Jim Henson

Creator of Sesame Street and the Muppets. Good guy.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981) -- A pretty funny little movie. Charles Grodin.

The Dark Crystal (1982) -- Directed with Frank Oz. The story is kind of uninteresting, as are the lead characters (and many of the secondary ones), but the good thing about the movie is that Jim Henson and Frank Oz have created a complete world from scratch, and all the little details of the movie make it always visually interesting. You end up viewing it as a nature documentary, caring more about the world itself than the story being told. As far as movies being created entirely with puppets goes, this is brilliant.

Labyrinth (1986) -- The Dark Crystal suffered from an uninteresting, typical story, and this one suffered from no story at all. The movie tries very hard to be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, but fails, using them in ways that feel less like homage and more like un-creative rip-offs (same for their use of M.C. Escher). It's no wonder that the script was written (by Terry Jones) by just looking at sketches of the Muppet creatures and writing a scene around them. And it doesn't have the complete world vision that The Dark Crystal had.