Hey, A Movie!: The Muppet Christmas Carol

It's in the singing of a street-corner choir.

What are the Muppets without Jim Henson? This is the impossible question that has bubbled underneath basically everything from the Jim Henson Company since his tragic and untimely passing in 1990. The men and women who worked alongside Henson didn’t pack up and go home upon his crushing loss, instead soldiering on and making even more movies and TV shows in the three-plus decades since he died. But there is a clear demarcation point between the era when Henson was alive and the time in which he’s been done, not simply in terms of the quality of Muppet movies (specifically) but in terms of what those movies even are.

Though we’re a couple months early, seasonally, the calendar shakes out in such a way that we’re talking about Christmas today on the blog. Specifically, The Muppet Christmas Carol, a film that turned 30 last year and has only grown in estimation among many people of my generation. That we have more adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic holiday-themed ghost story than someone could shake a stick at is undebatable. That this version has wound up enduring far more than many other adaptations is a pleasant surprise, almost in spite of itself.

The Muppet Christmas Carol had to contend with the unsolvable problem of losing Jim Henson, as well as the hardship of having lost fellow Muppeteer Richard Hunt in the early 1990s. That it worked as well as it has, enduring over the years, is a reminder of how the Muppets remain charming in so many different creative venues, and in so many different ways. But — and you probably knew I was going to throw in a “but” here — I feel like this is a case where I have to invoke a phrase I’ve shared online before: two things seemingly in opposition to each other can be true.

One: this is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of A Christmas Carol, boasting arguably the best big-screen Scrooge performance of all time.

Two: …this is not a very good Muppet movie.

Before you close this out of disgust, humor me.