The Muppets

[ShyViolet]

Dan, didn’t you suggest the name “The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me,” a while back? That would have been awesome!

[Ben]

Better, but still not quite there. Maybe "The Lovers, The Dreamers And Jim" to reflect that it’s about him, not from him. But I’m not sure just what you’d call a Henson film, really. The guy was just so smashing it almost defies a title.

[EricJ]

That's just it, I'm worried it's going to be TOO saintly and canonized, and not get into Jim's darker mindset in the 80s towards Kermit & Co., vs. his new dreams of literally being the George Lucas of puppet/creature FX.

Ron Howard is obviously trading on his reputation for biodocs after X-producing "Imagine: John Lennon", but that one was a well-researched theatrical trying to be "the" definitive Lennon obit.
Here, I'm not so sure Disney+ wants as complex a take, and most casual Boomer Muppet fans don't even bother to know whether such complexity ever existed.

[Ben]

I donut remember Howard having anything to do with the Lennon doc, and 1988 is a very, very long time ago to trade on any reputation…!


I expect they’ll touch on the "darker side", but in a "this was just Jim being frustrated by the constraints of The Muppets" kind of way, which is kind of fair enough. Just as Frank Oz thanks Henson for everything, the guy himself never forgot to thank Kermit for everything. The one that mostly gets overlooked in this story, for me at least, is Lew Grade, who staked a lot on a crazy puppet show here in England that literally no-one else *in the world* wanted to touch. So much fun to see the Muppet Show stage here at Elstree again in those clips. I was just last in there a couple of years ago…Statler and Waldorf's theatre box is still up there on the wall.

[Daniel]

I’d forgotten the name of this talking to someone the other day, and now that I see it again, "Idea Man" can’t even begin to describe Jim in a title. I don’t know what could, and "Muppet Man" is also too obvious (and the name of an unproduced biopic script), but "Idea Man" is just so…bland!

It's a reference to this short film he created in 1966:

[Ben]

D'oh! Well I feel sheepish!

Ridiculously, I did actually know about this in the deepest, darkest recesses of what used to be my mind…! I had an idea (no pun intended) that the name was connected somehow, but the old neural net didn’t want to connect those dots!

Thanks for the nudge! Still think it’s not the best title!