2/6/1978 – ‘Try to fly to London – SNOWED in with Cheryl (at Howard Johnson at Kennedy Airport – did outline for Dark Crystal – just called The Crystal – concept of Skeksis/oo-urs etc.)’

Cheryl Henson describes this time with her dad:

The international success of The Muppet Show gave my father the opportunity to realize projects that he had only dreamed of. In 1978 he was busier than he had ever been. Flying between London, Los Angeles and New York, he often doodled in notepads, getting his ideas on paper so he could pick up on them later. That February I was traveling with him to London when the Blizzard of ’78 hit New York. What had promised to be one of the fastest trips across the ocean in the new Concorde became a 72 hour exercise in patience and imagination. It took more than three hours to be bussed from Kennedy airport to a Howard Johnson’s hotel just a few miles away. There we settled in with hundreds of other stranded travelers to wait out the storm.

During the blizzard, the world appeared to be one enormous blank white slate. Before cell phones and laptop computers, being stranded by a snowstorm meant quiet time, time to imagine new worlds and their inhabitants. My father filled pages with ideas and musings. By the time we reached London, he had an outline for what was to become The Dark Crystal. It took five more years and many extraordinary artists to make these ideas into a film. But the germ was doodled down then.