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September 24 marks the 90^th anniversary of the birth of Jim Henson, in this writer’s opinion one of the greatest creative artists of the 20^th century. Even though we have been without his imagination and humanism for nearly four decades, the loss is still keenly felt.

Although we have never enshrined any of his productions here, Henson’s projects make a legitimate bid for full-fledged weirdness. The vaudevillian surrealism of the Muppets borrows as much from Ernie Kovacs as it does from Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, and The Muppet Movie (1979) is an unexpectedly metatextual work, to the point where Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem come riding to the rescue by virtue of having read the script. And this was no accident. Blessed with a blank check from the success of the Muppets, Henson opted to direct the dark fantasies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, At the very least, he’s weird-friendly.

There is another Jim Henson, though, one prone to seeing doom around the corner. You get hints of it in his most popular works, like the way “The Muppet Show” is always just one Gonzo-led stunt away from disaster. It’s likely that this was a holdover from his earliest days in show business, when he was finding different kinds of success, but none that brought stability or security. In the years between his first foray into television, “Sam and Friends,” and his eventual arrival on Sesame Street, Henson was a hustler, grabbing work wherever it might be found. The Muppets were regulars on “The Jimmy Dean Show,” frequent guests on Ed Sullivan, and leading lights in TV advertising. Amidst all this, Henson was a movie director, and two films from this period represent an inflection point, a moment when Henson could have legitimately become a pessimistic avant-garde filmmaker. Fate intervened, arguably for the betterment of all mankind, but it’s interesting to glance at the road not taken. 

“Time Piece” has its place in history as the project that earned Henson the only Academy Award nomination of his career. A meticulously planned short film, “Time Piece” features Henson himself (looking, in the words of Boston Phoenix critic David Harris, “like a beatnik posing as an office worker”) as he flits about his imagination while under pressure from an endlessly ticking stopwatch. Images come steadily, none lasting four seconds, and continue at a deliberate pace, serving to ratchet up the mounting tension. Henson’s bearded businessman is frequently on the run, sometimes enjoying a Tom Jones-like dinner, occasionally piloting a DaVinci-like set of wings, or indulging in some other dreamlike oddity, as when he metronomically paints an elephant pink or when his head is revealed as the centerpiece at a grand banquet. His cry of “Help!” is unacknowledged but charmingly redolent of a certain green-felt amphibian.

While there’s no trace of the master of puppets in anything within the film, “Time Piece” is laced with the trademark Muppet sense of anarchy, of things threatening to come off the rails. Some of his future collaborators have cameo appearances, include a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it walkthrough by a teenage Frank Oz. Henson’s mix of images feels as though it could have inspired Godfrey Reggio, with its cascade of subjects rapidly turning over before the viewer has a chance to fully process. “Time Piece” is a genuinely fascinating work, only slightly spoiled by the obviousness of its final twist. For anyone who only wanted to break in to the movie business, it would have been a fine calling card. But Henson wanted more.

“The Cube” comes to us by way of an NBC anthology series called “Experiment in Television.” (Henson also contributed to a documentary for this series, co-writing “Youth 68: Everything’s Changing… or Maybe It Isn’t” with future Muppet scribe Jerry Juhl. Jon Stone was at the helm, prior to creating a little show called “Sesame Street.”) At heart, “The Cube” is a straight-up ontological mystery, marching an unnamed man (Richard Schaal) into a featureless white box and watching him squirm as he wonders why he is here and if he will ever get out. We’ve seen our fair share of inexplicably-trapped-in-a-room scenarios ‘round these parts (there’s no proof that the Canonically Weird Cube was inspired by Henson’s work, but it certainly springs from same notion), but it is absolutely an unusual product for network TV, rooted in an unceasing mood of uncertainty and obtuseness. Here is a show that conceals its intentions from the outset and never threatens to make them clear at any point.

Part of what makes this tale distinctive is the solitary nature of Schaal, who is completely alone in his hell, left to be disregarded, misled, mocked, and tricked by a full cast of torturers. Some, like the snooty general manager and the snarky handyman Arnie, pitch themselves as helpful, laying out rules of the game that ultimately won’t apply. Others are downright hostile, one of the most amusing being a small boy on a bicycle singing, “You’re gonna die here,” echoing a sentiment sung by a folk-rock quartet earlier. The Man tries every trick he can imagine: from hostile to passive, from inquisitive to apathetic, from confrontational to suicidal. The peculiar circumstances of this particular hell are that no strategy can work. There’s no moral like in No Exit, no twist as found in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.” He’s just stuck, probably for eternity. It’s an unusually grim scenario to spring from Henson’s mind, but one delivered with great cleverness. The antiseptic white set proves highly malleable, adapting to each new occurrence with an appropriate impossibility. The ensemble is also well-crafted, balancing absurdity with menace as they create an ever-more claustrophobic atmosphere. (One of them, an obtuse priest, is played by workhorse Muppeteer Jerry Nelson.) 

Jim Henson was kind, but not saintly. He was human, with irritations and frustrations like any of us, but committed to seeking out love wherever he could. These two early, short works reveal a mindset that he rarely let show in later productions, but it may be that only a man with such strong experience with cynicism could have created something as life-embracing as the Muppets. You have to have wandered through darkness in order to appreciate brightness. “Time Piece” and “The Cube” present a filmmaker doggedly working his way toward the light.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Time Piece”:

“For those of us that have a lot on their plate–multiple jobs, a family, a house to tend to, etc.–we find ourselves thinking about what feels like a million things at once, and it feels like sometimes those things don’t make much sense. We see fragments of our day pieced together in odd ways, we see strange visuals standing in for what we might expect to see, and the harrowing reality that we have a million and one things to do weighs heavily on us... The seemingly fractured nature of Time Piece is intentional, an honest and scary representation of how our minds work.” – Kyle Bain, Bain’s Film Reviews

“The Cube”:

“…as avant garde and challenging a work of art as one is likely to find in the medium. In fact, it’s difficult to believe that prime-time network television programming from that homogenized era in mass entertainment could have produced something so individual, so singular, and so surreal… Trippy and strange,” – John Kenneth Muir, Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

(“The Cube” was nominated for review anonymously. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)