The Muppet Christmas Carol was first released on 11 December 1992. Gregory Wakeman finds out how grief and addiction helped shape a film that still has a huge following 30 years on.

When Brian Henson was hired to direct The Muppet Christmas Carol, he was terrified.

“I didn’t want to do it,” Henson admits to BBC Culture. He had good reason, too. Not only was this his feature film debut as a director, but he was stepping into the shoes of his father Jim Henson, the puppeteer and filmmaker who had created the Muppets and turned them into pop culture icons, before tragically dying at the age of 53 in May 1990.

“We’d lost Jim. We were all really still mourning,” says Steve Whitmire, who, like Brian, was tasked with replacing Jim Henson in The Muppet Christmas Carol, this time by voicing and puppeteering Kermit the Frog. “We were also just trying to move forward. We were not completely sure whether we would. That’s one of the most interesting things about the film on the inside, it was really a bit of a test. Could we continue without Jim?”

– The X

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– ‘A delightful, fresh new romcom’

– ‘A spectacular, action-packed epic’

Henson believed that Frank Oz, the voice of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and Animal, as well as the director of The Dark Crystal, Little Shop of Horrors and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, should have been overseeing The Muppet Christmas Carol instead of him.

“But Frank was the biggest strong supporter of me doing it,” says Henson. “He told me, ‘I’ll be on set with you the whole time.’ He was. Frank was on set every day. He was wonderful support. But, yeah, I was terrified.”

It turns out that Henson was actually the perfect filmmaker to make The Muppet Christmas Carol. Not just because he was the son of their creator. He’d also previously worked as a puppeteer and performer on a variety of darker movies using animatronics and puppets, including Labyrinth, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Witches.

“I was able to bring that darkness that I had been working in, and mix it with the comedy. That’s the whole film,” explains Henson. “It’s Dickens and Henson. Scrooge is the leader of Dickens. Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit is the leader of Henson. The two contrasts crash into each other. They’re not particularly comfortable cohabitants. That’s why it’s so exciting.”

Audiences were similarly excited by the film. The Muppet Christmas Carol was a minor success upon its release on 11 December, 1992, grossing $27.2 million from a $12 million budget. It also received mostly positive reviews, with Paul Williams’s delightfully catchy songs earning special praise.

By the end of the 80s my career had basically gone. I had misplaced the 80s – Paul Williams

The writer of The Carpenters’ We’ve Only Just Begun and Barbra Streisand’s Evergreen, Williams had worked on The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie, earning an Oscar nomination for the latter’s song Rainbow Connection. Which is all the more remarkable, since Williams struggled with alcohol and drug addiction through his life, up until 15 March, 1990.

“That’s my sober birthday,” admits Williams. “I’m 32 years sober. By the end of the 80s my career had basically gone. I had misplaced the 80s. When you misplace an entire decade, you have earned your seat and you are officially an alcoholic. I had a reputation in Hollywood as an alcoholic and an addict.”

A story of redemption

Hiring Williams to work on the songs for The Muppet Christmas Carol proved to be a masterstroke, as he used his own recent spiritual awakening as a parallel for Scrooge’s journey.

“All of a sudden I was waking up in the morning with no cravings. I’d found my tribe. I was comfortable and grateful in this world in a way I’d never experienced before,” declares Williams. “That’s when I was asked to write a score about Scrooge, who is experiencing a spiritual awakening and a changed outlook. It was a perfect fit.”

Which makes it all the more surprising, then, that the initial idea for The Muppets to do their own version of A Christmas Carol wasn’t a calculated masterstroke from Henson or anyone at Jim Henson Productions. Instead, in the middle of 1991, just a year after Jim’s death, it was suggested to Brian by his agent Bill Haber, who worked for Creative Agents Agency.

“He has always been a big fan of literary classics,” says Henson. “We knew we needed to do something pretty substantial with the Muppets to propel them forward so that they could live on past my dad. So Bill Haber called me and said, ‘A Christmas Carol with the Muppets. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?'”

At first, Henson was dubious. The Dickens novel had already been adapted so many times. But Haber insisted that the Muppets would be able to put their own spin on it. He was persistent. For a reason. Henson recalls, “Suddenly he told me, ‘Well, I’ve already sold it to ABC as a special. Give them a call. They’re super excited.'”

So, Henson asked for assistance on the project from screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who had been the head writer on The Muppet Show, and had written The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper. They briefly flirted with making the special a satire, only to quickly realise that the novel was “too good a story” to make fun of.

“We knew that, if we were going to do it, we just had to do it respectfully, because the story and the book demanded that,” says Henson. “That was good, because it stopped us talking about Miss Piggy as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Gonzo as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. We threw all that out.”

An ardent fan of Gonzo, Juhl decided the Muppet should play Charles Dickens in the film, and he made him the onscreen narrator.

“Jerry wanted Gonzo’s Dickens to be a character out of time and space. That’s exactly what Gonzo is,” notes Henson, who adds that, by taking this approach, Juhl was able to take Dickens’ “remarkable prose” straight out of the book and have Gonzo use them to “set up scenes.”

SAM

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