A LOVE LETTER TO JIM HENSON

chickens, Goelz says.

Considering the impact and popularity of the Muppets at their height in the early 1980s, it’s surprising there aren’t more documentaries about the making of the phenomenon.

Brill said that in the Muppets’ early days, Henson discouraged puppeteers from posing for photos with their characters to help suspend disbelief for young audiences. Oz still won’t pose with any of his puppet personae, nor does he perform their voices.

He didn’t even want to make Muppet Guys Talking, but his wife, Victoria Labalme, insisted on it.

“She saw the way we worked, the culture that Jim created, and she had never seen that kind of work,” Oz recalls. “She said, ‘People should be aware that people can work like this — without backstabbing, without politics, but just working for the quality of the product.’

“She badgered me for about a year and I finally said OK.”

Now Oz, who became a director in 1982, says he misses puppeteering. Apart from reprising his appearance as Yoda in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, he hasn’t performed with a puppet for more than a decade.

“No one asks me he says.

Besides, he adds, there was something truly special about Henson’s Muppet environment, where the characters and the people creating them were all equally close.

“These characters are believable because our relationship down below is believable and real,” Oz says. “The actual humour and the heart, it doesn’t come from the puppets. It comes from the people underneath who’ve been working with each other for so many years.” anymore,” also on-again-off-again) girlfriend, follows a metronome beat; nothing special here.

But the real love stories in this movie are between a father and son; a man and his God; and a singer and his song. I Can Only Imagine opens with young Bart growing up in Greenville, Tex., and backed by the raucous strains of Don’t Bring Me Down by E.L.O. No fair guessing what song it ends on.