It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets at the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum.

No, seriously, I’m not kidding: the Muppets are here and can be found downtown until June 22 in an exhibit entitled Jim Henson’s Fantastic World. For anyone who grew up with The Muppet Show, learned to count with Sesame Street, and chased her cares away with the Fraggles, you have to go and check this out.

The first thing that you see when you walk into the show is Kermit the Frog. He is encased in a glass box – which is good, because the first thing you want to do when you see a real Muppet is touch it, like you would any famous person. I’m not overstating when I say some of these items made me want to squeal like a little fan girl, and I know that I can’t be the only one.

Kermit is surrounded by sketches and drawings of some of Henson’s earliest work. I was stunned to find out that Jim Henson could draw.I just thought that he created funny and fuzzy creatures, but Henson actually made money in college by selling promotional posters for various school groups. Though many of these are dated and look so sixties that they are almost painful, they are still interesting to look at.

More interesting, I found, were the doodles. This man had the most organized doodles I’ve ever seen. They don’t really look like doodles, except for the fact that they are surrounding other written work, so you know they were not the main focus of the page.

Further into the exhibit, you see some of Henson’s early commercials and shows. Much of this exhibit is audio-visual, so do not go when you are limited on time. The commercials are hilarious and surprisingly violent in a cartoony sort of way. They made me wish that we weren’t so politically correct, so that we could see commercials like this again.

There are clips of several of Henson’s commercials – most for products that no longer exist, with only a few exceptions. You also see the storyboards that Henson made to brainstorm for them. One of these storyboards shows that Henson created a commercial for Community Coffee^®. Who knew? The coolest part of this section, however, has got to be Rowlf, the piano-playing dog that was one of Henson’s first Muppet creations, who starred in several of his commercials before becoming one of the main characters in The Muppet Show.

Walk into what I dubbed “the Sesame Street room,” and you are greeted by Bert and Ernie. Lining the walls around them are more storyboards and clips from Sesame Street. It was truly amazing to see the planning that goes into the counting cartoons that they show on Sesame Street. Even more amazing, to me, at least, was how many of these cartoons that I didn’t know I remembered until I saw them.

The closest I came to squealing like a fan girl (I may have jumped up and down a little and wished that I had a camera) was when I saw the Mahna Mahna Muppets. That’s not their official name, of course, but that’s what I’ve always called them, so their real name didn’t stick. These are the pink Muppets that look like aliens out of a Dr. Seuss drawing that sing along with the scat-singing jazz cat:

“Mahna Mahna.”

“Doo-doo, do-doo-doo.”

“Mahna Mahna.”

“Doo-doo doo-doo.”

“Mahna Mahna.”

“Doo-doo, do-doo-doo, do-doo-doo, do-doo-doo, do-doo-doo, do-do-doo-doo do-doo-doo.”

It’s a classic, people. If you don’t know it, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

By far, the coolest room was the Fraggle Rock/Dark Crystal room. My husband couldn’t get over how big a real Fraggle Muppet is, while I couldn’t get over the detail work that went into every aspect of The Dark Crystal. The finger forks that the Skeksis use look like something that you would see on display in a museum exhibit of a foreign culture.

Since I am supposed to be the music critic, it would behoove me to talk about the music in the exhibit. No, Jim Henson didn’t compose, that I know of, and there are no live musicians performing, but every piece of Henson’s work was closely tied to music. It almost seems, when you look at his work, that he thought to music. Very little of the video presentations do not include music or singing, and I found myself humming throughout the museum.

The bottom line is – you’ve got to go check this exhibit out!!!! I didn’t even touch on half of the cool things that are on display, and this is one of the longest articles that I’ve written for this magazine. So check it out and remember why you loved the Muppets as a child, and find out why you should love them even more as an adult.