The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson Bill Prady The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson is a one-hour special that aired on CBS on November 21, 1990. The program was a tribute to Muppet creator Jim Henson, who had died earlier in 1990 due to toxic shock syndrome caused by a streptococcus infection, and featured characters from "The Muppet Show", "Fraggle Rock", and "Sesame Street". It marked Steve Whitmire's first onscreen performance as Kermit the Frog. This was also one of Richard Hunt's final puppetry works before his death in 1992. Kermit the Frog is away traveling, leaving Fozzie Bear and the other
The Muppets Studio under Senior Vice President and General Manager R. Russell Hampton, Jr. ABC, in October 2005, commissioned "America's Next Muppet", a script and five script outlines, but ABC was reluctant to green light "America's Next Muppet", and it never got out of the planning stage. Muppet Holding's new general manager instead licensed the Muppets out to TF1, a French television network, to produce "Muppet TV" in September 2006. In 2006, the Muppets Holding Company was transferred from the Disney Consumer Products unit to The Walt Disney Studios; with studio executives passing on oversight, the unit was placed in the special events