Iván Rodríguez

In the off-season, he left Florida to sign with the Detroit Tigers. The Jim Henson Company retains Creature Shop, as well as the rest of its film and television library including Fraggle Rock, Farscape, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. By then a major-league veteran of over a decade, he helped lead a team of talented youngsters to victory in the World Series. On February 17, 2004, it was announced that the Muppets (excluding the Sesame Street characters, which are separately owned by Sesame Workshop) and Bear in the Big Blue House properties had been sold by Henson to The Walt Disney Company. When his contract with Texas ran out following the 2002 season, Rodríguez signed with the Florida Marlins for one year. Steve Whitmire, a veteran member of the muppet puppeteering crew, has assumed the roles of the two most famous characters played by Jim Henson himself, Kermit the Frog and Ernie. Although he had the nickname "Pudge" since his youth, Rodríguez was often compared early on to the veteran catcher Carlton Fisk, who was also called "Pudge." Fisk retired early in Rodríguez's career, and fans and sportswriters viewed it as the passing of the torch from one Pudge to another. His son Brian and daughter Lisa are currently the co-chairs and co-CEOs of the Company; his daughter Cheryl is the president of the Foundation.

. The Jim Henson Company, Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop have continued on after his death. He immediately established himself as an excellent hitter who was also proficient in throwing out would-be base-stealers. A memorial service for him aired on PBS, and drew millions of viewers and dozens of celebrities in reverence for his life and work. When Rodríguez made his major league debut with the Texas Rangers in 1992, he became the youngest person to play catcher in a major league game. Jim Henson died of bacterial pneumonia on May 16, 1990 at the age of 53. He has a career batting average of .304 and has won eleven Gold Glove Awards as a catcher, as well as the American League Most Valuable Player Award in 1999. Henson also founded Jim Henson's Creature Shop to build creatures for a large number of other films and series (most recently the science fiction production Farscape), and is considered one of the most advanced and well respected creators of film creatures.

Iván Rodríguez Torres (born November 30, 1971 in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico), nicknamed "Pudge", "Pud-rod" or "I-Rod", is a professional baseball player. In 1982, Henson founded the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States. Henson also continued creating children's programs—Fraggle Rock and the animated Muppet Babies—and new prime-time ventures such as the mythology-oriented The Storyteller. The Jim Henson company continues to produce new series and specials. To provide a visual style distinct from the Muppets, the puppets in these two movies were based on conceptual artwork by Brian Froud. Henson was also responsible for two non-Muppet Show-related movies, 1982's high fantasy The Dark Crystal and the 1986 Labyrinth, co-produced by George Lucas.

The muppet characters have also appeared in a large number of made-for-TV-movies and television specials. One song from that musical film, The Rainbow Connection, sung by Kermit, was nominated for an Oscar. The Muppet Show ended after a few seasons, but the characters have appeared in a long series of movies, beginning with 1979's The Muppet Movie. A vaudeville-style variety show aimed at a family audience, the show was a sensation in the United Kingdom and soon elsewhere in the world.

The show featured Kermit as host, and a variety of other memorable characters including Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, and Fozzie Bear. Starting in 1976, The Muppet Show was occupying Henson's attention in England. The failure of the Muppets on SNL might have been a blessing in disguise. The SNL writers never got comfortable writing for the characters.

Eleven sketches aired between October 1975 and January 1976, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September. Henson, Oz, and his team targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, set mostly in the Land of Gorch. At first the puppetry was separated from the realistic segments on the street, but after a poor test screening in Philadelphia, the show was revamped to integrate the two and place much greater emphasis on Henson's work. Kermit was also included as a roving Television News Reporter; a frill was added around his neck, to make him a frog.

These included Oscar the Grouch, Ernie and Bert, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on the titular street. In 1968, Joan Ganz Cooney and the team at the Children's Television Workshop began work on Sesame Street, a visionary children's program for public television. The NBC TV movie The Cube from 1969 is another experimental film that Jim Henson had produced.

His nine-minute experimental film Time Piece was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1966. From 1964 to 1968, Henson began exploring film-making, and produced a series of experimental films. At that time Henson's long-time partner Frank Oz also came on board with the new company. Henson devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog, the first Muppet to make a regular appearance on a network show The Jimmy Dean Show.

would reside for some time. In 1963, Henson and his wife Jane, also a puppeteer, moved to New York City, where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. then turns the cannon directly toward the viewer, and ends the ad with, "Now, how do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?". The first muppet says, "How do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?" The second muppet responds gruffly, "Never heard of it!" The first muppet fires the cannon and blows the second muppet away..

Another muppet is in front of the barrel end of the cannon. A muppet is poised behind a cannon seen in profile. A good example is one of the early coffee ads. Being puppets, they have been able to get away with a greater level of slapstick violence than might be acceptable with human actors.

The greatly increased exposure led to hundreds of commercial appearances (mostly for Wilkins Coffee) by Henson characters through the 1960s. Henson himself appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show. To this day, Muppets appear as "guests" on shows such as The Tonight Show and Hollywood Squares, with particularly memorable appearances by Kermit and Miss Piggy on 60 Minutes and Cookie Monster on Martha Stewart Living. The success of Sam and Friends led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows.

Already he was experimenting with the techniques that would change the way puppetry was used on television, notably using the frame defined by the camera shot to allow the puppeteer to work from off-camera. Sam and Friends were already recognizably Muppets, and the show included a primitive version of what would become Henson's signature character, Kermit the Frog. The next year he created Sam and Friends, a five-minute puppet show for WRC-TV, while attending the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1954, while still in high school, he began working for WTOP-TV creating puppets for a Saturday morning children's show.

in the late 1940s. Born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1936, Henson moved with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. . He is also widely acknowledged for the ongoing vision of faith, friendship, magic, and love which was infused in nearly all of his work.

Creator of The Muppets, and the leading force behind their long creative run, Henson brought an engaging cast of characters, innovative ideas, and a sense of timing and humor to millions of people. He was also a filmmaker, television producer, and the founder of The Jim Henson Company, the Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. James Maury "Jim" Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990), was one of the most important puppeteers in modern American television history. David McKay, 1993, hardcover, 251 pages, ISBN 0679412034.

Jim Henson: The Works: The Art, the Magic, the Imagination. Finch and Jim Henson. Finch, Christopher, Charles S. Tom Smith's song "A Boy and His Frog", which won the Pegasus Award for Best Filk Song in 1991.

The ceremony dedicated a life-sized statue of University of Maryland alumnus Jim Henson, conversing with one of his favorite creations, Kermit the Frog, in front of the Adele Stamp Student Union on the College Park campus.[1]. On September 24, 2003, University of Maryland, College Park honored Jim Henson by holding a dedication ceremony.