Who has not laughed at the famous characters we all know as the Muppets? As famous as they are, Miss Piggy and the gang were not Jim Henson’s first creations. 

Sam and Friends was Jim Henson’s first television show, a five-minute show that aired twice daily on WRC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. The show ran from May 9, 1955 to December 15, 1961. In 2010, these 10 characters joined Kermit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington D.C.

This was an unusually hard image to take. There was a lot of reflection on the glass and too many people to maneuver into a favorable position. I would wait for the crowd to thin out, but they just kept coming! Tripods are not allowed in the museums there, which means all indoor photography was hand-held.

An interesting note, before he became a frog, Kermit had a lizard-like appearance (far left).