Press tour: Visiting The Jim Henson Co.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- PBS took TCA members on a field trip to The Jim Henson Co. studios Saturday night for a preview of the upcoming series "Sid the Science Kid," which is created using some pretty amazing technological innovations in live digital puppetry.

The Henson studio is housed on a lot that was built by Charlie Chaplin in 1918 for making  movies, including "Modern Times," "Gold Rush" and "City Lights." Later the small lot was used by A&M Records and "We Are the World" was recorded there. The Henson Co. cheekily recounts the history of the lot with a video starring two Muppets who lead a tour of the lot and explain, "All of this was orange groves until Charlie Chaplin and his brother destroyed it."

Down a short path we could see Chaplin's office, now the office of Brian Henson, Jim's son and co-president (with sister Lisa) of The Jim Henson Co. Henson's office is stuffed with a treasure trove of Muppet toys, swords and mementos from "Farscape." My favorite bizarre thing was a photo on a desk of Ricardo Montalban as Khan from "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" with the Muppet Gonzo sitting in his lap. Strange. But cool!

However the coolest part of our visit was "The Barn," once Chaplin's carpenter shop for building sets, now it's used as the home to Henson's Creature Shop, where puppet characters are made. (Disney now owns and makes the most familiar Muppet characters, such as Kermit and Miss Piggy.)

Grant Baciocco, a performer with Henson's "Puppet Up!" -- puppetry for adults -- and host of the Henson.com podcast, gave us the tour of the Creature Shop. He showed us the animatronic guinea pig from "Dr. Doolittle," Roy and Baby Sinclair from "Dinosaurs" and the motion control capture rig used in "Sid the Science Kid."

But by far the highlight for me was when Baciocco invited critics to try their hand, literally, at performing a Muppet character. Before I wanted to be a TV critic as a high schooler, I dreamed of working for Jim Henson as a Muppeteer when I was in elementary school. So it was a childhood dream come true to work with the puppet, even if for just a couple of minutes.

And guess what? It was really difficult. Perhaps some of it was nerves and the lack of playing with puppets for the past 20 years, but my performance was tentative and unimaginative.

Baciocco manipulated an ape puppet and interacted with me on camera. The camera was mounted on a table, so we had to hoist the puppets over our heads, just as a puppeteer would. We could see what the camera was seeing in a monitor. Baciocco's ape kept asking my red-headed character why he was leaning over and not standing up straight. It turns out, it's pretty difficult to get the puppet to stand up straight.

My friend Jeff Hidek of the Wilmington, N.C., Star News did a much better job when he took his turn with the puppet. Perhaps going the TV critic route was the correct choice!