The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Director: Brian Henson

Cast: Michael Caine, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson

Have I Seen it Before: Let’s put it this way: the frequency of the phrase “who did not die” is uttered in my house would annoy everyone that isn’t my wife or I. It certainly annoys the cat, who, by the way, stepped on me as I wrote this sentence.

Did I Like It: What is the role of a movie? Is cinema the only predominantly American export, shifting hundreds of millions of dollars around for the sake of the shift? Are they the only endurable cultural time capsule we are capable of creating in the modern age, even when the contemporary ones mostly smack of insincerity? Or am I overthinking the whole exercise, and they are just another kind of entertainment, no different at their core than Gregorian chants or paintings of cherubs?

Na, I think it’s a third thing. We watched the movie on Christmas Eve, with a holiday season nearly behind us that threatened to bring any reasonable person I’m related to the brink of madness. I could have searched the entirety of human experience for something to turn the mood around, and would have come up short. I even bought British Christmas crackers to give it a shot, but it turns out low-grade explosives only work on the fourth of July, even when they come with fun paper hats.

But you want to know something? Caine’s perfectly calibrated, straight-faced performance, combined with a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the Dickens story, infused throughout with just the right amount of Muppets zaniness caused or hearts to grow, if not two sizes, than just enough to get to sleep and face another day of needless familial acrimony.

That’s what the movies are. Escape is too tidy a word, I think. They are a vehicle for transcending anguish, if even temporarily. One might think that the Muppets lost something after Jim Henson’s death, but I would say—at least at this point—the original magic was certainly still present.

The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

Director: Frank Oz

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I’m the guy who keeps noticing that the diner Jerry and George eat in the pilot of Seinfeld is actually the exterior of the luncheonette where the Muppets work here. It’s the movie released the weekend of my birth, no less.

Did I Like It: I really wished I did. It doesn’t have the heart of The Muppet Movie (1979), or the demented, anarchic glee of The Great Muppet Caper (1981). It might be unfair to say that a film based on characters who made their bones in a variety format is short on plot, but those previous films made good—and in the case of Caper, great—cases for their existence. Here, the Muppet gang are small-timers who want to make it big with their obvious talent and charm. Sound familiar from The Muppet Movie? It should. And then—surprise of all surprises—they do it. Without ornate sequences involving Kermit (Henson) and Piggy’s (Oz) nuptials and imagining the muppets as babies* which add nothing to the proceedings, the runtime might not have even qualified as a feature.

This is all perfunctory, as if all of the Muppet crew (here all together for the final time in a feature before Henson’s passing in 1990) desperately wanted to be doing something else. After reading the recent Brian Jay Jones biography of Henson, I’m thinking that was probably the case. Oz never felt comfortable with the Muppet label and seems to tolerate this exercise so he can have a hit under his belt so he could start directing what he might have viewed as real movies. The Dark Crystal (1982) bombed somewhat scandalously two years earlier, and I even get the sense throughout the is film that Henson hoped Crystal’s failure wouldn’t mean he’d have to be attached at the hip with Kermit for the rest of his days.

*Even the Muppets characters themselves stop the movie cold to eye a Saturday Morning cartoon deal.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

Director: Jim Henson

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A VHS recording from a local UHF station in the `80s became a regular staple in my house growing up. As much as I had uncertainty that I actually had seen The Muppet Movie (1979) in the past, that doubt was completely absent here.

Did I Like It: I can feel the criticisms of this movie as I watch it. It’s too jokey. It’s too irreverent. It’s too—dare I say it—clever?

Those people are wrong. The entirety of Henson’s output has been a concerted fight between goofing off (anything with the proper Muppets) and more earnest whimsy (anything Disney decided wasn’t worth buying after Henson died). This is the peak of that former mold, and it is in every way authored by Henson. Whereas The Muppet Movie (1979) had to shoulder the not insignificant burden of proving that the Muppets could even conceivably work on the silver screen, everyone could relax here and dwell on the absurdity that are the confines of a movie. Preposterously bad casting of family members (a running gag has Fozzie (Oz) and Kermit (Henson) as twin brothers) , credits (“Nobody reads those names anyway, do they?” “Sure. They all have families.”) and the very notion of exposition (“It has to go somewhere.”). All of it is picked apart directly in the movie and singularly fuels the best parts of the Muppet’s sense of humor in movies to come.

But in that wry sense of the absurd, in that chasing of the laugh, the film doesn’t try to shed the things that made the Muppets beloved in the first place. The Happiness Hotel might very well be the nastiest hotel that the movies have ever brought us (I include The Overlook from The Shining (1980) in that calculus), but who wouldn’t want to stay there when Dr. Teeth (Henson) the Electric Mayhem (feat. Rowlf (also Henson*) are around? It’s not just that the Muppets are lovable, it’s impossible to not want to be around the characters whenever possible.

*My working theory after also spending some time watching The Muppet Show? Dr. Teeth is merely a vaguely humanesque suit that Rowlf wears for certain gigs