 I'm so happy that Jim Henson was searching for someone to play Big Bird and Oscar in the August of 1969, because he had been booked by the people who were creating a new show called Sesame Street. But he didn't have enough puppeteers, he only had one other, it was Frank Oz. So he was searching for someone and I found that out while I was going to give a show there in Salt Lake City where the convention was here, Puppeteers of America. Well, he liked what I was doing and I got a job with him. And I said, what will I be playing? He said, well, one is going to be a large, silly bird and the other is going to be a grouch puppet who is losing a pile of trash. And well, it didn't quite turn out that way. But what was really neat is that Big Bird and Oscar are quite different characters, although they do have one similarity, they live alone. And they don't get along. Oscar doesn't respect Big Bird much because of a turkey, which Big Bird resents. He knows he's not a turkey. He likes to say that he's a giant golden condor, but he knows he's really just a lark. A little joke, I mean. But they're really different from each other. And Big Bird is sensitive and a vulnerable little guy. I say he's little in that he doesn't think of himself as a giant. He's 8-3-2, which makes me the tallest character on television in history, I think, which I was really great because when I was a boy, I was the smallest kid in the class, sometimes in the whole school. And so I really have a great job there. And Oscar is extremely irritable. And he's complex in that if he says something, if he says it's rotten, it's beautiful to him. And if he says it's beautiful, it's just so rotten that he thinks it's beautiful. But it's easy to switch from one to the other because the puppet kind of commands who you're playing. You just know it's so different to do with Big Bird. And I can see almost nothing. I have a little tiny LED flashlight to light up the script inside because we have so much material each day that you couldn't possibly memorize at all. And all the puppeteers read their stuff. Nobody memorizes it. You have to kind of keep watching two things. You can answer the script, be familiar with it, so you don't have to just keep studying it. You have to also dash my eyes back to the monitor I'm looking at. A little tiny monitor inside. It's very different. You know you're in this place where you can't see anything except a little monitor. Whereas Oscar, I'm outside kind of hudged behind the trash can reaching up in for a cut of way back. You know, I worked one time with Michael Jackson. And he asked, how do I get into the trash can to do Oscar? Because it's such a small can, considering how my size was. I could easily actually squeeze into it, but I didn't have to. I told him I'd sit behind it and lean in and hold off the puppet. I said, would you like to come and see what it's like? It's not high tech. He said, oh no, I love fantasy. I don't want to spoil it for me myself. So I'd like my whole life to be fantasy. And I thought that he'd achieve that pretty well. And I'm sorry he had to leave, you know. I want to ask you two more questions. One, it's about the puppet industry. You know, I feel like there's been a lot of evolution and we don't see. I would love Ninja Turtles movie the way they made it when I was introduced to the movie. But I don't think they would ever do it like that. I don't know if they ever would. What are your thoughts on it? Well, I've made one feature movie. I've been in some little cameos and some of the other Muppet movies. But the one feature movie I found out is very different making that movie than the work in the TV show. Because we would actually get 40 minutes of material in the can every day. We worked so quick and simple in those days. Whereas the movie was such, we were lucky to get three or four minutes in the can. I want to get your thoughts on the turtles. Ninja Turtles movie. I never saw the movie. Oh, no way. Although they're my friends. I never saw an Ninja movie. So I don't know what they were like. How does it feel being involved with the groundbreaking show that directly affected not only mine, but so many children's lives? And how do you feel about the different cultural aspect of Sesame Street today, the direction they've gone? What does that mean to you? Well, we were sort of in a sense warned. It wasn't a warning. But when we started their show, we said it's going to be an evolutionary show which would change with the times. And so we, of course, the times have changed. We've done 45 years of it. And if you start, do you think of the 45 years, say, starting in 1900? In 1900, there were no airplanes or anything. But 1945, we've finished the worst war in the world we've ever seen. And so in that length of time, we've done our show. And it has changed with the times have changed. And the show always tries to keep up with fads that people respond to. When there's break dancing was big, we had break dancers. We had everything kind of following what it was. So I think it has changed a great deal. And I kind of really enjoyed it the early days which were so simple to do. I would memorize the script in three rehearsals, which we were doing just before we did the scene. The rehearsal, we're going to take a few minutes. But now it's much more elaborate and evolved because we often have scenes which are going to be enhanced with computer generated clouds or flashes or whatever the script requires. So we have to kind of stop with that stuff all the time. So it just doesn't flow as quickly. It's sort of like watching football. It's only eight seconds left in the game but it may take 20 minutes. So it's sort of like cool.