The Muppet’s Christmas Carol is my favourite Christmas movie. I adore Elf, Nightmare before Christmas, It’s a Wonderful life (you know, the classics), but The Muppets Christmas Carol has always been my favourite.
But it wasn’t until this year, that I really sat down to ask myself why. Is it the story? Partly. I adore the Victorian era, I love ghost stories, and I read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol every year. Is it the Muppets themselves? Partly. I love their humour and wholesomeness, their self-awareness, and the weird uncanniness that accompanies puppetry. And who doesn’t love Michael Caine?
When thinking about this, I realised that I love the story and the Muppets in equal measure, and that’s what makes their version of A Christmas Carol so enduring and appealing to so many people, regardless of age.
The Muppets seem ready-made to fit into a Victorian world and the characters themselves – Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Statler and Waldorf – fit their respective roles perfectly. They embody them wholly, staying true to Dickens’s characters, while also adding their own unique, Muppety identity to them.
So join me as we explore what makes The Muppets Christmas Carol so gosh darn good.
Production: Why A Christmas Carol?
The story behind The Muppet’s Christmas Carol is a sad one which, if anything, helps us understand the tone and aesthetics of the tale a little better. Muppets creator Jim Henson had died unexpectedly of pneumonia in May 1990 and his son Brian, director of the film, was grief-stricken.
The father and son had been very close, and Brian greatly respected his father as a filmmaker and creator. When Jim passed, not only did Brian have to deal with losing a parent – Jim was only 53 years old – but he also took on the responsibility of The Muppets, who were almost like orphans now.
Perhaps hoping to distract Brian from the pain of grief, talent agent Bill Haber approached Brian and suggested making an adaptation. Bill instantly thought of Charles Dickens: “A Christmas Carol is the greatest story of all time; you should do that”. Thanks, Bill, no pressure! But the pressure seemed to be just what first-time feature director Brian needed.
Brian initially agreed to make the film out of politeness and his original vision is far cry from what we got. Brian was an emotional mess, and he wanted his film to be too. “The Muppets are famous for questioning the status quo, and anti-establishment reverence”, he said, “so we took that and pointed it as Charles Dickens…we were going to do a romping parody”.
The more Brian read A Christmas Carol, however, the more he doubted his original idea. He considered how his father would’ve treated the material – turn it into a laughingstock or honour Dickens’s vision? Brian went with the latter, and it was definitely the right choice.
Casting the Muppets
One of the things I love most about this film is that the Muppets feel like they’re Victorian. They fit perfectly into the aesthetic of the 19th century. While the novel is based on social realism – Dickens used the story to interrogate London’s poverty and how the rich treated the poor – it feels like a fairy-tale.
It is simultaneously steeped in realism and wrapped in fantasy. This is further emphasised using muted palettes and natural lighting for the London scenes, which greatly contrast with the rainbow colours and textures of the Muppets. As the great and sadly late Anne Rice said, the supernatural is the best way to address and ask the big questions that shape and influence real life. A cast of Muppets and humans is the best way to get that delicate tonal balance across cinematically.
Brian’s first order of business was how he was going to tell the story. He looked back at other cinematic adaptations of the tale, and he realised that not one had ever really captured Dickens’s beautiful, haunting, and yet witty prose. A good deal of the story’s charm is because of the way Dickens writes, so what better way to honour Dickens’s writing than including him as a character?
“We had to put Charles Dickens in the movie,” Brian later said, “Who’s the least likely character to be Charles Dickens? Gonzo! So we made him this omniscient storyteller, with Rizzo, his pain-in-the-neck sidekick. Ninety-five percent of what Gonzo says in the movie is directly taken from the book”.
This is one of my favourite things about the movie. Adapting books is usually a matter of taking the story, characters, and a few key/memorable lines of dialogue and creating a cinematic version while missing the lyrical prose of the original writing. The Muppets Christmas Carol, however, makes Dickens’s prose an integral part of the narrative and actively calls attention to its identity as a work of fiction in an intelligent and fun fourth-wall-breaking way.
Who better than to play Bob Cratchit and his wife than our favourite Muppets couple, Kermit and Miss Piggy? While some critics argued that their Dickensian roles limited these Muppets in terms of performance, I disagree. Miss Piggy’s sass and confidence is there but still in line with what would have been expected of a working-class Victorian woman, and Kermit is, without a doubt, the best version of Bob Cratchit.
No other portrayal has captured the character’s heart-warming optimism and resilience in the face of abject poverty than Kermit, and no other portrayal has elicited such sympathy and empathy from the audience. His wonderful voice fills your heart with warmth in a way a human version just couldn’t.
When Bob/Kermit finishes for Christmas and begins ‘One more Sleep til Christmas’ as he leaves the office, his line ‘there’s magic in the air this evening, magic in the air’ gets me every time. You can tell how much this holiday means to him and by extension, what it means to people like him – i.e you and me, regular folk.
The Christmas Spirits are not any Muppets we’re familiar with, and I think that’s for the best. If we knew the Muppets who played the ghosts, we would get lost in their personalities and mannerisms and miss the point of the characters.
The white, ethereal Ghost of Christmas Past embodies the Victorian obsession with childhood and the purity of their souls (unless, of course, they’re working class and then they can work in whatever factory you need them to…moving on). Her floating look, which was one of the things about the film that struck me as a child, was achieved through experimental underwater photography.
