Yo Ho Ho And A Bottle Of Dumb

Year: 1996

Director: Brian Henson

Cast: Tim Curry, Billy Connolly, Jennifer Saunders

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

Following Jim Henson’s death in 1990, the Muppet franchise was set adrift on a choppy tide. The first theatrical feature since that dreadful day was The Muppet Christmas Carol, a mildly entertaining literary adaptation that sidelined the Muppets. It didn’t do half bad at the box office, and considering that this was during the early period of Disney’s flirtation with the property, the soul-crushing corporation squeezed that felt to see if they could get even more blood to drip out. Thus, Muppet Treasure Island was born, made on the exact same model but proving to be ever so much worse.

And I actually LIKE classic literature.

The plot, obviously, is pretty much just Treasure Island with a few (too few) Muppety spins on the seafaring tale. Jim Hawkins (Kevin Bishop), Rizzo the Rat (Steve Whitmire), and Gonzo (Dave Goelz) live sad, lonely lives as servants at an inn when a dying patron leaves them with a treasure map. Seeking adventure on the high seas, they set sail with the wealthy but spacey Squire Trelawny [Fozzie Bear (Frank Oz)] and Captain Smollett [Kermit the Frog (Steve Whitmire)]. When the treacherous Long John Silver (Tim Curry) steals the map and kidnaps Jim, they must journey to the island where the treasure is buried to save Jim and stop Silver and his band of pirates.

This was back in the day when pirates did cool swashbuckling things instead of just torrenting Expendables movies.

Hey, remember when I had a severe problem with The Muppet Christmas Carol shunting the A-list Muppets into tertiary roles? Well, Muppet Treasure Island is a vast improvement. The A-list Muppets are shunted into secondary roles this time. Progress! Once again, the dream team (by somebody’s definition) of Gonzo and Rizzo take the remaining leads and prove for the second time that they don’t have the capacity to drive a Muppet feature all on their own. It’s not like I have a problem with Tim Curry (or the previous venture’s Michael Caine, for that matter), but human performances are light years less compelling than the alchemic magic that brings the Muppets to life. And as for Kevin Bishop? Oh, we’ll get to him later.

Muppet humor generally thrives on postmodern meta winks and nudge, but there’s a very crucial limit to their self-referentiality. As much as they will admit that they’re putting on a show or making a movie, the Muppets will never ever make reference to the fact that they are puppets. Because they aren’t. They are living, breathing creatures that play characters and put on shows for your amusement. The idea that the Muppets are a fictional construct rubs against the very grain of the magical material. That’s why the opening credits read “Kermit the Frog as Captain Smollett” and poor Steve Whitmire is relegated to the closing crawl.

Muppet Treasure Island doesn’t violate this rule, thank Henson, but with Disney pulling the strings they come knife-edge close. The Big Mouse is so proud of its acquisition that it can’t help but drop a couple anachronistic references to itself in the script. Oops, did I say “drop?”? I meant “propel at cannonball force, reducing the script to tatters.” Such obvious, clunky homage to the company is a vulgar challenge to the purity of the Muppet universe. It’s not like kids will notice, but if we’ve learned anything about me during these past few months, it’s that I take my Muppets very seriously.

Swedish Chef and Jason Voorhees. It’s a good thing I’m already dating someone, because my profile would melt Match.com’s servers.

But my intense analytical ranting is far from the only issue with Muppet Treasure Island’s humor. It runs into the typical 90’s Muppet pitfalls, favoring cheap slapstick, crappy pop culture references, and sanitized kiddy gags over the anarchist family humor of previous entries. Frankly, it’s not funny. And the weak adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s source novel is hardly compelling enough to compensate for this titanic deficiency. Because of this, Muppet Treasure Island is unequivocally the worst Muppet film, though as a member of that particular class, it is saved from being a particularly abhorrent example of family filmmaking.

