Michael K. Frith
| Michael Kingsbury Frith | |
|---|---|
| Born |
8 July 1941 Hamilton, Bermuda |
| Education | Harvard College |
| Occupation | director, consultant, designer, puppeteer, producer, creator, writer, illustrator, and technician |
| Spouse(s) | Kathryn Mullen |
Michael Kingsbury Frith (born 8 July 1941) is the former Executive Vice-President and Creative Director for Jim Henson Productions. His contributions to Muppet projects have been extensive and varied.
Frith was born in Bermuda and educated at Harvard College. He and Christopher Cerf co-wrote Alligator, the 1962 Harvard Lampoon parody of James Bond novels. Later he illustrated the front cover of Bored of the Rings, the 1969 Lampoon parody of The Lord of the Rings.
Frith began his career at Random House in 1963 as a children's book illustrator and editor. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Beginner Books series, the line of books created by Theodor Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss. He was also Dr. Seuss's book editor and close personal friend.
In 1971, when Random House began publishing Sesame Street books, Frith was named editor and art director of the Sesame series. He 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). Appreciating Frith's talents as a designer, Jim Henson brought him on board his creative team. One of Frith's early projects was designing characters for the The Land of Gorch segment of Saturday Night Live.
Frith recalled his beginnings with the Muppets in The Saturday Evening Post (December 1980): "The first drawings I ever worked on were characters for Saturday Night Live. The Muppets did regular segments for a season featuring characters about as far removed from Sesame Street as you could get. Jim asked me to come over one day to talk about creating Muppet personalities—specifically, strange, mossy, warty creatures. Instead of traditional ones with cartoon eyes—round, white and black—he had become fascinated with taxidermist eyes: cow, camel and tiger eyes. Around this simple concept of a different eye evolved a whole new concept which led to the creation of the crazy-eyed loonies we enjoy today."
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