Miss Piggy, Fraggles, and an auction at the Twilight of a Hollywood Era

LOS ANGELES – It’s time to stop the music? It’s time to unlight the lights?

The Jim Henson Co., which became an entertainment force in the 1970s with “Sesame Street,” “The Muppet Show” and “The Muppet Movie,” sold its longtime Los Angeles studio last year for more than $40 million. Now Henson is auctioning 435 items from its archive – puppets, props, posters, even some shirts that Jim Henson himself used to wear. (He died in 1990).

The sale, billed as the company’s 70th Anniversary Auction, will take place Tuesday at the former Henson campus. It is expected to raise $1.3 million to $2.1 million, according to Julien’s Auctions.

“In 70 years, the Jim Henson Co. has never sold anything at auction,” said Roy Parker-Saladino, a Julien’s pop culture specialist. “That means we don’t really know what the market is. I’m confident, but it’s going to be a surprise for us all.”

Henson is not going out of business. New projects include “The First Snow of Fraggle Rock,” a holiday special coming to Apple TV on Dec. 5. Apple also has a second season of the Henson-produced preschool series “Slumberkins” on the way, and more shows are in the works for various outlets.

The auction is less Muppety than you might expect – that is, there aren’t any actual Muppets, most likely because Henson sold the franchise to Disney in 2004 for $74 million. But there are standout props, including Miss Piggy’s production-worn pumps ($7,000 to $9,000) from the 1981 comedy “The Great Muppet Caper.”

In 2019, as streaming services poured money into content, Henson received one of the biggest orders in its history: Netflix spent an estimated $100 million on “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” a 10-episode prequel to Jim Henson’s 1982 movie. Puppets and animatronic figures used in the show, including a villainous Skeksis character with a fiberglass beak ($20,000 to $30,000), make up about a quarter of the items up for bid.

The Henson family is also parting with roughly a dozen puppets from the original “Fraggle Rock” series, which ran on HBO in the 1980s.

“There was a little fan reaction of, well, shouldn’t these things be in a museum?” said Lisa Henson, who runs her father’s company. But she emphasized that Henson still had “thousands” of items in its archive and “major museum partnerships that are ongoing and permanent.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.