um,

I recently did a, a podcast with another gentleman where I spent over an hour talking about my, my experiences with the Muppets.

And it, that's, it started as that in that one day, um, as a puppeteer, the Muppeteer, um, it was, I was still in college at Cal arts and my design teacher, um, collected African art and was kind of an authority on African art and had a friendship and actually business association with Jim Henson because Jim collected African art and loved African art.

And Jim was filming the Muppet movie in LA and knew they were going to do this scene where they wanted to have every Muppet ever designed, ever, you know, They've been on TV and movies, whatever.

And what was the first movie? And they kind of exhausted all the available puppeteers.

And he mentioned that to my design teacher.

I was in my senior year.

What was that process like? What were you designing? Can you talk a little bit about what came out of that and how you put that together?

Um,

That's an interesting question.

At the time, a lot of what I did, to be honest with you, I was pretty naive because I moved into this field just like a lot of the people who were Imagineers.

It was interesting because, as I said, this was a new art form or a new industry, theme park industry.

Walt had only created it in the 1950s.

He had recruited art directors, engineers, a lot of movie people, a lot of animation people.

Just like with animation, they evolved and they created the art form as they went along.

How much of that is something that you get to bring to the table and how much of it is an edict from above of we want three characters that can do these things?

And tell the story that you just told me.

Yeah.

So I'm at CalArts, you know, animation student in the character animation program.

And one of my favorite teachers, I think one of the best teachers, and I think most of my peers would attest to that, was this gentleman by the name of Bill Moore, our design teacher.

And he actually came from, he was a Chouinard professor, and they brought him to CalArts.

Fantastic, fantastic design teacher, really difficult.

He happened to be friends with, and actually did business with Jim Henson, because Jim Henson collected African art.

Yeah.