A Sesame Street Christmas Carol

Title:
A Sesame Street Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Multi-camera studio video direct-to-DVD special
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Sesame Workshop
 
Year:
2006 (released on DVD in the US on November 14^th that year)
 
Length:
46 minutes
 
Setting:
A fantasy version of a contemporary urban American city street
 
Background:
Sesame Street is one of the most famous television programmes ever made in the English language, designed as an educational aid to young children. By this point it had been running on the PBS public television network in the USA for nearly forty years, but was also very well-known and sometimes re-versioned around the world.
 
This was actually the second time the Sesame Street characters had been involved in a loose adaptation of the Carol. The theme, with even the same Oscar the Grouch character in the Scrooge part, had previously been explored in a 1978 Christmas special for the commercial CBS network, although this version is more explicitly labelled as being an adaptation of the Dickens tale.
 
Sesame Street, of course, stars various Muppet characters created by Jim Henson, and the Muppets of The Muppet Show had also made their own version in the early 1990s – which is now one of the most famous and beloved of all.

Cast and crew:
Sesame Street stalwart Carroll Spinney stars in his regular role as Oscar the Grouch, who is the central focus here. The various Muppet incarnations are always able to rope in some good guest stars, and here British stage and screen regular Tim Curry has a role as the narrator, having previously starred as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island in 1996 – although his best known role of all is probably as the star of the 1970s cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Less auspiciously, he’d also voiced Scrooge in the bloody awful 1997 animated version of the story.
 
Director Victor DiNapoli had by this point had a very long and distinguished career on Sesame Street and its associated specials, having begun working on the show as a scenic artist in 197. He worked his way up to become a production designer and a director on the show, while also making a few on-screen cameo appearances when background human characters were required.
 
Scriptwriter Rickey Boyd had been a puppeteer and voice artist on various Henson company projects since the late 1980s. This linking script is one of only a handful of writing credits he has gained, having mostly continued to work as a performer.

Underdone Potato:
The special begins with a quite a nice, instrumental, Christmas-ified version of the famous Sesame Street theme tune, with some suitably plummy introductory narration from Curry, who’s only really a peripheral presence – he only has a few brief passages at the start and end, but I suppose adds a certain suggestion of old-world Englishness. He also has some interaction with Oscar, doing a bit of fourth-wall breaking.
 
Oscar, as you might expect, declares himself to be not a fan of Christmas, and has decided to sleep through the whole thing and pinned a note on the outside of his trashcan home to tell everyone so. However, he is rudely awoken by ‘Joe Marley’ of the ‘Scaredy Pants Delivery Service’, who has been instructed – we are never told by whom – to deliver three different ‘Ghost-a-Grams’ to Oscar throughout the evening, in order to attempt to cheer him up and introduce him to the Christmas spirit.

Past:
The first ‘Ghost-a-Gram’ is a CGI version of one of Oscar’s… species, I suppose you’d call it? ‘The Grouch of Christmas Past’, a famous grouch from London 1843 – a nice little touch as that was the year when the book was published. There’s a slight mixing of imagery from the book, however, as the character also wears chains – more usually associated with Marley, of course. Why it’s wearing them is not gone into.
 
The Grouch of Christmas Past shows Oscar two visions, although they’re not specifically related to his own life, but more general. It’s here that you realise that, actually, this is quite a cheap-and-cheerful affair, as almost everything Oscar is shown by all of the spirits by which he’s visited consists of archive material from previous Sesame Street productions.

This works well with the very first vision, however, a sweet little lesson about the gift of giving starring Sesame stalwarts Bert and Ernie. It works well because its archive nature is in its favour; it also features Sesame Street’s famous – and by this point long-dead – local store owner Mr Hooper, so would have been a nice little nostalgia-fest for some of the parents watching this with their own children when it came out.
 
The second vision shows Big Bird missing his / her / its best friend Snuffy on Christmas Eve, and singing a song to him / her / it down the phone. Not being particularly well-versed in Sesame Street I wasn’t sure if this was also archive material or newly-shot, although it became clear as things went along that all of the main visions were from previous Sesame Christmas productions.
 
Present:
Specifically labelled as a ‘Ghost’ this time, the Ghost of Christmas Present is a cheery talking Christmas tree which springs from a jack-in-the-box again delivered by Joe Marley. Once again it’s rendered in CGI, which I’m not sure really meshes particularly well with the traditional puppetry of Oscar. Certainly, character of Oscar must be about fifty years old by now, and looks much less dated than the CGI does here.

Anyway, she shows Oscar four more visions. Firstly, a couple of excerpts from an Elmo Christmas special where he meets Father Christmas and then later sings a song about realising it would be rubbish if it were Christmas every day. She then serves up a traditional Sesame Street educational segment, showing two families celebrating Hannukah and Kwanzaa, with a child from each family explaining to the viewer in voiceover a little about the respective festivals.
 
There’s a song to finish with, and Big Bird being reunited with Snuffy in a sequel scene to the one we saw in the ‘Past’ section, clearly lifted from the same previous special.

Yet to Come:
Nothing frightening or imposing here – no black-cloaked figure of death, but instead another cheery CGI creation. This one a sort of flying robotic football, a little reminiscent of those things from Terrahawks.
 
It only shows Oscar one vision, an animated short done in a kind of Hanna-Barbera style, showing a family taking a trip on a kind of theme park ride which shows them what Christmas will be like in the future, with pre-decorated trees and the like. One of the children of the family points out that they already have those.

What’s To-Day:
There’s a brief wrap-up section where Oscar emerges from his trashcan on a bright Christmas morning, and the whole thing appears to have actually been a dream. The ‘Joe Marley’ puppet is recycled as ‘Joey Dickens’, who sort of takes the role of the passing boy Scrooge hails from his window in the book. He’s come to bring Oscar a gift – a big sicky ball of used wrapping paper. Oscar in return gives him a smelly old shoe. It’s interesting to note that Oscar does not appear to have been significantly changed in any particular way by his experience.

Review:
This is an interesting one in the sense that it’s clearly a cut-and-shut job mostly made up of linking material shot on a single set with a very limited number of characters, around already-existing material, and obviously aimed at very young children. And yet in spite of all of that, it remains surprisingly watchable. Throughout the whole thing, Oscar has some nice lines moaning about and generally mocking everything, and the script never takes itself too seriously.
 
There are some nice gags at the expense of modern living, such as Oscar being asked by Joe Marley to rate the service he has received, and the vintage Bert and Ernie sequence is pleasant to see. Perhaps surprising, too, given that an important part of it revolves around a cigar box – an empty one, admittedly, but not something you’d expect a production for very young children to be allowed to make any reference to these days. So I’m pleased they didn’t feel this precluded them from including it.
 
Obviously it’s all very insubstantial, but against the low bar I judge all such child-focused versions against – the 2006 CGI monstrosity – it’s vastly superior. A direct-to-video… I hate to say ‘cash in’, but… Well, anyway, whatever it is, it has at least had a certain amount of care and attention taken with it, as you’d expect from the Sesame Workshop. The only criticism I’d made would be the use of CGI ghosts instead of puppets, and the Hanna Barbera-style animation – neither of which felt as if they sat particularly well alongside the more traditional Sesame Street techniques.
 
In a nutshell:
Better than it needs to be for what it is. But then again, what it is is a direct-to-video linking story around a whole load of old clips.
 
Links:
Muppet Wiki
IMDb