The Muppet Christmas Carol

Brian Henson's The Muppet Christmas Carol puts Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge through the Muppet wringer, with Michael Caine playing the miser straight while Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo fill in as Bob Cratchit, Emily Cratchit, and a narrating Charles Dickens. Released by Walt Disney Pictures on December 11, 1992, the film cost $12 million and returned $34.5 million worldwide. It arrived two years after Jim Henson's death, the first Muppet feature made without him, and his son Brian directed from a script by Jerry Juhl.

The casting is the joke and the engine: Caine never winks at the puppets, which lets the ghosts and the Cratchit family carry the comedy around him. Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat bicker through the framing device, while the Ghost of Christmas Present, played by Jerry Nelson, booms out carols and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come says nothing at all. The songs come from Paul Williams, who wrote the music for The Muppet Movie, and Miles Goodman handled the score.

Critics in 1992 were warmer than the box office suggested, and the film's reputation has only grown with annual holiday screenings. A 7.4 rating across more than 60,000 votes reflects that second life. It sits alongside The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper in the franchise, but it's the one families return to every December. [edit]

London, Christmas Eve, the 1840s. A rat named Rizzo and a blue whatever-it-is named Gonzo, dressed as Charles Dickens and clutching a manuscript, push their way into the frame to announce that they will be telling the story of Ebenezer Scrooge. Rizzo is skeptical, chiefly because he is hungry. Gonzo is earnest. Their bickering commentary runs through the film, and they occasionally wander into the scenes they are describing.

Scrooge (Michael Caine) is a moneylender with a fortune and no use for anyone. He keeps his clerk, Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog), in a freezing counting house and refuses him coal. His nephew Fred (Steven Mackintosh) stops by to invite him to Christmas dinner; Scrooge declines with contempt, calling the holiday humbug. Two gentlemen collecting for charity get the same treatment, and Scrooge asks whether the prisons and workhouses are still open. Bob asks only for Christmas Day off, which Scrooge grants grudgingly.

That night, the ghost of Scrooge's partner Jacob Marley (Jerry Nelson) appears, bound in chains and cash boxes forged by his own greed. Marley warns that Scrooge's chain is longer, and that three spirits will visit him before dawn.

The Ghost of Christmas Past (performed by Robert Tygner, voiced by Jessica Fox) arrives first, a small floating figure with a candle-like head. It takes Scrooge back to his boyhood, where he was left at school over the holidays, and then to his youth, where he fell in love with a woman named Belle (Meredith Braun). Scrooge watches himself choose money over Belle, and watches Belle release him from their engagement because he has become someone she no longer knows. He also sees his sister Fan, Fred's mother, and remembers the kindness he once showed her.

The Ghost of Christmas Present (Jerry Nelson) is a giant in green robes who laughs like a cannon. He shows Scrooge the city on Christmas morning and then the home of Bob Cratchit, where Emily (Miss Piggy) and the children make do with little. The youngest, Tiny Tim (Jerry Nelson), is sickly but cheerful. The spirit warns that Tim may not survive unless something changes. Scrooge also watches Fred's party from outside, unseen, and feels the pull of a warmth he has refused.

The second spirit leaves him shaken, and as the clock strikes, a third figure approaches through the fog. The film pauses there, with the last of the three visitors still to come.[edit]