Talk about “ahead of its time.” This video of a sketch on Sam and Friends—the show created by the great Jim Henson that debuted in 1955 and would later become the Muppets—not only serves as a motion-picture primer on visual thinking, but also illustrates just how far how one can reach creatively when leading-edge thinking drives the use of the medium (in this case, a kinescope) that creates the visuals, as opposed to vice versa.
The relationship between the visuals and the puppets represents a sort of stream of consciousness, a projection of the workings of the interpretive mind that exemplifies what we at Visual Insight refer to as the “shape of thought” (based on our research with Bonnie DeVarco, which you can see by visiting shapeofthought.com).
Another notable aspect of this sketch is the wordplay, brilliantly woven into the brief lesson on visual thinking—e.g. a “4” appears as Kermit asks Harry the Hipster, “What for?” in response to Harry’s claim that he’s an “old hand” at visual thinking, and a ticking watch face appears when Harry tells Kermit to “watch” him demonstrate his visual thinking skills. This takes the sketch beyond the realm of visual language to an exploration of how visuals can emphasize the interconnectedness of letters, words, numbers, and other symbols, in communication.
In the latter part of the sketch, Harry shows Kermit how he visualizes music—a much more abstract exercise in visualization—with shapes appearing on the screen as he emphatically sings classical and jazz melodies. While Harry sings a classical tune, a cloud of notes appears around his head, briefly floats across the screen, and then disappears. But then, when he switches it up to a jazz number, trails of squiggly lines appear and grow haphazardly and become tangled amorphous images, capturing the genre’s raw and dynamic spontaneity. And in about a minute or so, a television show starring puppets effectively illustrated how the human mind can visualize sound and language.
Valuable art begins with valuable ideas, and the visual thinking concepts conveyed in this sketch are as timely and entertaining as ever, with a level of brilliance in the writing that remains rare, if not unrivaled, to this day. We at Visual Insight believe that the take-home message here is that if a more-than-half-century-year-old clip about visualization from Sam and Friends can wow us in this age of rapid technological advancement in visual communication, then it is hard to dispute that the quality of the technology being used, and the visuals themselves, are only as good as the ideas that they are conveying.