The Muppets Studio, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of media conglomerate The Walt Disney Company, formed in 2004 through the acquisition of The Muppets and Bear in the Big Blue House characters from The Jim Henson Company. Since the mid-1980s, Jim Henson had been in talks with Disney CEO Michael Eisner to sell Disney the Muppets. He and other Muppet performers had secretly filmed tutorials for Disney animators, entertainers and Imagineers on the matter of how to properly operate a Muppet, and many Muppet producers were already preparing for the transfer. On August 28, 1989, the two... announced a deal for Disney to buy Henson Associates and all of its characters, minus the characters from Sesame Street . The deal fell through several months after Jim Henson's death in 1990, largely due to clashes between the Henson family and Disney attorneys. The real-life occurrence of this history was later parodied in the 1990 TV special, The Muppets at Walt Disney World. Following several legal battles, the theme park attraction, Jim Henson's Muppet*Vision 3D, opened at the Disney-MGM Studios in May 1991.
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