Plus, as much as I abhor humans stealing lead roles from Muppets, Tim Curry really is pretty phenomenal. As a fan of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’s a delight to see him back in a musical, even if he only taps about half of that gonzo Dr. Frank-N-Furter charisma. Kevin Bishop, on the other hand… (See? I told you we’d get back to him.) As a child actor in the 1990’s, he just plain wasn’t going to be good. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to the direction of young actors back then, and he’s just one of dozens who got lost in the shuffle. Look, if Jurassic Park couldn’t do it, Muppet Treasure Island was just not going to stack up.

The truly disastrous element of his hammy, exaggerate performance is his singing voice, which really couldn’t be helped. As kids of a certain age are wont to do, Bishop underwent puberty during the course of the film’s production, forcing sound engineers to use early demo recording of his songs. The result is an overly filtered, Paris Hilton-esque whine that exists in a sonic universe that is light years away from the rest of the cast. It’s distracting, sometimes ear-splitting, and the songs weren’t really that good in the first place. No offense to the arbitrary calypso free-for-all number Cabin Fever,” but there’s nothing here that’s worthy of licking the boots of “Rainbow Connection” or “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday.”

Hell, it even makes me kind of miss Electric Mayhem.

Muppet Treasure Island was the nadir of this marathon, so thankfully things are uphill from here. Disney would drop the property before picking it up for good and finally deciding what the hell to do with it. And the 90’s were well on their way to folding into the culture of the new millennium. Good riddance.

TL;DR: Muppet Treasure Island is a flimsy excuse for a Muppet picture.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1033
Reviews In This Series
The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979)
The Great Muppet Caper (Henson, 1981)
The Muppets Take Manhattan (Oz, 1984)
The Muppet Christmas Carol (Henson, 1991)
Muppet Treasure Island (Henson, 1996)
Muppets from Space (Hill, 1999)
The Muppets (Bobin, 2011)
Muppets Most Wanted (Bobin, 2014)

Frog Bless Us, Every One

Year: 1992

Director: Brian Henson

Cast: Michael Caine, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

So, here we are. The reason I foolishly decided to begin a Muppet marathon in the month leading up to Star Wars VII, only the biggest blockbuster event in the annals of blog history. No, The Muppet Christmas Carol does not hold the same currency as a review of, say, The Empire Strikes Back. But as a fiendish bit of counterprogramming, it works perfectly, injecting a bit of felt-covered family fun into the Popcorn Culture Christmas season, which is generally a notoriously bloody affair.

The Muppet Christmas Carol, released in 1992, heralds in the darkest stretch of our retrospective, the decade immediately following Jim Henson’s tragic death in 1990. Steve Whitmire does an admirable job covering his shifts as the classic characters Kermit the Frog, Rizzo the Rat, and Beaker, but with the loss of Henson, the floppy ensemble also lost their guiding light, that indomitable spark that twinkled at the core of their features. That is not to say that Muppet Christmas Carol is a bad movie. But it is profoundly lacking in that Something that even the worst Muppet features contained.

Cough, cough, Great Muppet Caper.

The Muppet Christmas Carol begins by immediately bringing back the meta absent from the previous entry with hurricane force. Gonzo (Dave Goelz) and Rizzo (Steve Whitmire) welcome us to the film. Gonzo is portraying Charles Dickens as the interactive narrator to the story. As much as he is, in the film, wholly and irrevocably Charles Dickens, we are meant to understand that he is also wholly and irrevocably Gonzo. And both of them, whoever they are, have chosen to partner with a Guido rat to tell us the story. I bet you thought these movies wouldn’t require several advanced degrees in rhetorical logic, but these are still the Muppets we’re talking about, Henson or no Henson.

Anyway, Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine, somehow) is a miserable, miserly old man who hates Christmas, charity, the poor, and pretty much anything that doesn’t rhyme with “honey.” He is cruel to his employees, including the kindly Bob Cratchett (Kermit (Steve Whitmire)), who lives in destitution with his wife (Miss Piggy (Frank Oz)) and their kids, including the crippled but loving Tiny Tim (Robin (Jerry Nelson)). You know the story, weed of Christmas past – whoops, sorry, I got my The Night Before notes mixed up in there. Ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future arrive to show Scrooge the error of his ways and teach him to respect the spirit of Christmas.

