Jim Henson Shot a Trailer for ‘Wizard of Id’ TV Show

By Jason Boog 

In the late 1960s, Muppets creator Jim Henson collaborated with comic strip artist Johnny Hart (the creator of B.C. and The Wizard of Id)–planning TV show based on The Wizard of Id with puppets and animated sets. The duo created the trailer embedded above.

Here’s more from the Jim Henson Company Archives: “Jim loved comics and cartoons and collected books of Pogo, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, L’il Abner, Charles Addams, Jules Feiffer, Roger Price, James Thurber, and Johnny Hart. During the 1960s, Jim pursued several projects based on classic fairy tales, but the Wizard of Id project was the first time Jim sought out a creative collaborator with an existing character group. The snarky humor of Hart’s B.C. and Wizard of Id appealed to Jim, and he saw how his sensibility overlapped with these funnies.”

A few years later, Henson started work on Sesame Street and his first Muppet projects, so the show never happened. Last summer, biographer Brian Jay Jones sold a biography of Henson to Ballantine. (Via i09)