Muppets Master Jim Henson Dies : Sesame Street: The creator of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Bert and Ernie succumbed unexpectedly to a massive infection.

Jim Henson, the man who created the Muppets and took Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and an ever-complaining Oscar the Grouch to international stardom, died today at age 53 of a sudden, massive infection.

Officials at New York Hospital said that his death was unexpected and that he had been in the hospital for only a day.

Henson crossed puppets with marionettes to create the Muppets in the early 1960s, breathing new life into the ancient art of puppeteering and enchanting millions with such creations as Oscar, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, humanoids Bert and Ernie and Sam the Robot.

A prime vehicle for his creations was “Sesame Street,” a television program that became first a national nursery school and then an international one, teaching preschoolers around the world the alphabet and numbers.

Henson’s own “The Muppet Show,” broadcast from 1975 through 1981, became the most widely seen television program in the world, with an estimated 235 million viewers in 100 countries.

Among the films he made were “Labyrinth,” “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” “The Muppet Movie” and “The Great Muppet Caper.”

In the process, he made hundreds of millions of dollars, creating an empire that saw Muppets in record shops, toy stores, on T-shirts and even at Walt Disney’s theme parks through an August, 1989, deal in which Disney bought Henson’s privately held company and entered into a long-term production agreement with him.

When Mickey Mouse became Kermit the Frog’s new boss in a deal rumored to be worth more than $100 million, Disney spokesmen paid Henson the ultimate compliment, recognizing that his creations had become as world-famous as theirs.

Born in Greenville, Miss., on Sept. 24, 1936, Henson fell in love with puppeteering as a teen-ager. Friends described him as the kind of kid who watched Peter Pan fly but always kept his eyes on the strings to see how it was done.

His first creation to make a national impact was Rowlf the Dog, which was designed for a dog food commercial and later wound up as a guest on a country music television show hosted by Jimmy Dean.

Rowlf was the first of the Muppets to make the big time. The Muppets as created by Henson were hand puppets sculpted out of foam rubber and covered with flannel or other fleecy material. Unlike wooden puppets, the Muppets have extraordinary flexibility and movement. A Henson trademark were his characters’ wide mouths and ever-too-human foibles.

“Puppetry is a good way of hiding,” he once told an interviewer. “When you do puppets you can create the whole show yourself, perform it, direct it, design it. Everything.”

Henson married his wife, Jane, in 1959, and they had five children.

His Manhattan townhouse became something of a legend in New York, decorated with Kermit the Frog telephones, papier-mache moose heads, Miss Piggy wallpaper and even a Gainsborough-style portrait of Kermit.