Is There A Word Yet For Old Friends Who've Just Met?

Year: 2011

Director: James Bobin

Cast: Amy Adams, Jason Segel, Chris Cooper

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

At last, it has come to this. Although the last film in the extant theatrical Muppet franchise is technically 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted, I reviewed that film when it first came out. So that leaves us with 2011’s The Muppets as the finale of this long-winded retrospective. Really, it couldn’t be more serendipitous. We’re finishing in the very place where my deep-seated love for the Muppets began.

The Muppets took such a hold on me that I saw it twice in the theater and even wrote a glowing review of it on an ancient, prehistoric blog that has long since washed away on the tides of the Internet. One boy who couldn’t care less about Jim Henson and his legacy walked into the theater, and out came a man with a heart made of felt.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.

In The Muppets, Gary (Jason Segel) is happily dating Mary (Amy Adams), and they’re heading to the tropical paradise known as Los Angeles for their tenth anniversary. But there’s one small problem. One very small, ping-pong ball-eyed problem. His name is Walter (Peter Linz) and he’s Gary’s tagalong little brother/puppet. Mary is mildly perturbed that he will be joining them, but bears it with good, Amy Adams-esque grace. However, during a visit to the run-down Muppet Studios, thing get about as un-romantic as they could possibly be. Walter learns that wicked oil baron Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) is planning on razing the Muppet Studio and Theater to drill for oil unless the Muppets can raise enough money in one week to buy it back.

There’s only one way to do that, and it’s getting the gang back together. With the help of one Mr. The Frog (Steve Whitmire), they gather up the old crew, including Animal (Eric Jacobson, taking over for Frank Oz, who was finally broken by Muppets from Space), Gonzo (the steadfast Dave Goelz), Fozzie Bear (Eric Jacobson), and the reluctant Miss Piggy (Eric Jacobson , who seems to have made a pretty solid career move). The Muppets are unsure if they’re still relevant to modern audiences, but they give it the old college try (and they actually did go to college in Muppets Take Manhattan, so it works) and put on a show.

It’s time to get things started.

The Muppets operates primarily on nostalgia, much in the vein of the recent explosion of revival media: Arrested Development, The X-Files, Fuller House, Terminator: Genisys, Jurassic World… The list goes on and on, but The Muppets stands out for two reasons in particular. Primarily, it got here first. But it’s also one of the only films to use that nostalgia as more than a gimmick, weaving it into the very thematic structure of the film. The Muppets have always been particularly devoted to self-referentiality, so it’s no surprise that its structure is so well-integrated with its reason for being. But the only other recent film that even comes close to achieving that level of metatextual awareness is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is pretty explicitly about Star Wars fanboys/girls getting to have their own space adventure. And I think we can agree that, at least thematically speaking, it ain’t a patch on The Muppets.

Yes, there is a large part of The Muppets devoted to recreating and or fawning over classic moments from The Muppet Show and their previous theatrical features (Muppets from Space, tragically, does not get a shout-out), but it’s also about the act of nostalgia and whether or not the Good Ol’ Days can be resurrected in the cynical modern world. It takes a good hard look at the Muppet legacy, only using rose-colored glasses where Muppet Treasure Island is concerned. This oddly unfiltered scrutiny is married to a ludicrously cheery tone that should work but effortlessly, ineffably does. It’s just one more facet of the inestimable magic of the Muppets.

Someday we’ll find it, the Muppet connection.

Even if The Muppets operates in large part as a nostalgia piece, it does have a charming, original story to tell. Gary, Mary, and Walter’s storyline is shoved roughly aside when the A-list Muppets are reunited, but their characters are painted in such broad strokes that they can withstand the hit. The blankness of their characters is not a liability because they act as the channel through which the audience gains exclusive front row seats to the “real live” Muppets. They perform a vital function, and they do it with grace and good cheer. Walter’s inherent blandness (and boy, is he ever the most boring Muppet ever cooked, all drab flesh tones with a limp flop of hair) would become an issue in Muppets Most Wanted, but in the context of this story, he’s an excellent bridge between the human and Muppet world, as this film more than any other seeks to explore that relationship.

By far the best original contribution to the film is its musical numbers, by Flight of the Conchords vet Bret McKenzie. Although Tex Richman’s rap is a little too 90’s for my taste, compositions like the deeply silly crooner “Man or Muppet” and the rousing opening number “Life’s a Happy Song” are tremendously satisfying. And Kermit’s solo number, the doleful, yearning “Pictures in My Head” is the single best Muppet performance since “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” way back when in 1979. The music and its tone fit the Muppet ensemble perfectly – sprightly yet wistful; full of dreams, humanity, and list for life’s ups and downs.

Really, The Muppets is a perfectly imperfect evocation of the anarchist Muppet comedy credo. The pacing might be a smidge wonky, and the variety show performances have a tendency to lean toward the twee, but this is a welcome whirligig of meta movie humor, offbeat celebrity cameos, and a deep, abiding love for the world and the people in it, even the bad folks. It’s an excellent vehicle for the Muppet renaissance we’ve thankfully found ourselves in, a grand introduction for new fans, and a fond love letter to old ones. It’s the most consistent, wholly coherent and entertaining Muppet feature film ever released, and I thank it from the bottom of my heart for pulling our felt-covered friends smack dab into the middle of the pop culture conversation once more.

