Jim Henson’s lost 1969 teleplay The Cube resurfaces in spotlight
A 1969 NBC teleplay trapped Richard Schaal inside a white cube, and its eerie logic now feels closer to surveillance-age television than old-network experiment.
Jim Henson’s The Cube returned to attention because its central image is almost brutally modern: Richard Schaal plays an unnamed man sealed inside a white, doorless room, visited by strangers who enter and exit through hidden openings while he tries to understand where he is and why he cannot leave. The 53-minute teleplay, made for NBC’s Experiment in Television anthology, turns confinement into a sustained joke and a slow panic, with Hugh Webster, Rex Sevenoaks, Jack Van Evera, Jon Granik, Guy Sanvido, Liza Creighton, Don Crawford, William Osler, Jerry Nelson, Sandra Scott and Claude Rae moving through the surreal chamber around him.
Henson and Jerry Juhl wrote the script in 1966, but the project did not get broadcaster funding until 1968, a delay that underscored how unusual this kind of formal experiment was for network television at the time. Henson had already delivered Youth ’68 for NBC the year before, and The Cube pushed further into live-action absurdism without puppets, a path he rarely took in his career. Filming happened at CFTO Television studio in Toronto, Canada, from February 10 to 15, 1969, and the teleplay premiered on NBC on February 23, 1969.
The production was recorded in color, even though viewers often encounter it now in black-and-white or in cleaned-up remastered versions. Its running time shifts slightly depending on the source, landing between about 50 and 54 minutes, but the structure stays the same: a man in a white cube, each new visitor deepening the sense that the room itself is part stage set, part trap, part experiment in perception.
That oddness is what gives The Cube its staying power. Long before The Dark Crystal, Henson was already testing live-action surrealism and existential comedy, and the NBC anthology format gave him a rare place to do it on network television. In an era when constrained spaces, mediated identities and manipulated realities dominate popular culture, the teleplay now reads less like a relic than a prototype.
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