'The Muppet Christmas Carol' is a great Dickens adaptation
Kermit and company deliver one of the great takes on the classic tale.
On the Wednesdays leading up to Christmas, Chrisicisms will take a look at various film adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
The Muppet Christmas Carol is not the greatest telling of Dickens’ classic. It’s not the best Muppet movie. It’s probably only the second-best Muppet Christmas project.
And yet, this 1992 film might be my favorite adaptation of the beloved story. It’s a beautifully shot, reverent adaptation, brimming with the requisite doses of humor and sincerity, not to mention some of the best selections in the characters’ songbook, courtesy of Paul Williams (who also wrote the songs for 1979’s The Muppet Movie).
The reason is simple: Rather than let the Muppets run loose on Dickens’ classic with their brand of anarchy and chaos, The Muppet Christmas Carol is a loving adaptation of the story first, a Muppet movie second.
What the Dickens?
In the early 1990s, many people were likely wondering if Kermit, Piggy and the gang would ever appear again in any format. When Jim Henson died in 1990, the world lost one of its greatest creative minds, and the Muppets lost the voice and soul of many of their characters. Henson had signed a tentative deal with the Walt Disney Company shortly before his death, but without Jim, Disney was cautious about taking on the characters, which would ultimately result in them languishing under other holders until late last decade.
But Disney was willing to initially fund a few Muppet projects, and Jim Henson’s son, Brian, stepped up to helm the first big-screen Muppet movie since 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. And what initially started as a television project for ABC letting the Muppets run amok as the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come turned into something more sincere and straightforward.
Where most Muppet movies find the gang playing themselves as they attempt to put on a show or solve a caper, The Muppet Christmas Carol goes a different direction, one that would be followed for Muppet Treasure Island and the TV movie The Muppets Wizard of Oz. As the snow falls across Victorian England, the credits inform us that Kermit will be play Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy will be Mrs. Cratchit and that Fozzie will be play Fozziewig (who else?). Elsewhere, Statler and Waldorf play Jacob (and Robert) Marley, various Muppet characters show up as Victorian townsfolk, and Gonzo the Great narrates as Charles Dickens, with Rizzo being the only Muppet playing himself. The main character is, of course, Ebenezer Scrooge, played by the great Michael Caine.
There’s a nerdy way of explaining this. At the end of The Muppet Movie, Kermit and the gang sign their “Rich and Famous Contract,” and set off to make movies and TV shows. This film could be seen as an in-universe product of that contract, one of the films the Muppets produced to “make millions of people happy.” And so what we’re seeing is not supposed to be the Muppets as new characters, but the Muppets giving a performance, creating the type of movie they know would warm hearts at Christmastime.
Or you could put the nerdery aside and look at this as a delightful Christmas movie. Both ways work.
Silly and sincere
Caine reportedly told Henson that he was going to play Scrooge straight. No winking at the camera, no Muppet-y high jinks. He was going to play him just as he would if this were a regular adaptation. And he does; his Scrooge is cross and joyless, delighting in forcing foreclosures at Christmastime and hoarding coal from his freezing bookkeepers. The film takes its cue from Caine’s performance; the Muppets are a bit understated (well, for the most part; Gonzo is as thrilled to defy death as ever, and Miss Piggy still whips out her karate chops at one point), and the film takes place in a snowy, idealized London. Recognizable Muppets pop up throughout the film (I particularly like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker as charity collectors), but the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come are specially designed for this movie, ranging from ethereal beauties to frivolous giants to creepy specters.
Or course, being a Muppet movie, there’s still a welcome dose of levity. Gonzo as Dickens is the film’s masterstroke, allowing the film to not only incorporate that author’s prose verbatim, but also providing the postmodern twist the franchise is known for. Gonzo and Rizzo are show-stealers, and I love their banter (there’s a moment where Rizzo kisses a befuddled Gonzo on the nose that never fails to make me laugh). Other Muppets are also welcome, particularly Sam the Eagle as Scrooge’s capitalism-loving headmaster (“It is the British way”) and Miss Piggy as, well, Emily Cratchit by way of Miss Piggy. And of course Kermit is Bob Cratchit and the ever-sincere Robin is Tiny Tim.
The songs, as I said earlier, are some of the best in the Muppet songbook. They might be a bit saccharine, but it’s Christmas; that’s allowed. The opener “Scrooge” is a delight, and the jaunty “Marley and Marley” gives Statler and Waldorf the rare chance to sing and dance. “One More Sleep ‘Til Christmas,” “It Feels Like Christmas” and “With a Thankful Heart” are like giant hugs, and Tiny Tim’s “Bless Us All” is the film’s sincere tear-jerker. If there’s one complaint, it’s that the film’s most beautiful song, the breakup ballad “When Love is Gone” was available only briefly on VHS and has been removed from every subsequent release (you can see it online).
We turn to A Christmas Carol because it’s holiday comfort food, a story we know by heart that still resonates. If you stick too staidly to the story, it feels lifeless and inert, as many stilted adaptations have shown. But if you take too radical a departure from it, you risk losing the story’s heart and sounding insincere (as we will see next week). The Muppet Christmas Carol works because it delivers enough humor and freshness to make the adaptation work, while respecting the earnestness and heart of Dickens’ original work. Plus, it’s the Muppets; who would humbug that?