‘It makes me feel very proud, it’s lovely. And it also makes me think, wow, my best thing was the very first thing I made!’ laughs Brian Henson of the reverence and adoration with which his directorial debut, festive classic The Muppet Christmas Carol, is treated.
Released in 1992, the movie was the first project for everyone’s favourite puppet troupe since the unexpected death of their creator – and Brian’s father – Jim Henson at the age of 53 in May 1990. More than 30 years later, and it has only continued to cement its place as one of the most popular Christmas films ever made.
That the passage of time has had little effect on its popularity (in fact, increasing it) is also a source of pride for Henson as the creative team deliberately avoided any contemporary references from the time.
‘We did it in period and we were hoping that that would mean that it never feels old [and] you can’t tell when it was made,’ he explains, before going on to add: ‘But I’m really pleased that people love it so much because at the time, like with every movie, you get a bunch of negative reviews with the positive ones and, being a filmmaker – and any filmmaker will tell you – you basically ignore all the good reviews, and then you read the bad reviews!’
For a millennial die-hard Muppet Christmas Carol fan, it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around this nostalgic piece of cinema being received with anything other than praise – but the evidence is there with the criminal fact it scores 78% from the 59 reviews recorded by aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a strong positive rating but not nearly resounding enough for my liking.
Henson, 62, can still remember the criticism levelled at his film, namely due to the desire for Kermit to have a bigger role and for everything to be funnier. The latter note was one the filmmaker expected.
‘Truth is, this was something we knew and we weren’t telling Disney [who were involved with the Muppets from the 1980s before outright buying them in 2004] – so it was sort of our secret, don’t tell Disney we’re making a drama because they want a comedy. Every time we would get notes back from Disney, it was always “could be funnier, could be brighter”.’
This is also an odd thing to hear when the jokes in The Muppet Christmas Carol were oft quoted in my household growing up – ‘Light the lamp not the rat! Light the lamp not the rat!’ of course – but Henson acknowledges that this was ‘a much deeper, richer dramatic story than even the original Muppet movie’.
It was different to what came before it terms of the Muppets, and Henson acknowledges that things would have been very different had his father still been alive – this movie never being made, among them.
Following his final Muppets project, the Muppet*Vision 3D film attraction at Florida theme park Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Henson says his father ‘was unsure if he could ever make another Muppet movie’ after covering an origin story, a heist movie and a ‘slightly different take on an origin story that kind of contradicted the first film’ with 1979’s The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper in 1981 and The Muppets Take Manhattan in 1984.
‘He wasn’t sure what to do next,’ Henson adds. ‘But he would have always done an original story. I think he probably wouldn’t have wanted to make Christmas Carol, but the thinking behind it was, we need to put the Muppets in a new situation.’
This meant moving on beloved characters from where audiences saw them, such as possessive Miss Piggy and Kermit’s commitment phobia, Fozzie’s trepidation over being a comic onstage and Gonzo’s, um, desire to eat tyres onstage, among other tricks.
‘That’s an expectation from the audience, and the way to break that expectation is to use them as a cast of very famous actors and then put them into a movie where the fact that you know these things about the characters is now in the subtext, and it makes the text much richer.’
Adapting Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was initially Henson’s agent Bill Haber’s idea, although Henson was sceptical given how many times it had previously been adapted in cinema. But he and screenwriter Jerry Juhl agreed they’d only read the book and do no research ‘in terms of looking at how other people treated Christmas Carol’.
And herein lies the genius of The Muppet Christmas Carol – its purity and faithfulness to Dickens’ text, and how and where it was carefully mixed in with the Muppets’ unique brand of zany. Henson agrees.
‘The reason why I think it works really well is the whole movie is the contrast of Dickens, and Henson and the Muppets. So you’ve got Miles Goodman, who composed a classic Dickens score, while Paul Williams wrote the songs – and they’re classic Muppet songs. Val Strazovec is doing the production design – it’s Dickens, but it’s all twisted a little bit like the Muppets. The costume design is Muppets on the Muppets and very period Dickens [elsewhere].’
