The Walt Disney Company's acquisition of the Muppets in 2004 caused a significant rupture in the authorial history of a beloved franchise. Created in the 1970s the late media icon Jim Henson and his creative team, the classic Muppets enjoyed many years in the spotlight during the 1970s and 1980s -- on The Muppet Show (1976-1981), and in The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984). The physically wacky and colorful puppets are known for their irreverent and chaotic antics, and they still have a sizeable cult following devoted to them. Fans attribute the character's "Muppetness" to Jim Henson's creativity as an author. However, Henson worked with a team of creative artists who all contributed to the Muppet franchise. As a result, is both impossible and inadvisable to try and breakdown Muppet authorship by contributor. Instead, I label Henson's authorship a brand in order to analysis the value of his perceived authorial power. These perceptions are what put the Muppets in such opposition with the corporate image of Disney. Disney, by contrast, has a reputation for commercial, family-oriented entertainment. The production studio has grown into a media conglomerate that saturates the market with merchandise, cross-promotions, and advertisement campaigns. Its dominant position in the media industry affects fan reception of any Disney-led project, so the re-launch of a long-dormant, independent brand like the Muppets creates an understandable tension among critics, popular press writers, and fans. By tracing media industry shifts the 1990s and 2000s and Disney's changing image and corporate structure, I analyze how it has "authored" the Muppets in the past few years. Both in its Muppet advertising campaign and in particular its treatment of the infamous character Miss Piggy, Disney has re-branded the Muppets for a new time and new generations, while attempting to hold onto the historical traits that make the Muppet brand appealing and profitable. / text

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Intention of this thesis is to introduce the reader the work of Jim Henson and his contribution of the puppet used in the field of movie and television. It is mapping not only the history behind the puppet called Muppet and the animatronic characters but also describes their characteristics in the style of Jim Henson. First part is dedicated mainly to his person and is about introduction of Jim Henson to reader unfimilliar with his cult. Contains brief biography and splits his work into three life stages. The second part is about Muppet phenomenon, what is the Muppet, his characters, his style and the technology in the relation to movie and television and Henson success in this field. The third part is about Henson animatronics, Henson relation to the first appearance of this technology and analyzes its impact and its success in the field of movie and television for Jim Henson and his Creature shop. The last part is dedicated to Jim Henson Legacy.

"Spirited Media" analyzes distributed structures of authorship in the reform literature of the nineteenth-century United States. The literature that emerged out of reform movements like abolitionism often was a product of complex negotiations between speech and print, involving multiple people working across media in relationships that were sometimes collaborative, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes antagonistic. The cultural authority of print and individual authorship, often unquestioned in studies that focus on major or canonical figures of the nineteenth century, has tended to obscure some of this complexity. Moving from phonography, to Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to spiritualism, to Sojourner Truth and Walt Whitman, I consider four cases in which reporters, amanuenses, spirit mediums, and poets revived and remediated the voices of abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and figures from American history. By separating publication into events—speech, inscription, revision, and print—I show that "authorship" consisted of a series of interactions over time and across media, but that in the case of reform, the stakes for proving that authorship was a clear and indisputable characteristic of print were high. For abolitionist, African American, and spiritualist speakers and writers, authority depended on authorship, which in turn depended on the transparency of the print or the medium, or the perception of a direct relationship between speaker and reader. Like authorship, this transparency was constructed by a variety of social actors for whom the author was a key site of empowerment. It was authorized by appeals to revelation and race, two constructs often sidelined in media histories, yet central to discussions of society and politics in nineteenth-century America. Thinking of authorship as a distributed phenomenon disrupts models of the unitary subject and original genius, calling attention instead to uncanny acts of reading and writing in nineteenth-century literature. This dissertation argues that we should think about the transformative power of U.S. literature as located in revelation, not just creation, and in congregating people, not just representing them. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-136). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-136). Also available on the Internet.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-06-16T13:11:30Z No. of bitstreams: 1 liliancarvalhomoreira.pdf: 6233245 bytes, checksum: 5463d90e79e4c76afef6e028bbe548fc (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-07-13T14:13:31Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 liliancarvalhomoreira.pdf: 6233245 bytes, checksum: 5463d90e79e4c76afef6e028bbe548fc (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-07-13T14:13:58Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 liliancarvalhomoreira.pdf: 6233245 bytes, checksum: 5463d90e79e4c76afef6e028bbe548fc (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-13T14:13:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 liliancarvalhomoreira.pdf: 6233245 bytes, checksum: 5463d90e79e4c76afef6e028bbe548fc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-13 / As Aventuras de Alice no País das Maravilhas e Através do Espelho e o que Alice Encontrou Lá , os livros mais famosos de Lewis Carroll, foram amplamente traduzidos intersemióticamente nos últimos 150 anos. Uma enorme quantidade de ilustrações, peças, balés, músicas, filmes, programas de TV e outros foram feitos por artistas conceituados e menos conhecidos. Não existe, no entanto, uma abordagem sistemática desse fenômeo no campo específico da intermidialidade e da tradução intersemiótica. Dois exemplos notáveis servirão para análise: uma famosa série de TV de Jim Henson, The Muppet Show , que foi ao ar entre 1976 e 1981, estrelando fantoches e uma pessoa convidada em que um episódio da quinta temporada levou Brooke Shields interpretando Alice em 1980; e um filme de 1988 com uma mistura de stop motion e animação pelo muitas diretor tcheco vezes premiado, Jan Švankmajer, intitulado Neco z Alenky . Pretendemos aqui comparar essas duas traduções dos romances de Alice, em que os tradutores escolheram características do livro opostas entre si, porém ambas de importância fundamental para a fonte. / Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass And What Alice Found There , Lewis Carroll’s most famous books, have been widely intersemiotically translated throughout the last 150 years. A number of illustration, plays, ballets, songs, movies, TV shows and others was made by renowned and lesser known artists. There is not, however, a systematic approach of this phenomenon in a more strict field of analysis of intermediality and intersemiotic translations. Two notable examples will serve for analysis: a famous TV series by Jim Henson, The Muppet Show , aired from 1976 to 1981, featuring puppets and a human guest, in which an episode from the fifth season starred Brooke Shields playing Alice in 1980; and 1988 film with a blend of stop motion animation by multiple prize winner Czech director Jan Švankmajer, called Neco z Alenky . We intend to compare these translations of Alice’s novels, in which translators choose opposingly distinct characteristics of the books, but both of fundamental importance to the source.