Hear Me Out: ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’ Is The Perfect Holiday Movie

The ideal holiday movie has three essential features. It should take place during the season (obviously), convey the importance of togetherness and generosity, and be light and fun to watch for an audience of all ages. A bonus is if the movie has festive but non-saccharine music. There is one film that fits this bill, and I rewatch it every year: The Muppet Christmas Carol. Released in 1992, the same year my grandmother gave me the VHS, director Brian Henson’s Muppet version of Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella hews to the original work’s plot and themes, while being totally accessible for children and wackily fun for adults. It is the perfect Christmas movie.

The film stars Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge and Gonzo (voiced by Dave Goelz) as Charles Dickens, who also serves as a narrator for this kid-appropriate version of the writer’s classic tale of greed and redemption. If you didn’t think a blue Muppet best known for his love of chickens and daredevil sports could credibly deliver lines like “He was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, old Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” you’re in for a treat — screenwriter Jerry Juhl fits Dickens’ words right into 20th-century children’s media. Even if your little ones don’t quite follow the exact meaning of all the original lines, the scenes following make their intention amply apparent.

The film opens on a snowy market in the winding alleys of early Victorian London. A seller hawking turkeys admonishes one of his escaping wares to get back in the box. The turkey’s name is Martin, and he and the vendor are both Muppets. Gonzo, selling apples, introduces himself as Charles Dickens. Rizzo the Rat, in a thick New Jersey accent, introduces himself as himself, challenges Gonzo to demonstrate that he’s really the 19th-century writer, and so begins the story. The rat’s disbelief never abates, even as Gonzo-Dickens correctly predicts plot points right before they happen.

There’s no time for Dickens to argue with his rodent sidekick, though, because it’s Christmas Eve, and Scrooge is rounding the corner, preceded by a dark chill. The hated moneylender credibly employs rats for bookkeepers, underpays Bob Cratchit (played by Kermit the Frog), his kindly right-hand man, and wants to force all his staff to work on Christmas. The windows of his dreary office are filthy, which Gonzo points out (using Rizzo to clean one) in one of the film’s many appreciable small nods to the reality of the era.

But first, a song — we learn who Scrooge is as various creatures (pigs, mice, carts of vegetables, hard-to-place monsters, and also some humans, all costumed in bonnets and top hats and overcoats and petticoats) gather behind Caine, jauntily singing about Scrooge’s mean, underhanded nature and wealth built on charging a fortune for cold and drafty houses. Worst of all, he’s unrepentant. “Scrooge loves his money, because he thinks it gives him power,” the market folk sing. Yes, particularly attuned children may draw their own parallels between Scrooge and the current political climate.

Scrooge arrives home to his dark, cold mansion. As he eats dinner alone by the fire, his late business partners, Jacob and Robert Marley, appear to warn him that he’ll be visited by three spirits who will show him better ways, lest he end up like the Marleys — ghosts draped in rags, dragged down by chains and lock boxes. The scene could be scary for smaller children, but it’s too silly, with noted Muppet hecklers Statler and Waldorf playing the two old dead guys, doing more of a send-up of ghostliness — there’s a lot of saying “woooooo” while they sing about how terrible it is to be them — than appearing as the actual damned on a quick break from hell.

Along comes the Ghost of Christmas Past, a pleasant, animated redheaded child encased in flowing white tulle. She and Scrooge sail over London’s snowy rooftops and, hanging on by a rope, Gonzo and Rizzo ride along, crashing into trees and landing covered in chickens. Everyone visits Scrooge’s old boarding school, where we learn the first source of the miser’s present unhappiness. As a child, he was left alone here for the holidays while the other students went home to their families. Shortly after, at his first job at Fozziwig’s rubber chicken factory (Fozzie Bear is Scrooge’s first boss), instead of dancing with the rest of the guests to Animal rocking out on the drums during the annual Christmas party, he complains about how much the event costs. He also meets Belle (Meredith Braun), his first and only love.

