TV Talk: Disney+ profiles Muppets creator Jim Henson

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Before settling on the career goal of TV critic, I went through four distinct areas of job interest, all entertainment-­related.

As much as I was a fan of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” it was always the puppets in the Neighborhood of Make-­Believe that I gravitated toward more than the real-world scenes in Mister Rogers’ house.

Even more than those “Neighborhood” puppet characters, it was The Muppets, particularly on “The Muppet Show,” that led to my first occupational declaration around age 7: I wanted to be the next Jim Henson.

That was followed by “I’m gonna be Tom Brokaw” (age 10), “I’m gonna be Steven Spielberg” (age 14) and, finally, “I’m gonna be Matt Roush” when I was a high school senior and Roush was the TV critic for USA Today. (Yes, I know, I was a weird kid.)

All those goals seem presumptuous and precocious in retrospect and I’ll forever work to be as fine a wordsmith as Roush, now at TV Guide.

It also becomes clear watching Disney+’s winning documentary film “Jim Henson: Idea Man” that a desire to perform with puppets is not the same as being the forward-­thinking, experimental, fearless inventor of the very specific art form that is the Muppets.

Streaming Friday on Disney+, the 105-minute Ron Howard-directed “Idea Man” explores the roots of Henson’s genius, a curiosity borne out of a quiet, unassuming, reed-thin inventor with a wildly creative imagination.

“Idea Man” includes familiar clips from “The Muppet Show” and also some rare gems, including Henson and fellow Muppeteer Frank Oz in an appearance on “The Orson Welles Show.”

Oz is also one of the film’s primary interview subjects, offering his perspective on the “internal and quiet” Henson, including that Henson “created out of innocence.” The film also points out one of Henson’s simple yet important puppet innovations: Close-ups of the Muppets, which imbued them with a greater sense of character.

“Idea Man” isn’t just hagiography as the film interviews Henson’s children and gets into how Henson’s success and ambition destroyed his marriage to Jane Henson, with whom he started the Muppets on a local TV station in Washington, D.C.

Watching “Idea Man,” I wondered what Henson’s contemporary, Fred Rogers, made of his TV peer. So I asked David Newell, who played Mr. McFeely on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and served as the show’s publicist.

Newell said Rogers and Henson met a few times, including when Rogers was a guest on “Sesame Street,” which features Henson’s Muppet characters.

Newell met Henson in the early 1970s at a TV panel and festival in San Francisco, held at an elementary school.

“I was there as McFeely and Jim was there with Kermit,” Newell said, describing a day full of short performances/meet-n-greets in multiple classrooms. “I remember chatting with him during a break about the then-new ‘Sesame Street.’ He was friendly and appreciated Fred’s work. Fred had a professional respect for Jim Henson. He respected Henson’s mission to help create positive children’s television.”

Newell said Rogers appreciated Henson’s creativity, but noted their divergent approaches to puppetry.

“[Rogers’] style, approach and mission was quite different from Jim Henson, as were the puppets,” Newell said. “‘Sesame’ puppets were elaborate where ‘MRN’ puppets were basically simple.”

Regardless of the differences, for those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the work of Fred Rogers and Jim Henson is foundational and marks some of our earliest pop culture memories.