Legend has it that, back in December 1964, Jim Henson and his Muppet troupe (performer Frank Oz, puppet builder Don Sahlin, and writer Jerry Juhl) were booked for a guest-spot on The Jack Paar Show. This was the period, before Sesame Street, when the team made their living via variety show appearances and commercials.
Henson and friends arrived at NBC at 10am for a rehearsal and were told that they wouldn’t be performing until 4pm. With lots of time to kill, Oz opened a utility closet door in their dressing room and found essentially a wall of dusty, black pipes.
In a 1992 interview
, Juhl recalled, “We had nothing to do, and Don had brought paints because we were performing something that needed touch-ups, so one thing led to another and we started decorating the pipes. It was Jim’s idea — a typical Jim idea — and as the whole thing got more elaborate, one of us hopped in a cab and brought more material from the workshop.”
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Late Night with Conan O'Brien,
Late Night with David Letterman,
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,
Sesame Street,
The Jack Paar Show,
The Jay Leno Show,
The Today Show
