Michael Frith has been involved in family entertainment as an internationally-acclaimed designer, illustrator, writer, performer and producer for more than 40 years.
He is best known for his work with Jim Henson Productions on the seminal children’s TV shows Sesame Street, The Muppets and Fraggle Rock and his diverse talents as a designer, illustrator, writer, performer and TV producer have earned him numerous industry awards.
The scores of characters he created or designed are loved by millions of children around the world, and much of his work has been informed by an innate Bermudian sensibility, not least in Fraggle Rock, the popular children’s TV series, which was inspired by the Island’s Crystal Caves.
Although a native Bermudian, Michael Frith was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After having a bad experience giving birth to his older brother at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, his American-born mother Mary (nee Hefferan) risked flying in wartime with his father Alexander J. Frith, to have Michael in the hospital founded by her grandfather, a famous brain surgeon.
Alexander Frith, a passionate sailor, a designer of traditional Bermudian cottages and indefatigable storyteller, had studied law at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, while Mary had once been a society columnist on a Detroit newspaper.
The family moved frequently during Michael’s childhood before settling at Salt Kettle House, Paget, which his parents converted from a ruin into a popular guesthouse before later moving to nearby Pruden’s Point.
A naturally gifted artist, Michael began drawing professionally at age 11 and quickly displayed a talent for capturing likenesses using the strong and energetic lines that would become his trademark. He also developed an early interest in puppetry, turning old plywood boxes into “TV sets” and creating finger puppets for neighbourhood shows.
He spent one summer working as a gofer on Darrell’s Island, which had been converted after the Second World War from a seaplane terminal into a television studio. He also worked as an office boy at Master’s where he wrote and illustrated its newspaper advertising; a magician’s assistant; a radio disc jockey; a writer and illustrator for tourist magazine Preview; a cartoonist for the Mid-Ocean News and, as teenager, hosted Junior Club, a children’s television show on ZBM.
His siblings also inherited the family’s creative genes. Alexander John Frith became an architect and sailor, Jeremy Fuller Frith was a poet and farmer, and Mary “Wendy” Washington Frith, a gifted caricaturist and bird artist.
Michael Frith was educated at Warwick Academy; Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts and Harvard University, where he earned a BA in Fine Arts, became President of the Harvard Lampoon magazine and co-authored Alligator, a James Bond spoof set in Bermuda, with fellow undergraduate Christopher Cerf.
On graduation in 1963, Frith was hired by New York publisher Random House to work on the groundbreaking Beginner Book series started by Theodor Seuss Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”). Frith was editor-in-chief and art director of the series, and working closely and collaborating with Seuss, wrote and/or illustrated a number of books for both adults and children, and also served as editor and art director of Random’s Sesame Street and Step-Up Book series.
Frith produced a series of five annual large-format Sesame Street Storybooks, and contributed artwork for four of them: The Sesame Street Storybook (1971), The Sesame Street 1, 2, 3 Storybook (1973), The Sesame Street ABC Storybook (1974), and Big Bird’s Busy Book (1975), all starring the Muppets.
Muppet creator Jim Henson was so impressed with Frith’s work that he invited him to join his creative team. He joined Henson Associates full-time as Art Director in 1975. He was named Vice President in 1978, and Executive Vice President and Director of Creative Services in 1985.
Frith’s first projects for Henson were designing “realistic” but other-worldly characters for The Land of Gorch, an ongoing sketch in the first season of Saturday Night Live, and new characters for a pilot for what was to become The Muppet Show.
Frith’s design sketches shaped the look of characters, sets and props in Muppet TV shows and movies. He created or collaborated on classic characters such as Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Scooter, and The Dr. Teeth Band as well as the characters for a spin-off series, the four-time Emmy Award-winning Muppet Babies, for which he was creative consultant and executive producer.
He was design consultant on five Muppet movies—The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) and Muppet Treasure Island (1996)—as well as the Sesame Street feature Follow That Bird. He acted in a similar role for The Jim Henson Hour television series and was executive producer for two other TV series, the two-time Canadian Prix Gemini-winning Jim Henson’s Dog City (1992-1995) and The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss (1996-1998). The latter was twice nominated for Prime Time Emmy Awards for Outstanding Children’s Program.