The spirit moves along to another Christmas past, when Belle leaves Ebenezer for taking too long to marry her. He insists he hasn’t yet made enough money to marry. Speaking of non-saccharine singing, this scene is now short and to the point. But as a kid, I recall a somewhat insipid song that was a weak point for the movie. The Disney+ streaming executives must have agreed because that number seems to have been cut. The absent singing makes the scene sadder still, and Belle and Ebenezer both cry. No wonder Scrooge hates Christmas. As a kid he spends it alone, and as an adult, he gets dumped.

The spirit of the past leaves, and along comes the Ghost of Christmas Present, an enormous jolly Muppet reminiscent of Father Christmas, to sing about how wherever you find love, it feels like Christmas.

He shows Scrooge all the loving Christmases he’s currently missing. At his nephew Fred’s, Fred and his wife Clara are playing a guessing game with their guests. The answer to the hint “an unwanted creature” is Scrooge, who seems genuinely hurt to hear this in the otherwise happy scene. In the background, Rizzo eats some wax fruit. Over at Bob Cratchit’s house, Bob includes Scrooge in his Christmas dinner toast, but his wife, Emily Cratchit (Miss Piggy) is having none of it. She calls Scrooge odious, wicked, and badly dressed, and her lookalike twin daughters huff in agreement. Scrooge is shocked, but more concerned for Tiny Tim, the Cratchits’ sickly youngest son (a tiny Muppet frog with a cane and newsboy cap). Rizzo burns his feet falling down the Cratchit’s chimney and crash-landing on the roasting Christmas goose.

Darkness rolls in at a snowy churchyard. Gonzo-Dickens continues to narrate, and Rizzo, swinging wildly, rings the church bells. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears in a gust of fog. This scene is about an hour into the movie, and the only one children might find frightening, but if your kid has seen Harry Potter’s dementors and been fine, the spirit shouldn’t bother them — it’s a bit of a proto-dementor, a tall creature draped in dark rags, with a black hole for a face. But just in case, our narrator and his sidekick offer an easy exit. Rizzo sticks his head out of the church door to announce that this is too scary, and Gonzo-Dickens tells the camera, “We’ll see you at the finale.” They exit the scene, and Scrooge, by now softened up from the lessons of the first two spirits, tells the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that he’s ready to listen and learn.

The pair land in Scrooge’s neighborhood. It’s bleak and raining, and three pigs clad in 19th-century business attire joke about attending the funeral of some unlikeable wretch only for the free lunch. They’re talking about Scrooge, obviously. The spirit points Scrooge indoors, where ragpickers happily poke fun at a dead man from whom they’re sorting their latest wares. Led by a large spider, the scene is as seedy and creepy as Muppets allow. Scrooge needs a break and asks to see some tenderness, so they head to the Cratchits.

Mrs. Cratchit is crying, and Mr. Cratchit comes home without Tiny Tim on his shoulder. The couple discuss where to put their son’s grave. Scrooge looks stricken, but Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit is resignedly philosophical. “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it,” he tells his remaining three children over their somber Christmas dinner. The camera pans to a chair by the fire, holding Tiny Tim’s cane and cap.

Scrooge and the spirit appear again at the graveyard, where Scrooge demands to know whose death made the pigs and ragpickers so happy. Your children will have likely already figured it out. When he wakes up in his own bedchamber, alone and in the present, Scrooge is full of joy. Gonzo and Rizzo are back, too, perched outside the window. Scrooge sends them flying into the snow as he flings it open to ask a small rabbit child to go buy the prize turkey in the shop down the street. Everyone sings their way to the Cratchits, where Scrooge bestows the turkey on his employee and offers him a raise. Michael Caine, well cast as the grim, lipless landlord, is ebullient, up to his ears in Muppets, and the movie ends on a big happy musical number with everyone crammed into the Cratchits’ crooked little house.

My toddler has never watched anything longer than the occasional five-minute Trotro, but in a few years, I’m looking forward to showing him this movie, which so handily uses the Muppets’ nuttiness to convey the moral lessons of Dickens’ enduring work. Avarice will leave you miserable. If you love someone, care for them. It’s never too late to change for the better. The movie ends with Rizzo, finally a believer, complimenting Gonzo as Mr. Dickens on his story. And in the final lesson, Gonzo thanks him, saying, “If you like the movie, you should read the book!”

This article was originally published on scarymommy.com.