The Muppet Show world is always about misfits pulling together and managing to accomplish something, and in this case it was certainly coloured by the loss of Jim. There was legitimate pathos among our characters, and it felt so right to do something that was beyond comedy. “It was unthinkable that Jim was gone,” lifetime Muppet performer Dave Goelz recalls now, “but we all felt that the Muppets were our life’s work, and that we’d like to continue if it was possible. The tone of the project was also unavoidably informed by the absence of Brian’s father. There were seemingly few opportunities for Muppet-y knockabout comedy. But that warmth arrives, Henson realised, “surprisingly late” in the story. We perhaps think of it as inherently feelgood thanks to the redemption that comes at the end: a story about light returning to the world in the depths of winter. For most of its short page-count, Dickens’ original is sombre, sometimes bleak, and noticeably angry – the Ghost Of Christmas Present furiously confronts Scrooge with two cadaverous children called Ignorance and Want, for example.
#GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST MUPPETS PLUS#
Dickens’ tale, as you’ll be well aware, is of the heartless Scrooge his considerable fortune (which he does nothing with) propped up by the abject poverty of his debtors, until visits from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future – plus his late partner Jacob Marley – convince him to turn his life around. The book and the Muppets were not an obvious match. We decided that everything about the film should celebrate between the Muppets and Dickens – Brian Henson I think we can just do it.’ So then it was a case of finding the formula that would make this exciting and unique." “He was like, ‘Brian, this is so good, I don’t think we can make fun of it anywhere. “Jerry just fell so in love with the book,” Henson recalls. But as the writing progressed, Henson and particularly Juhl became less keen on that approach. Henson and writer Jerry Juhl initially envisaged the project as a parody, with the Muppets as a Monty Python-style ensemble running riot through the story of Scrooge. He said he’d called ABC and said, ‘I want you to do something with the Muppets,’ and they said, ‘Well, what?’ and he, as a lover of the classics, said, ‘A Christmas Carol!’ It really was all him.”Īdapting Charles Dickens’ famous, and already much-filmed, story presented a fascinating new challenge: it would require the Muppets to play characters other than themselves. "Bill basically called me and went ‘I just made a sale for you,’” Henson laughs.
Brian Henson, Jim’s son, was by 1992 running the Henson Company, and the idea was sprung on him by his agent, Bill Haber. The Muppet Christmas Carol, like The Muppet Family Christmas, began life as a television project. Nobody knew if Jim’s creations could survive without him. Henson’s unexpected death in 1990, at the age of only 53, threw the Muppets’ future into question completely. Their last cinematic outing had been The Muppets Take Manhattan in 1984, and by the time of the ABC television special A Muppet Family Christmas in 1987, their appeal was already starting to feel nostalgic. After their raucous '70s heyday, the Muppets in the '80s had been quieter, their creator Jim Henson moving on to the ambitious new worlds of The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Fraggle Rock and The StoryTeller. The film is now a festive perennial beloved by generations, and yet, in 1992, it was far from a surefire success. We’re speaking in honour of The Muppet Christmas Carol’s 30th anniversary, marked by the theatrical and Disney+ release of a newly-extended version that includes a previously deleted Williams song. I was like, 'Hey, that’s pretty good!' I was so glad I had my tape recorder because I couldn’t have written it down fast enough.” “I sat on a bench and Scrooge’s song suddenly started coming to me: ‘Bom-bom-bom-bom… When a cold wind blows it chills you…’ I think I got as far as ‘There goes Mr Humbug, there goes Mr Grim / If they gave a prize for being mean, the winner would be him’ before I paused at all. Three decades later, he tells Empire, he needn’t have worried. Years of rock ’n roll debauchery having finally caught up with him, The Muppet Christmas Carol would be the first project he’d worked on sober in forever. Sixteen years after first working with the Muppets, he was about to return to their colourful world, but he was apprehensive.
In the spring of 1992, the legendary singer-songwriter Paul Williams was walking in a park in the Los Angeles sunshine, thinking about Christmas.
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