Last week, I went to see the Jim Henson's Fantastic World exhibit that just opened at the EMP. I'm a pretty big Muppets fan—I think EMP invited me to the press tour because I've posted so many Muppet videos on Slog over the last year—and I really enjoyed seeing the exhibit. I recommend it, with some caveats.
The first thing you should know before you go into the Muppet exhibit at EMP is that it's not very big. I'm pretty sure there are some galleries in Pioneer Square that are bigger than the entire space set aside for the show. But the exhibit does a good job of covering the whole of Henson's career, from his beginnings as a cartoonist (I was struck by how much his illustration work resembles that of Dr. Seuss) to his work making commercials (examples of those commercials play on video screens in the exhibit, and I'd suggest that you watch them: a couple of the commercials were genuinely funny because they seemed to make fun of the overenthusiastic exuberance of most television commercials) to his later work we all know: the Muppets and Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal.
The second thing you should know about the Muppets is that physically, they're fucking huge. For some reason, I wasn't prepared for this. Cookie Monster, in his glass cage, was immense. It makes sense: Cookie Monster and Rowlf were both operated by three arms, and so two full-grown men had to hide in their bellies.
The third thing you should know about the Muppet exhibit is that it ends with an attempt to be "local." There is a hands-on experience in which museum-goers can select a popular Muppet song ("Rainbow Connection," "Movin' Right Along" and more) and play along with a band of real Muppets made especially for the EMP. The set-up (a stage with TVs beneath it so people can watch how they're manipulating the Muppets, just the way that real Muppeteers do) is great, but I do wish that Henson's people hadn't decided to make one of the Muppets in the likeness of Kurt Cobain. The Cobain Muppet, with his cardigan and his stringy blond hair, was a really awkward experience for me: How many other heroin-addicted suicides have had plush representations constructed of them?
But I'm picking nits, here: You should go and check out the Muppet exhibit. It's fifteen bucks, and that gives you access to the whole EMP: If you've never been, you should make an afternoon of it just for the sheer weirdness of seeing famous Muppets in person. The feeling of recognition—of seeing a long-lost childhood friend, sitting in a big glass cube—is a really weird kind of buzz.