Initially everyone – including Haber – expected the movie to be a parody rather than quoting great swathes of Dickens’ original text, because that’s what the Muppets were famous for.
‘I would never do a movie that was a parody, because that just doesn’t work – so we knew we were going to treat it with great respect and do a very, very faithful adaptation,’ recalls Henson.
Another element of the movie that saw the Muppets break from their own convention was in the casting.
Juhl, while reading the book, had become convinced that the Muppet version would need to not only include Dickens’ ‘gorgeous wordsmithing’ with heavy use of the novella’s original prose – but also Dickens himself in the film as narrator.
‘The obvious choice would be make Kermit Charles Dickens. Kermit’s a famous storyteller, the easy casting would be to put that on Kermit – but Kermit hadn’t performed since my dad had passed away,’ points out Henson.
With Henson Sr. the original voice and puppeteer of Kermit, the company looked to Steve Whitmire to fill his shoes, but this was his first major test in the part.
‘We knew we needed Kermit to have a much smaller role [so] that we could work very carefully on Steve’s Kermit, to make sure it was as close as possible to my dad’s Kermit. And it really was probably the closest he ever got, was this first one, because we worked on it so hard,’ Henson recalls.
Who is your favourite Muppet in The Muppet Christmas Carol?
-
Kermit
-
Miss Piggy
-
Gonzo
-
Rizzo
-
Fozzie
-
Robin
Kermit was instead moved into the role of Bob Cratchit – with Piggy as his wife, Emily (‘let’s get past [their will-they-won’t-they stage], let’s just say they’re married and now they have kids, and all the girls are pigs, all the boys are frogs, and now we get to see the dynamic between a married Kermit and Piggy!’). And this left the role of Dickens open for one of Juhl and Henson’s favourite Muppets – and perhaps the least likely candidate – the ‘flippant, wacky’ Gonzo, who ‘has crushes on chickens’.
‘But then in the first Muppet movie, he has that song, I’m Going to Go Back There Someday, where you really he had huge emotional depth,’ points out Henson. This gave Juhl and him confidence in the casting – as well as the unexpected quality.
‘He’s almost the last Muppet character that you would think would take the role of Charles Dickens!’
While they uses a combination of Muppet characters and new non-Muppet puppets for the ensemble, Henson recalls something else the press were ‘very critical’ of him for.
‘I made a decision that if we can’t find a delightful spot to cast a well-known Muppet character, we just won’t put them in the movie. So Rowlf the dog isn’t in the movie, the Electric Mayhem band are just in the back of Fozziwig’s playing a song, but they’re not characters, the Swedish Chef isn’t in it ever. We decided to just not worry about that, if we couldn’t find someplace to cast a favourite.’
But there was a more painful, personal reason behind it too.
‘You’re also hearing I was avoiding my dad’s characters other than Kermit, because Dr Teeth was my dad. I was like, we can work on Kermit, but I’m not ready to work on Dr Teeth, I’m not ready to work on Rowlf the dog. Scooter’s not in it. There’s a lot of favourites that that aren’t in the movie, and I got some critical kickback because of that as well.’
Speaking of favourites that are in the movie, we can’t of course not talk about Sir Michael Caine and the marvellously serious approach he took with his Muppet co-stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, never once indicating he was nearly completely surrounded by puppets.
While Henson did have ‘a few actors in mind’ for the role, he always knew the actor had to be British as he wanted The Muppet Christmas Carol to ‘really be an English film first of all’ – especially given the Henson Company’s strong roots in the UK, where The Muppet Show was originally produced and became a huge hit (‘We are at least as British as we are American, I’d say we’re a little more British than we are American!’)
But Henson credits Sir Michael’s extraordinarily successful ‘straight’ performance, making the choice ‘never to wink, never to break, never to do anything that acknowledges the sillier moments around him that are the Muppets’, to his being a gifted comic actor.
