TV URBAN LEGEND: The term "Muppets" comes from combining marionettes with puppets.

One of the trickiest type of legends for me to deal with are those where the person/people involved in the legend said one thing in Year X and then said a whole other thing in Year Y. How do you parse through it and figure out which one is the true statement and which one is the "legend"?

Typically, though, the people involved make ancillary arguments that help convince you one way or the other and I think that Jim Henson was convincing in when he explained that the long-accepted origin of the term "Muppets" was bogus.

It all stated early in the days of the Muppets, when the Muppets were simply a bunch of amorphic puppets...

Here's Dave Galloway on The Today Show, "They're called Muppets because they're neither puppets nor marionettes, but kind of a combination."

And Jim Henson himself, on Wonderama in 1974, "Originally, it was to be a combination of marionette and puppet because back when I first started, we used to do some work with marionettes and puppets, and that's how it came about."

And that has been, for the most part, how the term has been accepted. It has entered into the popular lexicon as Muppets being a mixture of marionettes and puppets.

However, as the years went by, Henson had a whole other take on things.

It's important to note that VERY early on, Henson first had another take on the origin of the term, telling the Washington Post in 1956, "A Muppet, according to Henson, is a cross between a hand puppet and a stick puppet. Henson thought up the term Muppet in order to 'have something distinctive.'"

In 1984, Henson told the Baltimore Sun, "We told reporters the word was a combination of puppets and marionettes, but that wasn't true. We just coined it. We just made it up. We just said that to satisfy the reporters."

The best point Henson had on this came when Henson spoke to Cinefantastique, in 1983, "I think we did the term Muppets before we got the show Sam and Friends - a few months after I started working. It was really just a term we made up. For a long time I would tell people it was a combination of marionettes and puppets but, basically, it was really just a word that we coined. We have done very few things connected with marionettes."

I think that's really the best argument - Henson DIDN'T really do anything notable with marionettes, so it really DOES seem to be a stretch to suggest that they were designed to be a mixture of the two words, since if they weren't using marionettes, why would he use that term to create the "Muppets" name?

I think the late, great Henson is believable on this topic, and that the name was simply something that he thought sounded cool.

The legend is...

STATUS: False

Thanks to the Muppets Wiki for the excellent collection of quotes!

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