Really though I love this and I think there's something beautiful about remembering lost loved ones in weird little ways like this. He recreated their smiles!
The ability for the Gonzo puppet to lift his eyelids separately was the result of a malfunction on the Today show. Dave Goelz liked the look so much he asked that it be made into a feature for the puppet.
Lips x Zoot is canon. Ik for a fact bc my uncle’s friend who has another friend who’s friend with another friend and who’s friend is friends with ANOTHER friend knows Dave Goelz and Peter Linz and they said so themselves that it was canon 😏
"Dave Goelz (the puppeteer for Zoot) came to me one day and said, “I have this idea that Zoot has this little character with him.” I was like, “Dave, that might be hard to do, all the time. Is there something else that maybe he has on him?” And he came back with this idea of doing a shoe named Jimmy, and Jimmy is Jim Henson. Dave found photos of Jim’s teeth because he wanted the shoe to be able to smile. Those are Jim’s teeth and he carved them himself. He went home and made this character because he was so dedicated to the surreal aspect of what he wanted to do with Zoot. And everybody brought great ideas and things, but he just went like far and above what we expected"
Every piece of information i learn about Goelz endears me to him but also makes me raise my eyebrows.
Dave Goelz said the most challenging Muppet scenes he ever filmed was for the Fraggle Rock episode "Boober's Quiet Day." On the now defunct Ask Henson website he explained:
There was an episode of Fraggle Rock titled Boober's Quiet Day in which I played Boober, his alter ego Sidebottom, and Boober disguised as the Old Gypsy Lady. We used ultimatte to allow me to perform two characters on the screen at once. I performed the first character in the set, leaving pauses for the second character's lines. Then I performed the second character in front of a blue screen and it was matted into the picture. I choreographed the movements to give the illusion that both characters could move freely in the set. The episode was especially challenging for two other reasons: first, it was written as a farce and the plot was complicated; second, it was about Boober trying to integrate the two sides of his personality, and everything in the show had to support that growth.
Sources:
Ask Henson archives. Question two, answered by Dave Goelz.
Fraggle Rock. Episode 223. "Boober's Quiet Day." June 4, 1984.