my way toward, somewhere down the line.
My point for right now was that this was my first intro to the group of guys I call the 80s Uncles. These were the filmmakers who more or less went on to construct what the very idea of childhood was like for us 80s brats. In no particular order, I'd have to label them as
Uncle George,
Uncle Joe,
Uncle Steve, and you've already met both
Uncle Bob and
Uncle Don. For now, however, I want to talk about the day I met Uncle Jim. It was the first complete day I can remember. This is how it started. I might still be just five years old. What matters is that this marks the first moment where I become aware of my surroundings. I'm dressed in my pajamas, and I'm making my way into the family living room from the dining area in my parents house. The big blocky outline of our early big screen idiot box is there waiting for me, and it's turned on. The first action I can ever remember doing is just sitting down once more in front of the screen and taking a look at what's there. The next thing I know, I'm a being introduced to what looks almost like a barnyard menagerie that's come to animated life, and has somehow gained the ability to talk and wear the same kind of toddler's clothes that I was still in back then. There's a green little frog on the TV, and he's sharing the spotlight with a pig in a pink dress.
Both of them appear to be at about the same age, though the girl might be just a smidge older than the tadpole she seems to want to dote on for some reason. Tagging along with the pig and the frog is a talking bear in yellow pjs, and a beany hat, followed closely by a strange looking creature with a long nose and big, goggling eyes the size of tennis balls. Close in tow is a piano playing dog, along with a brother and sister duo who are just as strange looking as the little blue weirdo (for that's what everyone calls him, and how he insists on being seen). The funny thing looking back on it now is that none of this seemed out of place, the way it might to the eyes of a disenchanted adult. Instead, the first thing that strikes me as interesting about my introduction to this setup is just how normal it all seemed. Without missing a beat, some part of my still developing mind took this all in and accepted it without missing a beat. It was as if we'd already known each other for years. I guess you could chalk that up to just how much these cartoon kids made me feel welcome as a viewer, if that makes sense. Whatever the case, what happened next was that I more or less followed these animated nursery inhabitants as they first browsed through a supermarket in a Plutonium power shopping cart, then ditched the idea to focus on growing muffins in a rural farming area that owed more to the world of Dr. Seuss than it did to anything related to the real work of soughing, ploughing, and harvesting. That's how it all got started.
It was the first time I ever met Jim Henson's Muppets. The fact that it was as a bunch of animated toddler forms of their usual adult selves really doesn't seem to have made all that much difference. It was just the gang, you know. No one except the characters themselves. It's like you could take the way they were portrayed on Muppet Babies, then go back and look at how they were in their primetime debut with Th Muppet Show, and the strength of characterization given to these imaginary figures is so seamless that it has to count as an underremarked upon creative accomplishment in terms of the artistry that's gone into the writing of Henson's main cast. In an age where there's the constant risk that showrunners have next to no clue as to how write with a sense of dramatic consistency to the characters in their charge, the level of cohesion that Jim and his friends were able to imbue the Muppets and their other creations with just comes off sounding like the unintentional yet genuine miracle it now is. The thing is, none of this ever came up overnight. The life of the Muppets is a story that will forever be entwined with that of their creator, and the trick with an artist like Jim Henson is he was a Man of Ideas in the truest Renaissance sense of the term. At the same time, all of this creativity didn't just spring up ready made in a day. Even if he was born with a nascent talent for tapping into the Imagination, the ability to both wield and then use this talent well was a long process of trial and error learning.
It's the kind of subject which by rights should be able to fill up several volumes of study. A good source for what I'm talking about is the personal journal Jim kept to chronicle the flow of his own ideas. Parts of this journal were published not long ago as
Imagination Illustrated by Karen Folk. While it's by no means the entirety of that journal, the content that was available to the public contains enough information that entire works of history and criticism could be made just from the chronology of moments leading up to the time of Henson's first public success as a puppeteer in Washington DC's local television sector. Indeed, it even makes sense that a full-length book should be written about that time, as its one of the key periods in the artist's history where all of his talent was successfully channeled into a proper first showing. That's something worth examining in full. There's just so much worth learning about that time in Jim's first major step in his artistic development that I can even see some intrepid scholar with enough gifts not just penning a successful history of those early years, but of also having it turned into one of those recent string of biographical films that can either sink or swim on the skill the filmmaker has in knowing which parts of their subject's life deserves to have the camera
trained on it. In some ways, I'm staring to wonder if maybe that's what Ron Howard should have done.
