Another favorite holiday movie is The Muppet Christmas Carol. If memory serves, this was the first Muppet movie to be released since Jim Henson’s passing, and the first major role for Steve Whitmire as Henson’s replacement as Kermit the Frog. As a lifelong Muppet fan, I was excited, but also probably a little concerned that it wouldn’t live up to Muppet films of the past.
(Oh, who am I kidding? I love the Muppets, and I love A Christmas Carol. I probably didn’t have any anxiety about this at all.)
What I love about the movie isn’t just that it is a great Muppet movie, but it’s also a great adaptation of A Christmas Carol. It helps that everyone—except maybe Gonzo and Rizzo as narrators Charles Dickens and Rizzo—play it completely straight, despite the fact that the majority of the characters are puppets. There’s some of the expected character schtick that you would expect, like Statler and Waldorf, as the Marley brothers, heckling Fozzie Bear as Fozziwig. We see Lew Zealand throwing his famous boomerang fish. Sam the Eagle makes a comment about the greatness of America, and needs to be reminded the story is set in England. But otherwise, the characters are all actors playing their roles.
More importantly, Michael Caine is taking it all completely seriously as well. He is one of the great screen Scrooges, partly because he doesn’t take the position that, because he’s playing mostly opposite Muppets, he can goof around. You completely buy his performance as Scrooge, and consequently his transformation from cold-hearted miser to reformed man.
The non-regular Muppet characters, particularly the Ghost of Christmas Present, are equally fantastic. It’s a great reminder that while Henson and his colleagues may be most famous for the Muppet characters, they were fantastic technical innovators. The set design, the costumes, everything screams high-budget motion picture, and by spending the money to make a great film, that’s what director Brian Henson and his collaborators give us.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the songs. I am including two of our favorites here. I personally love Kermit’s song, “One More Sleep Til Christmas.”
My wife loves “It Feels Like Christmas,” sung by the Ghost of Christmas Present.
Unfortunately, the song, “When Love is Gone,” which comes at the pivotal moment when Belle leaves Scrooge, which is clearly the turning point when Scrooge’s heart because cold and hard, was edited out of the original theatrical version. It’s available on the VHS release and certain versions of the DVD, but not on the blu-ray. That’s a shame, because it’s a great moment, but its absence doesn’t make the film any less worth watching.
As I write this on Christmas Day, 2017, right after Donald Trump has been crowing about how it’s now okay to say, “Merry Christmas” again, as if it ever wasn’t, almost immediately after signing into law a tax bill that will enrich corporations at the expense of the poor and middle classes, I can’t help but feel that the point of this movie, and of Christmas, are being lost. It feels like the people who are making the most noise about the importance of celebrating Christmas are people who maybe don’t understand that the point of the film is to look at Scrooge in the first half of the movie and disapprove, only to applaud his transformation at the end. Scrooge in the first part of the movie shouldn’t be someone to aspire to, and it feels like that’s being forgotten.
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