‘It’s because he’s an excellent comedian that he knew that playing it straight was going to make the comedy even better that was coming from the Muppets. If I had gotten a purely dramatic actor out of England – of which there are many terrific ones – without those comedic chops, I think they would always feel like, I’m not doing this right. I should be funny, I should have my moments because I’m in a Muppet movie… And Michael, because his career is sort of half comedy, half drama – he definitely got it and so he never was ever insecure about that choice.’
He also wasn’t afraid to work hard, and Henson takes a moment to address the industry assumption that working on a Muppet film is some kind of holiday for its human actors.
‘Within the industry, agents and people like that [would say], but have you ever done anything real, or have you just done Muppet stuff? It’s like, holy cow, you don’t get it! Muppet stuff is so much harder than just straight production!’
This includes working around the fact that there’s no floor under the puppets, but there is for the actor, so it moves all the time between shots, while tilting the camera too far up or down means you’ll catch puppeteers, so ‘every shot is a special effect where all this stuff is going on around the outside of the frame’.
But cracking on with things and having ‘no space for precious attitudes’ really suited the Oscar-winning Sir Michael, up until then best known for his roles in films like Zulu, The Ipcress File and Educating Rita.
‘I think that was important to Michael. He really loves a good, hard-working atmosphere where everybody knows their job, everybody’s doing their job, and we’re all efficient and appreciative of what we’re doing. Because particularly with American films, you can often walk on a set and you can cut the atmosphere with a knife because this actor won’t come out of the dressing room until that actor comes out of the dressing room, can you lift the camera higher because I don’t want you to see my chin… all of that nonsense.’
There were challenges aplenty on the set of The Muppet Christmas Carol, including the moment where Kermit dances down the street with Robin as Tiny Tim on his shoulder.
‘My dad always [said], “let’s have a moment in every Muppet movie where we’ve done something that we’ve never been able to do in the past”. So that was that shot, and the street is actually a rolling barrel with rubber cobblestones glued to it and the puppeteers are dressed in blue, working the puppet walking on the barrel. It’s a really clever shot.’
Henson and his team also shot the full Marley and Marley song sequence with Statler and Waldorf as the ghosts ‘the old-fashioned way’, in-camera and shooting it twice with the characters removed the second time, without using any visual effects or creating it in post-production
‘That’s kind of nerve-wracking when you’re using a technique like that, and you know if it goes wrong, you’ve got to start over again. But that sequence I thought worked really well.’
Henson also struggled a bit with knowing how to present the film with children in the audience, knowing that A Christmas Carol was ‘a scary story and it needs to be for it to resonate’. He tried to undermine the terror of the moment the door knocker morphs into Statler’s face and yells Scrooge but still remembers that kids screamed in the theatre.
And while he admits he might not have handled that one as planned, Henson was determined to ‘break the horrific tone that I had established up until then’ with the horror movie style of shooting Scrooge going through the house alone after that moment at the front door once Statler and Waldorf started singing.
Henson, who also helmed 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island, has performed and executive produced more in recent years, as well as developing his own projects, alongside his role as chairman of The Jim Henson Company – but he could see himself directing another Muppet film, if the opportunity was presented to him.
He’s a little hesitant at first, beginning: ‘I would probably like to do it the way I… because with those films, I basically made the movie and pre-negotiated to sell it to Disney when I was done – and what that meant is I didn’t have their production department, their published production department and their development executives all over me.
‘But the short answer is, I would absolutely direct another Muppet movie if they wanted me to.’
We chat about how fans love to suggest the next classic Muppet adaptation, with Pride and Prejudice a popular suggestion – and while Henson claims he’s not thought of possibilities himself, he does agree that’s what the Muppets should do.
‘I do think that it’s time for the Muppets to return to that formula where you treat them as an ensemble of very famous actors, and have them do either an actual classic story, or a classic genre with a story that may be original but is faithful to that genre. I think that should be done. And I often, when I can, suggest to Disney, that’s what you should be doing.’
The Muppet Christmas Carol is streaming now on Disney Plus.
Got a story?
If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us [email protected], calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.
