I don't know what to say really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives all comes down to today. Either we heal as a team or we are going to crumble. Inch by inch play by play till we're finished. We are in hell right now, gentlemen believe me and we can stay here and get the shit kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell. One inch, at a time.
Now I can't do it for you. I'm too old. I look around and I see these young faces and I think I mean I made every wrong choice a middle age man could make. I uh.... I pissed away all my money believe it or not. I chased off anyone who has ever loved me. And lately, I can't even stand the face I see in the mirror.
You know when you get old in life things get taken from you. That's, that's part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game life or football the margin for error is so small. I mean one half step too late or to early you don't quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in ever break of the game every minute, every second.
On this team, we fight for that inch On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch. Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and LOSING between LIVING and DYING.
I'll tell you this in any fight it is the guy who is willing to die who is going to win that inch. And I know if I am going to have any life anymore it is because, I am still willing to fight, and die for that inch because that is what LIVING is. The six inches in front of your face.
Now I can't make you do it. You gotta look at the guy next to you. Look into his eyes. Now I think you are going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You are going to see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team because he knows when it comes down to it, you are gonna do the same thing for him.
That's a team, gentlemen and either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That's football guys. That's all it is. Now, whattaya gonna do?
All Things Digital Q&A session with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 2007. Wonderful to see two of the most influential people of the our generation share space and time and discuss computers, software and innovation.
Before
Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson made short films for Big
Blue. The tech may be archaic, but the entertainment is timeless.
By Andrew Leal | Posted at 10:11 pm on Monday, May 31, 2010
IBM.
The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to
associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people
had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight,
the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of
short films designed to help its sales staff. Little known today, these
remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. Henson would return
to their gags and situations in his famous later works–and he plucked
the Cookie Monster from one of them when assembling the Muppet cast for
Sesame Street in 1969.
Whose idea was this unique collaboration? Well, Henson had already
established himself in the advertising field. He was best known at the
time for the Muppets’ guest skits on variety shows and Rowlf the Dog’s appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. But he was busier making a wide array of commercials and longer sales films for regional and national products from Esskay Meats to Marathon Gasoline.
For its own part, IBM was keenly aware that its products–including
computers, electric typewriters, and very early word processors–had to
be explained to both the public and IBM’s own employees. So it formed
its own advertising group, including a film and television division. An
executive named David Lazer headed this division, overseeing the
production of training and sales films.
Jim Henson and friends in the 1960s.
According to Henson archivist Karen Falk, the IBM films were
produced between 1966 and 1976, but most of the only confirmed examples
date to the 1960s, primarily 1967. Jim Henson was the primary puppeteer
and director in these projects. Assisting were the Muppets Inc./Henson
Inc. staffers: Frank Oz (later to play Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and
others), writer Jerry Juhl (who co-wrote The Muppet Movie, worked on Fraggle Rock, and scripted classic Ernie and Bert sketches), and puppet builder Don Sahlin (whose credits included George Pal’s Time Machine), among others.
1967 was an interesting time for the team-up: two years before the Muppets’ national prominence would rise thanks to Sesame Street, and two years after the introduction of IBM’s Selectric
typewriter, an electric device which was crucial in the transition from
old Remington typewriters to the modern word processors which would
soon make the Selectric look old-fashioned.
Short and Silly Films
The films Henson made for IBM fell into two basic classes. The first
were short comedic “meeting films,” which acted as icebreakers or to
signal breaks in long corporate, sales, and training meetings. The
second category consisted of longer industrial films which explained
IBM’s products, service, and approach. Though the industrials look like
commercials, their purpose seems to have been to motivate IBM’s sales
team and/or to serve as a primer to potential corporate clients.
The meeting films were comedy bits which could have fit right in on The Muppet Show
(and in fact some would be reworked and repeated on the series). Muppet
trademarks, such as characters eating each other or spontaneous
explosions, were already in force, as seen in a clip with two
businessmen arguing.
Another features an early version of Kermit the Frog, one of only
two star Muppets at the time, attempting to deliver a long speech on
sales success while intimidated by a gruesome monster.
