TV URBAN LEGEND: Kermit the Muppet became a frog for the first time in 1971’s The Frog Prince.
One of the trickiest things when it comes to legends is when the people directly involved in the stories are the ones who are inadvertently spreading the fake stories! That was the case with the story of how Kermit the frog came to be a frog.
As you may or may not know, Kermit was originally just, well, a puppet. You see, when Jim Henson first broke into the world of puppetry, it was on a local TV show in Washington D.C. that he did with his future wife, Jane Nebel. It was called Sam and Friends and the main puppet, Sam, was a human who interacted with a number of abstract puppets. One of those abstract puppets was a sort of lizard-like creature named Kermit…
Kermit soon became the breakout character from the series, in part due to Kermit’s wise guy personality, but also in great part due to how he was constructed. You see, with Kermit being essentially a sock puppet, the only thing making up Kermit’s head was Henson’s hand. That differed from Sam, who had a rigid face. As a result, Sam’s expressions could rarely change, while Kermit could go through many distinct expressions all based on the slightest movement of Henson’s hand inside the puppet. Therefore, especially when working in the close-up medium of television, Kermit became so much easier for viewers to identify with and he soon became a star, with Henson bringing Kermit along with him to each future project, as his puppetry soon became the Muppets we know and love.
However, again, in those early days, Kermit was just a…thing. He wasn’t an animal of any kind, but if he was ANYthing, it was a lizard. Over time, though, that changed, and he became the Kermit the Frog that we all know and love. The only question is WHEN did it happen?
WHEN DID JIM HENSON SAY KERMIT FIRST BECAME A FROG?
Most people believe that Kermit became a frog for the first time in the 1971 Muppet TV special, The Frog Prince. It seems like a natural time, right? Since, you know, the name of the special is the Frog Prince.
Even beyond that, though, people tended to believe that this was when it happened because Jim Henson, himself, said it was when it happened. In 1982, Judy Harris did an interview with Henson and the topic came to Kermit…
“Judy Harris: The first Kermit was made out of your mother’s coat. Would you say that it was just an accident that the coat was green and that maybe if the coat had been purple that Kermit would not have evolved into a frog?
Jim Henson: That’s quite likely actually. Yeah, the first Kermit was not even a clean green- it’s sort of more a turquoise – sort of a milky turquoise.
Harris: Yeah, I saw him at the exhibit; he looked a little faded.
Henson: Yeah, well, no, he’s not faded; that was the color he was.
Harris: That was his real color?
Henson: Sure, but you see back in those days you may have read somewhere, but I didn’t call him a frog.
Harris: Right, he was just Kermit the thing.
Henson: Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.
Harris: He didn’t turn into a frog until you did THE FROG PRINCE for a TV special.
Henson: Yeah, that’s right.
Harris: That was the first time he got flippers and his little pointed collar?
Henson: Right.
Harris: He just seems so froggy to me.
Henson: Yeah, well it’s interesting how that evolved. See, I still like very much the abstract characters and some of those abstract characters I still feel are slightly more pure. If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of sort of warmth and cool.”
So that certainly seems to be on point, right?
WHEN DID KERMIT ACTUALLY BECOME A FROG?
However, Henson was mistaken in the interview.
The actual “frogification” of Kermit came gradually throughout the 1960s, as there really were only two options, a lizard and a frog, and Kermit’s green coloring made people lean towards frog. Kermit himself even began to refer to himself as a “frog,” despite no changes being made to his design, like in this IBM film around 1967…
The actual OFFICIAL debut of Kermit as a frog, in terms of his design actually being altered to him specifically being a frog happened three years before The Frog Prince in the Muppets TV special, Hey Cinderella!, which was recorded in 1968, but did not air until 1970…
As a result, Kermit made a number of other appearances as a frog in other situations in 1969, like in early episodes of Sesame Street…
So Henson was just mistaken (he actually made that mistake a few other times over the years). No big deal. The guy obviously had a lot of Muppets history he had to remember, so it’s normal to miss something like this by a few years.
The legend is…
STATUS: False
Thanks to the Muppets Wiki for the great details on Kermit’s history!
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