History Lesson: The Muppeteers


The Early Muppeteers: Rockville, Maryland, 1969

While The Muppets Franchise has been a labour of love by many vampires and wizards, by 1969, it was accepted that there were three head Muppeteers ( pun intended with "The Three Musketeers" ):

  1. Arnold Alois "Arnie" Schwarzenegger, a vampire, was a professional athlete and a self-described amateur/hobbyist philosopher and comedian.

    As an assistant kindergartener ( Reference: “Kindergarten Cop” ), Schwarzenegger pushed his true prophet pupils to unnatural athletic and academic extremes by being a pedantic critic (so-called “nazi”). E.g.: even though they painted with Crayola crayons works that rivaled classical oil paintings, he was still able-to-find many legitimate faults in them. The true-prophet children appreciated his input, but he believed they and their parents kept becoming offended and complaining.

    I think Jim Henson eventually persuaded him to avoid trying to put the children on a strict high-protein / low-fat diet. I suspect such diet, is now regarded as both unhelpful and often detrimental for athletes, even professional ones, given it makes its practicioners miserable. If you are a terran human wizard hacker in the Selinaverse, then as long as you eat enough "carnivorous" protein, which never involved murdering living animals, you can eat what you want, when you want it (within reason) and still become physically-fitter. References: “Geeks in sports”.

  2. Richard Matthew "RMS" Stallman, a wizard-born, was an overly pedantic "nazi" critic too, but unathletic, unkempt, a maths/software wiz, and a bookworm brainiac. Given he was an atrocious slacker, none of his false-prophet friends understood how he got his Ph.D. (and from MIT no less).

    Despite being of (secular) Jewish upbringing, RMS was a pluralist ("rich"-ard).

    Given he was a wizard, Stallman was aware that Schwarzenegger, Henson, and the other vampire Muppeteers perceived mutated terrestrial hell realities.

  3. Jim Henson - "Jim" means “laborious” (not unlike “gym”) and he did almost everything “hard”: worked, socialised, learned, taught, entertained, volunteered, and exercised.

    “Jim” is also cognate with "jinn" (or "genie"), and he had a penchant for stage magic and video editing.

    As his last name implies, he believed he lived with his single-parent mother, in a relatively-small house-or-apartment in Rockville.

    Henson was the leader, and had the veto.

I believe all three were larger than life, even then. It is a testament to Selinaverse-an technology that I, a "humorist, writer, and software geek" (or a “blogger” or a “web monkey”), am somehow comparable to them.

One day in 1969, the three lamented the fact that the late 1960s’ Anglophone terrestrial television has become too paranoid, and so decided that they will act, produce, and distribute, a gratis, public domain, and non-commercial television show for children, called Sesame Street. Part of the reason for keeping it free was that they intended it to sport a lot of fan-fiction, RPF, fan-art, and song covers , which they believed were legally problematic. It was also due to an altruistic spirit of sharing.

They expected Sesame Street's popularity to be mostly confined to their base-town, Rockville, Maryland, but thought that They who saved one soul has essentially saved the world Entire .

Little did they realise that Sesame Street and its international spinoff The Muppet Show were remastered and widely televised. Moreover, despite being ostensibly public domain, it was an incredibly profitable and influential franchise.

Here's another fun fact: the vampires Muppeteers have left the premises of their base-town, Rockville (a Ziyoonist hell-hole ), very rarely.