I wouldn’t have believed it myself, but the images and video below offer some pretty damning evidence…

Do people still know what Wizard of Id is? I haven’t seen a newspaper comicstrip for the better part of the last five years, but certainly I used to read the funnies consistently, although I never once heard anyone utter the name of Johnny Hart and Brant Parker’s “Wizard of Id” out loud in conversation… Yes, it’s the crudely drawn comic starring the midget king and wizard you always skip over, yet seems to have miraculously thrived in syndication for decades anyway. (However, despite its medieval setting, Id‘s ironically less religiously intolerant than Johnny Hart’s other bafflingly long-running strip B.C.?)

Well, thank God this never saw the light of day. Apparently, Jim Henson met with Hart in 1968 and cobbled a Wizard of Id pilot together in March of 1969, almost 42 years ago to the day! The Jim Henson blog says it was supposed to combine puppetry with traditional animation, which I suppose explains the blue background.

See more pics at Jim Henson’s Red Book

This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I applaud the official Henson blog for posting video and pics along with this historical footnote, because I would’ve probably spent the rest of my life looking for the evidence and/or attempting to disprove it. But Henson’s involvement cannot be denied – just listen to that wizard.

According to the post, Henson was all about the project but in the year between filming the pilot and getting the networks interested, he moved on to other things. And by “other things” I mean getting Sesame Street off the ground and appearing on variety shows with The Goddamned Muppets! Phew… that was a close one.