The Ghost of Christmas Present is a huge, towering, and jolly man. While our modern idea of Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, wasn’t popular until the late Victorian period, the winter season has been personified by the English as far back as the 15th century. One of the film’s greatest strengths is Henson’s cinematography, and the Ghost of Christmas Present’s sequence is a great example.
The saturation is richer, giving off fireplace-like warmth, and everything feels jolly and open and welcoming. There are more people in the frames, the camera movements are more fluid, with fewer cuts and more eye-level shots, to suggest harmony and community. Compare that to the frostiness of Scrooge’s childhood scenes, the mise-en-scene of which is tinged with pain and loneliness, exemplified further by the framing and camerawork that makes Scrooge look tiny and insignificant.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has haunted my memory since I was a child. A looming figure shrouded in a gray/black cape, it has no face and does not communicate with any sound. It is truly a ghost and the one we most associate with death. And again, the cinematography is fantastic. Its dark palette creates an oppressive sense of morbidity and creepiness, so creepy in fact that Gonzo and Rizzo abandon us! ‘See you at the finale’, they say as they scuttle away.
The best casting, in my opinion, is Statler and Waldorf as Scrooge’s ghostly ex-partners, Marley and Marley. As much as I love the Mickey Mouse version of the tale, casting Goofy as Marley was a mistake. Poor Goofy couldn’t be mean if he tried! Statler and Waldorf, however, are needlessly nasty hecklers who are 100% believable as crooked, tight-fisted, angry and bitter old men who loved nothing more than sticking it to the poor.
Their song ‘Marley and Marley’ (so catchy) brilliantly summarises the role they played in keeping the poor in what they considered to be their rightful place, and it’s a great way of showing the world Scrooge willingly took part in, thus making his redemption by the end even more profound. This is further supported by their spooky, rattling chains that they now carry in the afterlife because of the lives they led: ‘your chains are forged / By what you say and do / So, have your fun / When life is done / A nightmare waits for you’.
Finding their Scrooge
When you think of Ebenezer Scrooge, your first thought is probably a crotchety old man who hates the world, which he expresses through his iconic line ‘humbug’. This part of the role is pretty easy for any actor to play, but the real challenge is finding someone who can play the nasty guy but also elicit sympathy from the audience as we learn more about him and make us believe that his interactions with the Christmas spirits has truly changed him for the better and long term.
Enter Michael Caine.
I’ve always admired Michael Caine for his range as an actor. While his London accent has meant his career has been shaped, to an extent, by typecasting, he has an impressive ability to be menacing, intelligent, powerful, suave, vulnerable, and sympathetic all throughout the same role. And because of that, he is perfect as Scrooge.
Of his approach, Caine said: ‘I’m going to play this movie like I’m working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink, I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me.’ Rather than preparing for his audition by immersing himself in Victorian culture, as most actors did, he used the news instead.
He analysed the ‘Wall Street cheats and embezzlers’ because he ‘thought they represented a very good picture of meanness and greed.’ Because of this, Caine’s Scrooge is ‘particularly irredeemable and more psychotic than most’, which makes his ultimate redemption at the end of the film all the more powerful.
The way Caine changes his facial expressions and vocal intonations as he goes through the various emotional experiences throughout the story is believable and profound, as is the way Henson frames him – when he is mean old Scrooge, the camera looks up at him to make him appear large and menacing, but the more he goes through his journey, the more the camera begins to look down on him to show his vulnerability, both physically and emotionally.
There have been some great Scrooges throughout cinema, and there will be undoubtedly more to come, but I think Caine’s portrayal will be remembered forever. Or, at least, I hope so.
Victorian Gothic: the Muppet Way
I’m a huge gothic horror fan, which is why I’m drawn to the story in the first place. I can appreciate the likes of Mickey’s Christmas Carol, the family-focused 1980s version, even Bill Murray’s Scrooged, but I think this version of the story is the most powerful because it embraces the fantastical, fairy-tale nature of the story without shying away from the horrific elements.
The story is frightening, and it’s meant to be. As Gonzo says in response to Rizzo expressing concern for ‘the kids in the audience’, this is culture. The Muppets version of A Christmas Carol doesn’t shy away from the scary elements of the story, which are necessary because, as Brian Henson later reflected, ‘you need to go to those dark places for the ending to be as joyous as it can be’. I appreciated this as a kid. The Muppets did not try to shelter me from the supernatural horror, nor the bleak real horror of London poverty, and nor did it talk down to me.
It introduced me to Dickens’s dark and lyrical prose without dumbing it down, and it introduced me to the supernatural as a storytelling device, a narrative way of exploring real-life problems and issues through the lens of the fantastical. Kids are more intelligent, more resilient, and more aware of things than people sometimes give them credit for, and the creators involved in the world of the Muppets understand and continue to understand that. Like Mr Rodgers before them, they respect children.
That is why I love The Muppets Christmas Carol. A Supernatural fairy-tale that deals with the bleak social problems of being working-class in Victorian London while entertaining me and making me laugh. What a delicate tight rope to walk, and yet, the Muppets execute it perfectly. Thank God for this film. And Merry Christmas
