It’s time to stop the music? It’s time to unlight the lights?
The Jim Henson Company, which became an entertainment force in the 1970s from “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show” to “The Muppet Movie,” sold its longtime Los Angeles studio last year for more than $40 million. Now, Henson is auctioning 435 items from its archive — puppets, props, posters, even some shirts that Jim Henson himself used to wear. (He died in 1990.)
The sale, billed as the company’s 70th Anniversary Auction, will take place on Tuesday at the former Henson campus. It is expected to raise $1.3 million to $2.1 million, according to Julien’s Auctions.
“In 70 years, the Jim Henson Company has never sold anything at auction,” Roy Parker-Saladino, a Julien’s pop culture specialist, said. “That means we don’t really know what the market is. I’m confident, but it’s going to be a surprise for us all.”
Henson is not going out of business. New projects include “The First Snow of Fraggle Rock,” a holiday special coming to Apple TV on Dec. 5. Apple also has a second season of the Henson-produced preschool series “Slumberkins” on the way, and more shows are in the works for various outlets.
“We are patiently awaiting green lights on a couple of brand-new things,” said Lisa Henson, who runs her father’s company.
Henson also fabricates puppets for outside productions. “Sesame Street,” for instance, still relies on its expertise. (Big Bird, Elmo and other “Sesame Street” characters, once owned by Henson, were purchased by Sesame Workshop for roughly $170 million in 2000.)
But the move and auction are reminders that the entertainment business is rapidly evolving. Streaming services and cable networks have cut back on programming, forcing content suppliers — especially independent ones like Henson — to make hard decisions. A portion of the items up for auction came from a storage facility in Britain that Henson recently closed.
The auction is less Muppety than you might expect — that is, there aren’t any actual Muppets, most likely because Henson sold the franchise to Disney in 2004 for $74 million. But there are standout props, including Miss Piggy’s production-worn pumps ($7,000 to $9,000) from the 1981 comedy “The Great Muppet Caper.”
In 2019, as streaming services poured money into content, Henson received one of the biggest orders in its history: Netflix spent an estimated $100 million on “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” a 10-episode prequel to Jim Henson’s 1982 movie. But the fantasy series, despite strong reviews, didn’t perform as Netflix had hoped. It was canceled after one season.
Puppets and animatronic figures used in the show, including a villainous Skeksis character with a fiberglass beak ($20,000 to $30,000), make up about a quarter of the items up for bid.
The Henson family is also parting with roughly a dozen puppets from the original “Fraggle Rock” series, which ran on HBO in the 1980s. Henson has made two seasons of a revival, “Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock,” for Apple TV, along with two holiday specials. But plans for a feature film stalled.
The auction has worried some fans.
“There was a little fan reaction of, well, shouldn’t these things be in a museum?” Ms. Henson said. “Our 70th anniversary was really the kicking-off point of the auction. We’ve been trying to find touch points where fans could connect with the company.”
She emphasized that Henson still had “thousands” of items in its archive and “major museum partnerships that are ongoing and permanent.”
Brooks Barnes covers all things Hollywood. He joined The Times in 2007 and previously worked at The Wall Street Journal.
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