The third spot, “Coffee Break Machine,” is a quintessential Muppet comedy skit (it was remade twice, for The Ed Sullivan Show and The Muppet Show). It’s
also the first explicit link between the meeting films and IBM’s
products. The premise is simple, as an elaborate talking computer
device (voiced by Jim Henson) recites a laundry list of features and
components all to produce a single cup of coffee. A Muppet monster,
instantly recognizable as a prototype of Cookie Monster (but scruffier
and with prominent teeth), enters and devours the machine piece by
piece. (The monster’s voraciousness would remain when Cookie showed up on Sesame Street, but a modified toothless puppet would be used instead.)
This entertaining short displays an ambivalent attitude towards
technology, showing it as complicated, seemingly pointless, and likely
to self-destruct. Not a message one would expect from IBM, but it shows
that the company–despite its reputations as a pretty button-downed
place–had a corporate ability to laugh at itself.
IBM Puts on the Dog
When it came to the actual selling of its technological
products and services, IBM worked with Henson and crew to produce more
sales-driven but still entertaining sales and industrial films. In an
entertaining untitled ten-minute short, Rowlf the Dog (the other
established star Muppet, thanks to his regular stint with Jimmy Dean)
appears as a newly hired IBM salescanine, proudly writing a letter to
his mother about his exploits. Rowlf displays an adeptness at the
keyboard which would serve him well years later as The Muppet Show‘s resident pianist.
Over the course of the film (divided into parts, with typed out
intertitles), Rowlf progresses from a standard typewriter to an
electric IBM model to finally using a Selectric, complete with shots of
the famous “golf ball” typing element,
which he observes with keen interest. Comedic bits include Rowlf
accidentally breaking a bottle of mimeograph ink , struggling with
stairs, and a running gag where the typewriter carriage backs up and
knocks over objects.
In an industry in-joke, Rowlf’s sales territory is expanded to
include an office building, only the camera trucks in to reveal the
name “Sperry-Rand,” the early IBM competitor behind the Univac.
By 1967, however, the company had become embroiled in a lawsuit with
Honeywell and was diminishing in importance. Still, based on his track
record, sending Rowlf to sell IBM products to a competing company might
be construed as an act of corporate sabotage! In addition, the
acknowledgment that IBM wasn’t the only fish in the pond differed from
the period in the 1940s and 1950s when corporations were afraid to
acknowledge competing companies (and long before the Mac/PC ads).
Among the other highlights are a series of amusing commercial spoofs made by Rowlf. One parodies a then-current series of Timex durability ads featuring newsman John Cameron Swayze. Another, referencing Wrigley’s Doublemint Twins
ads, has twin Rowlfs chanting “Double your output, double your speed!
With IBM MTS MT/ST” and then typing on dual machines.The MT/ST
(Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter) would feature far more prominently
in the next film, The Paperwork Explosion.
That film –whose title was a common term in the 1960s and perceived
as a side-effect of the information explosion–eschews Muppets for a
more serious but still creative presentation. It’s not dissimilar in
its rapid cuts and use of animation to Henson’s earlier,
Oscar-nominated short Time Piece.
The Paperwork Explosion (made concurrently with a
same-named print campaign) uses a talking heads approach, as various
office workers and/or IBM employees discuss the problem and its
solution. The cast consists of a mix of New York commercial and
character actors, Henson Inc. employees (a young Frank Oz can be
glimpsed smoking a cigarette and Henson’s voice is briefly heard), and
actual IBM people (including David Lazer).
The short’s music was by Raymond Scott, who had worked with Henson
before but is best known as the composer of that Looney Tunes staple “Powerhouse,”
usually played during assembly-line scenes. Scott’s synthesizer score
is perfectly matched to the subject matter, presenting both an
insistent feel to the initial problem (businesses overwhelmed by
paperwork in every facet) and then to IBM’s mechanized solution.
The IBM Selectric Composer, in a photo from IBMComposer.org.
