Photo Gallery: "Jim Henson's Fantastic World" at the MSI

The Muppets. To any kid (at heart) born in between the late '70s and early '90s, the Muppets—like so many other corny media touchstones such as the Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, Power Rangers and Smurfs that Gens X and Y now show allegiance to with even cheesier yet somehow trendy graphic tees—are pretty much synonymous with childhood. Except, at least for me, the Muppets weren't corny. The Muppet Show was never preachy, boring or repetitive. It was joyful, funny, even magic—something that my older brothers and I, some ten years older, could all watch together with no remote bickering (and something we still forward YouTube clips of back and forth, even and especially mocked-up Rick Rolled ones).

"Jim Henson's Fantastic World," the new traveling Smithsonian exhibit at home at the Museum of Science and Industry starting September 24, plays deliberately and delightfully on these "when I was a kid" sentiments. It showcases Henson chronologically as the innovative visual genius he was, with more than 100 original early sketches and posters, footage from movie shorts and pre-'70s commercials, quotes, intricate storyboards, photos of him and Frank Oz and the cast and crew—felt and human—and of course, the puppets. But the exhibit does more than entertain you with Henson's story. It taps into that sweet, sweeping pang of nostalgia that anyone who watched The Muppet Show—or Sesame Street—as a kid harbors somewhere. You'll see Miss Piggy in her wedding gown from Muppets Take Manhattan; Mahna Manhna and the Snowths; and everyone's favorite puppet pair with a unibrow and rubber duckie, Bert and Ernie. Although Henson's later projects like Time Piece and Dark Crystal have sections and props, there are no undercurrents of his darker personal life at that time, no talk of movies that didn't take off, and besides a giant on-the-wall time line of his career that stops short in 1990 when he passed, no talk of his early death. All is song, bright displays and happy memories.

And what's so wrong with that? Henson has described the years he worked on The Muppet Show as the most "delicious five years of my life." In the sound bites and film reels that play in the theater section of the exhibit, a recorded clip quotes him as saying:

"I've always loved this show. I loved being a part of it from the very beginning, and it was something that, during the '70s, I suppose, the whole country felt it was slightly in a depression, you know, an emotional type of depression. And when you were working for the preschool kids like the fives, four-, five-, six-year-olds, you can't be depressed about that. I mean, this is such a wonderful age, and it's this wonderful innocence that you're dealing with. So I loved doing all of that for all of those years."

So, how very poignant this exhibit is now. In the midst–or is it wake, changes everyday—of the recession, an emotional depression transitioning from '00s to '10s has seeped in. Summer's over, we're all a bit older, and kids today don't really know who the Muppets are. So, even though it might be more for you, take your kids. As they create their own puppet faces on the Velcro wall and record Swedish-chef-sounding babble footage at the interactive Foley stage, you'll feel yourself start to linger over when you were a kid. And then instantly, it will hit you that your kids are at that "wonderful age" now, the same age you were when you first saw the Muppets, and how all just might be well with the world. Well, at least within Jim Henson's fantastic one.