TL;DR: The Muppets is an excellent, self-reflective revival of a classic family franchise.
Rating: 10/10, which it probably doesn’t deserve, but I couldn’t care less.
Word Count: 1098
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)

The Final Frontier

Year: 1999

Director: Tim Hill

Cast: Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Bill Barretta

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

The 90’s were a hard time for the Muppets. Their creator and guiding light Jim Henson had passed away and Disney was mucking about with the property, forcing it to contort into a variety of subpar literary adaptations. At this point in the marathon, I was beginning to feel pretty disheartened. The next film on the list, Muppets from Space, was one of the most maligned features of them all, and all I could do was assume the crash position and hope for the best.

So here I am on the other side, and I’ve come to tell you that not only was Muppets from Space NOT the worst film in the series, I also had a mortifying amount of fun watching it. It’s definitely a far cry from the humanistic anarchy of the Henson era, but the 90’s Muppets finally found a niche they could work with. Taking the blossoming family entertainment tropes (teen culture references, X-Files-esque secret agencies, film-ending dance parties) that would eventually lead to movies like Shrek and its ilk and injecting them with zany Muppet antics, Muppets from Space is a shallow but delightful entry in the franchise.

I live to be controversial.

In Muppets from Space, Gonzo (Dave Goelz) begins receiving alien transmissions that he believes to be from his real family. The others, knowing that he has been feeling lonely and isolated, don’t believe him, but support his efforts to find them. Well, Kermit (Steve Whitmire) and Co. do. Miss Piggy (Frank Oz) only wants to use his story to advance from TV news intern to full blown anchorpig. All the while, Gonzo is being pursued by K. Edgar Singer (Jeffrey Tambor), who wants to vivisect him and prove that aliens exist.

Fox Mulder, eat your heart out.

There is one major difference between Muppets from Space and the literary adaptations that came before it (other than source material and the fact that this film is inexplicably not a musical), and their names are Pepe the King Prawn (Bill Barretta) and Bobo the Bear (also Bill Barretta, bless him). These Muppets, two of my personal favorites, are the only two major characters created after Jim Henson’s death (save for the artfully bland Walter of the new movies), and they are the saving grace of 90’s Muppetdom. They’re fun, bright, and silly, and their first-ever film appearances help Muppets from Space rise above the lugubrious mush of its late period peers.

Also back in action are the traditional Muppet cameos, and though their combined wattage isn’t particularly electrifying, the stars are game to really play with the Muppet sandbox. Ray Liotta is the obvious standout as a hypnotized guard, but Kathy Griffin as a security officer who falls for Animal and David Arquette as a wicked lab rat mad scientist speak directly to my heart, if not to the culturally advanced public at large in 2016. The point is, Muppets from Space is the film that finally remembered that the great Muppet films are the ones that play it fast and loose with the porous membrane between fiction and reality and actually have fun along the way.

Muppets from Space is genuinely entertaining, what can I say? The slapstick is less facile, not feeling like it’s straining to please the lowest common denominator (Kids aren’t idiots, they’re just treated like them. It’s easy to get confused), the character dynamics are rich and elastic, and the movie maintains a sense of weightlessness, carrying a spring in its step the whole way through.

That weightless thing is kind of ironic, though, considering that the Muppets never actually go to space in this film.

Obviously, not everything is perfect. There are a startling preponderance of cheesy, punny pop culture references, but they at least feel a little more organic in the warped, transitory atmosphere of this very 90’s film. The vast blanket of pop songs spread across the feature in lieu of musical numbers does nothing to change this feeling. It’s not a classic Muppets feature, with this weird pop culture sugar buzz, but it’s a sprightly good time.

That is, for the most part. There are a couple flaws in Muppets from Space that are about as easy to overlook as Mount Everest. First of all, there are some moments that are – I’ll just come right out and say it – shockingly racist. The magenta Muppet Clifford, with his dreadlocks and his huge lips, has apparently been around for quite some time, but is pulled to the forefront here, to lust after girls named “Shenaynay” and just generally remind people that minstrelsy was a thing. He’s downright unsettling, and the space fish with cartoon Indian accents don’t help the film recover much.

Almost as bad as Clifford and pals (OK, not really, because he’s the worst thing to ever happen to a Muppet feature, and I’m including the time Kermit got hit by a car) is the finale, in which Gonzo’s family greets him with a karaoke rendition of “Celebrate!” by Kool and the Gang. It’s a travesty of biblical proportions, and about as far from “Rainbow Connection” as a hubcap. But that said, in spite of the massive problems hanging off of it like pulsing goiters, Muppets from Space is a largely charming entry in the franchise, giving it one last push before the dawn of the New Age in 2011.

