I've often wondered what innovation or creation the world never got to see because Jim Henson died so young. There were so many great ideas floating around in his head, between characters, voices, technical innovations, and whole other worlds, that I'm convinced that something he may not have even imagined yet would have come out and would have been great. But I could never imagine what it might be that we never got to see.
Saturday night I was with my family in Boston to see the Lion King at the Boston Opera House (basically, Broadway, but in Boston and in a smaller theater as part of their traveling show). I had never seen the theater version or even the movie version (I remember Elton John's hit songs from 20 years ago), so I really didn't know what to expect at all. The play starts, and as it's going on, I see different kinds of mechanics being used to bring these different animal characters to life. There's a bird that is a normal-looking puppet, but with the performer in sight. There is some animal controlled by an performer where he is the hind legs and is standing up in costume while the low body and front legs are plastic and controlled like a puppet. There was another animal later where the animal was basically pinned in front of the performer's costume and operated as a hand and mouth puppet. Other animals were performers in costume, but rather than an animal's face covering the performer's face, it was on a fixed attachment and hanging above. You get the idea. Different mechanical ways to bring different animal types to life that wasn't difficult for the performers (which is necessary because of all the speaking, singing, and moving around on stage they have to do).
Early in the show, that's when it struck me. The idea the world lost from Jim Henson was some sort of live stage production using different types of puppetry (but not something billed as a "puppet show"). Kind of like what I saw in the Lion King, but with even more puppetry.