The soundtrack and pace gradually slow to a more
comfortable rhythm, as the previously shown office folks begin to
investigate the ways IBM products can help, especially the MT/ST. IBM’s
print “paperwork explosion” ads described it further, as “a rather
remarkable typewriter that takes a secretary’s rough draft and types it
back error-free at the rather remarkable rate of a page every two
minutes.”Also shown in the film is the IBM Selectric Composer,
an advanced typesetter used to prepare copy which would be photographed
for print ads and which allowed for a choice of font. Dictation
machines are presented as ways to record the office staff’s thoughts
more efficiently than freehand transcription or the best secretary.
These products may look quaint and amusing today, but in the 1960s
this was futuristic stuff. And the mantra, reiterated by the chorus of
talking heads, is that IBM office equipment and other machines will
help do the work, leaving people more time to think.
Forty odd years later, it’s not clear that technology and our
increasingly digital world have freed up time to think (though
unquestionably they’ve given us more to think about). Outside of deeper
messages, the film is very effective salesmanship and a fascinating
mixture of techniques and look at the 1960s business world (or one
version of it). As with his personal films, it proves Jim Henson could
do more than wiggle frogs and dogs.
And Now For the Rest of the Story….
Once work had been completed on these films, Henson and IBM ended
their partnership. But the collaboration’s impact continued to be felt,
and the relationship between the Muppets and technology continues to
this day:
Once personal computers and related gadgetry entered American
households, the Muppets were there. In the 1980s, for instance, there
was a Muppet keyboard for IBM’s infamous PC Jr and a Muppet computer literacy program for the Commodore 64. In the 1990s, there were Muppet CD-ROMs. Today, the Muppets star in several apps for the iPhone.
Henson scribe Jerry Juhl with animatronic Muppet at the 1964 Worlds' Fair.
Writer Jerry Juhl remained with the Muppets, but he used his IBM
experiences for his sole foray into adult literature, a 1968
science-fiction short story called “The Edward Salant Letters,”
detailing the correspondence between the owner of an IBM-like dictating
typewriter (called a Phonotyper) receiving automated computer responses
from the manufacturer (and thus eerily foreshadowing customer service
hassles of today).
IBM film honcho David Lazer joined Henson as a full-time executive, where, among other things, he was a producer for The Muppet Show and the movies The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth.
He also worked with Jim to develop and expand the “meeting film”
concept. While IBM owned the original shorts, Lazer proposed making
similar films which could be marketed to any business, spoofing
corporate doubletalk, workplace tedium, and hard sell exhortations.
These Muppet Meeting Films began in the 1970s, were significantly promoted in 1980 when new shorts were added, and remain available.
Following Jim Henson’s death in 1990, the Muppets experienced many
ups and downs and been sold and resold, but they’re currently enjoying
a resurgence, due both to an upcoming Disney movie (The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever) and–benefiting from the computer era and the Internet–a series of clever and popular viral YouTube videos (notably an acclaimed cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody”).
IBM
may no longer make typewriters or word processors–or office-automation
machinery of any sort–but it remains a technological giant. In a
touching nod to the past (or more likely, just using a popular internet
phenomenon as an example), its developerWorks page on the Lex parser uses the Swedish Chef translator (turning text into mock Swedish and adding the Muppet’s trademark “Bork bork”) as an example.
And Jim Henson himself? He continued to toy with computers for as long as he lived, from making “Scanimation” films for Sesame Street to hiring engineers who created some of the earliest motion-capture CGI puppetry.
And after his passing, one of the most memorable tributes he received
came from a computer company. No, not IBM. It was Apple that
prominently featured Henson (and Kermit) among the notable minds in its
famous “Think Different” campaign. Jim Henson did indeed think differently, as these early films attest.
(Andrew Leal is a freelance writer in El Paso, Texas. A lifelong Muppet fan, he serves as administrator at Muppet Wiki and contributed to the book Kermit Culture. He’s also an animation historian, with selections in the books Animation Art and The Animated Movie Guide. He completed this article without the aid of an IBM Composer.)
By Andrew Leal | Posted at 10:11 pm on Monday, May 31, 2010