TL;DR: Muppets from Space is excruciatingly 90's, but otherwise a delightful family comedy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 933

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)

Popcorn Kernels: Moonage Daydreams

Labyrinth

Year: 1986

Director: Jim Henson

Cast: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Dave Goelz

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

When a young woman accidentally banishes her baby brother to the goblin kingdom, she must work her way through a fantastical labyrinth to save him.

Obviously, Labyrinth made its way into my screening schedule due to the untimely passing of rock icon David Bowie, but it’s also a very appropriate interlude during the midpoint of my Muppet marathon. The last feature film directed by Jim Henson, Labyrinth is one of the final puzzle pieces in a career dedicated to converting the truly bizarre into the mainstream. The narrative of Labyrinth is piecemeal, part Alice in Wonderland, part Wizard of Oz, with the linguistic cunning of The Phantom Tollbooth, but beneath the vignettes of Jennifer Connelly’s journey there’s a dark, intelligent mind pulsing, constantly bursting forth with fresh, nutty ideas.

In the broadest sense, Labyrinth is about growing up and learning to share with/care for another human being. But Labyrinth is also about the poisonous behavior of clinging to material possessions, the unreliability of the rules by which one perceives the universe, and Jim Henson showing off just how devilishly creative he could truly be. The creature designs that erupt across the screen are feverish triumphs of character creation. 

From large to small, every monster, goblin, anthropomorphic door knocker, cockney worm, etc., etc., etc. has a personality and a detailed, idiosyncratic look. My personal favorites are the lichen-covered stone “Helping Hands” that guard the oubliette, and the trash ladies who roam the dump with their prized possessions piled on their backs, but every single creature has the potential to be somebody’s favorite for any number of equally sound reasons.

Labyrinth is confidently stylish and almost irritatingly large scale. The goblin battle in the third act somehow manages to wrangle puppets, life size monster suits, Jennifer Connelly, a dog, and rolling boulders all together in a dazzling, balletic display, sometimes all in the same shot. Labyrinth’s is a sumptuously realized world that took meticulous care and boundless creativity to produce, something Henson possessed in spades.

But above all else, Labyrinth is thoroughly weird. This is kind of unavoidable that features David Bowie in a lead role and lets him do the music, but that ain’t even the half of it. It’s a brain-bubbling stew of fantasy iconography, 80’s sludge pop, spontaneous reggae numbers, and Bowie music video interludes. Just like the titular labyrinth itself, it’s impossible to predict what’s around the next corner, which is why it’s pretty much perfect for kids and their frayed attention spans. 

There are moments where I must throw my hands up and admit that I have no idea what’s going on or why (like the totally pointless, nonsensical, masterpiece of a song “Magic Dance”), but whatever the reason, it’s relentlessly captivating stuff.

Rating: 8/10

The Beyond

For our podcast episode about The Beyond (including a lengthy Bowie tribute at the beginning and end), click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: X

A young woman inherits a Louisiana hotel, only to discoer that it is built over one of the seven entrances to Hell.

If Dario Argento is Italian horror’s Steven Spielberg, Lucio Fulci is its Roland Emmerich. He’s artful in his own way, but he goes straight for the jugular instead of tooling around with wastes of time like prestige, theme, or that bane of cinema, subtlety. In The Beyond, bad things happen because it’s Hell, dammit. Why are you trying to think things through when a man’s face is being pelted with glass?

The Beyond might not have much of a way with words (Or plot. Or logic.), but as a living gallery of excruciating pain, it’s undeniable. Continuing his lifelong vendetta against the human eye (this guy must have Un Chien Andalou as his screensaver… Film student humor!), he finds ever more extravagant ways to gouge, pluck, skewer, and otherwise inconvenience that accursed white orb. And that’s just the bedrock of an elaborately layered system of gore, from bloody falls to crucifixions to freaking tarantulas devouring a face. It’s an 80’s Italian film, so the effects don’t necessarily hold up, but they’re so gruesome that they bypass your brain’s reality cortex and dive straight for the “I’m gonna throw up” lobe.

The Beyond is a breathtaking gonzo gorefest, the ultimate visceral experience that horror filmmaking can provide. Its approach to gore can be easily summed up by one of its scenes, in which a woman is dissolved by acid, a wave of fluid sending her decaying body across the floor as a viscous, red foam. The Beyond is exactly that, an implacable crimson tidal wave threating to overtake you. 

Even amidst all this killing, Fulci never forgets to properly represent Italian horror, stylishly juxtaposing his kill scenes with moments of bucolic serenity, doubling down on the rapid cuts, rack focuses, and extreme close-ups so you’re incapable of forgetting which country is sponsoring this particular nightmare.

My only real issues with The Beyond are its slippery pacing and its climax. The dubiously dubbed dialogue scenes tend to drag like a 2 by 4 nailed to the back of a Hot Wheel car. There’s only so much momentum you can get out of wood. And the third act culminates in a bizarrely shoved-in, molasses-paced zombie sequence that seems like (and is) an ill thought-out studio note. Those two flaws combine with enough heft to knock The Beyond down a peg, but it’s still an exciting, revelatory, deliciously wicked motion picture.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 933

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)