As Art/Creative Director, Frith also created or oversaw a huge range of Sesame Street, Muppet, Muppet Baby and Fraggle Rock products and projects. He won the Art Director’s Club Gold Award for the book Miss Piggy’s Treasury of Art Masterpieces From the Kermitage Collection in 1984. He headed the Henson creative team developing attractions and characters for Disneyworld/MGM Studios, including the enormously popular “Muppet-Vision 3D” film and theatre.
Following the success of The Muppets, Henson asked Frith and two others to develop a new children’s show designed to appeal to a wider international audience. The result, with Frith also as Conceptual Designer, was Fraggle Rock, which debuted in January 1983 and ran for four seasons (96 episodes) on HBO from 1983 to 1987.
Inspired by Crystal Caves, the inventive and popular series featured a magical underground world inhabited by characters called Fraggles. Fraggle Rock was an entertaining allegory on the complex symbiotic relationships between different groups, cultures and races, and subtly explored issues of prejudice, spirituality, identity, environment and social conflict.
The series was seen in 98 countries and won many prestigious awards, including an International Emmy, four Cable ACE Awards and two Prix Gemini. In recognition of his work, Jim Henson personally invited Frith to share in the company’s prestigious George Foster Peabody Awards in 1978 and 1986.
In 1996, Frith left Henson Productions to start Sirius Thinking Ltd., a multimedia children’s education company, with Bermudian John Sculley, Christopher Cerf and Norman Stiles.
In 2000, Sirius debuted Between the Lions, an educational puppet show for PBS designed to teach children to read, and based on a family of lions that lives in an enchanted library. Frith, a co-creator, served as an executive producer, the creative director and the conceptual designer, designing all the puppets and most of the key animation characters, conceptualizing sets and storyboarding the show’s action and innovative graphics.
Co-creators included his wife Kathryn Mullen. A talented puppeteer, director and writer in her own right, she had worked on The Muppets since 1978. When they married in 1984, she also inherited his three children, Callee, Christina and Jonathan. They now have four grandchildren.
In its first two seasons, Between The Lions received 13 Emmy nominations (winning four), won the Parents Choice Gold Award, was endorsed by the National Education Association, and won the International Reading Association’s Broadcast Media Award.
As Executive Producer, Frith received two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Children’s Television Series, was nominated for Outstanding Writing, twice for Outstanding Achievement in Design and Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction and Set Design, for which he won an Emmy.
In both years, the series won the Television Critics of America Award for Best Children’s Television Program, as well as a Citation of Excellence from international puppetry association UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionette), for furthering the art of puppetry.
In 2004, as a response to the tragic events of 9/11, Michael and Kathryn founded, with international aid worker Johnie McGlade, the charity No Strings International, an organisation that makes educational puppet films for children in the developing world, addressing life-threatening issues such as land mines and HIV/AIDS.
Michael also designed the computer-generated characters and environments for the animated short film One Rat Short, which won the 2006 SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Best In Show Award and was shortlisted for a 2007 Academy Award nomination. He has also designed furniture, interiors, and stained glass windows—including a triptych installed in the Lampoon Castle at Harvard.
Frith retains a deep affection for his native Bermuda. In 1984, he produced The Early Bermudians, a humorous series of drawings for the Windjammer Gallery in Hamilton, to commemorate the 375th anniversary of Bermuda’s settlement. The drawings showed Bermudians evolving from moray eels to pirates and defeating the native pig population in the “Boar War”.
In 2005, Michael Frith received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council for his contributions to film and television, and in 2007 was presented with Deerfield Academy’s Alumni Heritage Award for “outstanding achievement and service in his contributions to children’s educational entertainment”.
But perhaps his personally most gratifying award came in 2005 when The Harvard Lampoon presented him with its Clement B. Wood, Jr. Runner-up Award—a traditional back-handed honour as the late Mr. Wood is always the actual winner. Frith joined an illustrious list of former runners-up, including writers John Updike and George Plimpton, U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and National Lampoon founder Henry Beard.