Side note: There are serial murderers less creepy than the Ghost of Christmas Past.

It is at this point that I should probably note that this was the moment in Muppet history where the Disney company first decided to get their hands dirty in the franchise, preparing for the purchase of Jim Henson Studios. Perhaps this is the reason Muppet Christmas Carol feels more like a cheery, corporatized slog. Perhaps it was the loss of Henson, or the advent of that most peculiar epoch known as the 90’s. Whatever the reason, this film, despite continuing the Muppet legacy of solid family content, feels altogether more typical and uninspired than ever before.

It certainly doesn’t help that the film’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ morality tale is slavishly faithful, even to the point of including full, direct passages because you know how much kiddos love their 19th century literature. Although this does have the intriguing effect of preserving the abjecet horror present in the material, it stifles the ability of the Muppets to do anything other than paint in the numbers, occasionally breaking into one of a litany of mostly boilerplate theater in the park songs. Except for the addition of a little juvenile slapstick here and there, the film is just another lump of coal in the bucker of generic Christmas Carol adaptations, of which there have been literally dozens since the birth of cinema.

Perhaps the single biggest flaw at the core of the film is Michael Caine. This feels like utter heresy to say, but it’s true. He coasts through the film, leaning on his inherent Britishisms to provide an adequately curmudgeonly performance, but nothing more. Many talented actors have trouble interacting with the Muppets (my least favorite being those who pitch up their voices and overact like they’re talking to a damn child with a poopy diaper – don’t they know who they’re dealing with?), but what he’s asked to do here (fly into a time portal with a china doll, shout angrily at a tiny bunny rabbit, and – worst of all – sing) seems to completely flummox him.

The other unfortunate effect of Caine’s starring role is that even the A-list Muppets are sidelined. Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear (Frank Oz) literally get less screen time than freaking Bunsen Honeydew, and even Kermit hops out of the film for massive stretches. The ghosts and the bulk of the ensemble aren’t even played by recognizable characters! This is a Muppet film that blatantly flaunts its lack of the Muppets, and it suffers greatly for it. Caine is called upon for no comedy at all, and the classic characters are trapped in treacherously serious side roles, so the results are bleakly dull for a miserably large proportion of the time.

I never thought I’d actually be happy to see Electric Mayhem on my TV screen.

If you take the film at face value as a Dickens adaptation, it is acceptable holiday fodder, but from a Muppet fan perspective, it’s an undue slog. The one place where the film really shines with the proper intensity is in its overall aesthetic. The gingerbread Olde England architecture that populates the sets is imbued with a whimsical, dare I say expressionistic, twist that reliably induces the proper sense of fantasy with wonky, tilted designs that delight the eyes.

Muppet Christmas Carol also retains the daring, rule-breaking puppetry that defined all the previous films. Although, there are none of the bicycle shots that Muppet  filmmakers inexplicably adored in the 80’s, we get ice skating Muppets, floating ghost Muppets in chains, and an indescribably stunning shot of Kermit walking down the street with Tiny Tim on his shoulder humming a Christmas ditty. That moment more than any other captures the sentimental magic of the franchise in a perfect little microcosm. Put that crap in a snowglobe, and I’d buy a dozen.

So no, I don’t hate The Muppet Christmas Carol. It is as far from being my favorite Muppet movie as my 12-pushups-a-day physique is from Chris Evans. But as a film, it is at the very least tolerable and from time to time, pretty fun. The Muppets were still reeling from the loss of Jim Henson, as they would be for a decade and change, but this is perhaps the best iteration of his legacy made during that period, even if the choice of material was certifiably dubious.

TL;DR: The Muppet Christmas Carol is a dully devoted adaptation that sidelines its most lovable characters.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1189
Reviews In This Series
The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979)
The Great Muppet Caper (Henson, 1981)
The Muppets Take Manhattan (Oz, 1984)
The Muppet Christmas Carol (Henson, 1992)
Muppet Treasure Island (Henson, 1996)
Muppets from Space (Hill, 1999)
The Muppets (Bobin, 2011)
Muppets Most Wanted (Bobin, 2014)