Jim Henson’s Son Reveals Life With ‘Workaholic’ Puppeteer

That includes Brian, who eventually took over his father’s mantle as chairman of the Jim Henson Company in Hollywood. It was a childhood dream come true for Brian, who grew up with his father’s Muppets.

“The value of some of the dolls that my brother John and I destroyed in the sandbox when we were four or five years old is terrible when I think about it,” says Brian, the first-born son of Jim and his wife Jane, who married in 1959.

Soon Brian was creating his own characters.

“I made the first Muppet penguin,” he said proudly. “All the kids in my family made Muppets for fun. Some were terrible, and others my dad said, ‘Oh, we’ll use this one.’ When [Miss Piggy puppeteer] Frank Oz used my penguin in one of The Muppet Show‘s musical numbers, I was so happy.”

Tragically, Jim died suddenly of toxic shock syndrome and pneumonia in 1990 at the age of 53, when Brian was only 26. Still, “I had the unique comfort that the whole world knew him and was sad for me,” Brian recalled. ‘When my mother died [in 2013 at 78 from cancer]It was much harder.”