The Jim HensonJim Henson (1936–1990) was the puppeteer and filmmaker who... More Company is the production company founded by Jim and Jane HensonJane Henson (1934–2013) co-created the Muppets with her hu... in 1958 as Muppets, Inc., and now run by their children.
It no longer owns the Muppets
The characters most people associate with the name — Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie — were sold to Disney in 2004, along with the Sesame Street characters going to Sesame WorkshopSesame Workshop is the American non-profit behind Sesame Str.... The company continued independently with everything else.
What it kept
includes Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, and it has gone on producing family and creature-driven work since.
The Creature Shop is the part builders care about
Established during the making of The Dark Crystal, it is the company’s animatronicsAnimatronics is the use of motors, servos, cables and electr... More and fabrication division, and for decades it was the most advanced creature workshop in the world. Its work appears well beyond Henson productions — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Farscape, Babe and a long list of films where a creature had to act rather than merely appear.
What it demonstrates
is that a puppet workshop can be a serious industrial operation: mechanical engineers, sculptors, mould makers, seamsters, fur specialists and performers working as one production pipeline.
The early history is more modest
Before Sesame Street in 1969, the company mostly made commercials, late-night talk show appearances and short corporate films — years of unglamorous paid work that funded everything after.
That trajectory is worth noting if you are building a business around this: the famous work came after a decade of the other kind.
Brian Henson
shared a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award for the Henson Performance Control System, the radio-control rig that drove the company creature work through the 1980s and beyond.