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

The Muppet Christmas Carol

My plan for this blog was to try and save most of the big, famous versions of the story until towards the end, so I had something to look forward to and was also discovering and helping others to discover less familiar versions. However, ever since I revealed to friends and colleagues last week that I was doing this, the one reaction pretty much anyone who’s noticed has had to the idea has been “Have you done / when are you doing the Muppets?”

So, here we are…

Title:

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Format:

Colour feature film

Country:

USA (for the money, companies and production talent, although it was primarily shot in the UK)

Production company:

Jim Henson Productions, for Walt Disney Pictures

Year:

1992

Length:

86 minutes

Setting:

A fantastical version of Victorian London, where puppets and talking animals and even talking vegetables live alongside humans without comment.

Background:

Created by Jim Henson, the Muppets had become phenomenally popular through their series The Muppet Show in the late 1970s, made for sale in the USA but produced in the UK after Henson had failed to find backing in his own country. The Muppet Christmas Carol has a similarly transatlantic background, with the finance and most of the creative input coming from the States, but the film actually being shot at Shepperton Studios in the UK.

The success of the Muppets had first seen them hit cinema screens with The Muppet Movie in 1979, but The Muppet Christmas Carol was their first big screen outing since The Muppets Take Manhattan in 1984. It was also their first feature film to be made after the death of the original creative force behind them, Jim Henson, who had died in 1990, and their first movie to be based on a literary source, something they would repeat with the subsequent Muppet Treasure Island. It was also the first Muppet production to be distributed by Disney – they would go on to purchase the Muppets outright in 2004.

On its original release in 1992, The Muppet Christmas Carol was did not made a particularly huge impact in the cinema, although it did make a profit. However, it’s gone on to enjoy a long and hugely successful life on home media and on television, becoming a festive staple and an integral part of the Christmas season for millions.

Cast and crew:

Michael Caine was not yet a knight of the realm at this point, and had yet to win his second Oscar, but he did already have one Academy Award under his belt, as well as nearly thirty years as one of Britain’s highest-profile film stars. He had undergone something of a career dip in the late eighties and early nineties, appearing in all manner of tat as long as it paid well, but whether by accident or design here he ended up taking on a role that will long be remembered as one of the defining ones of his career. There can be no doubt that for several generations of children for from The Muppet Christmas Carol is the first – or indeed, only – exposure to Dickens’s story, Caine is Scrooge, and he’s no bad one at that.

This was the first Muppet feature film to be made after the death of their creator and driving force Jim Henson in 1990, and the film is dedicated to his memory, along with that of fellow Muppet performer Richard Hunt, who had died at the beginning of 1992. In spite of these losses, the team is on fine form, with Brian Henson stepping into his father’s shoes as director, and Steve Whitmire replacing Henson as Kermit the Frog, the most famous of all the Muppets (although playing a supporting role as Bob Cratchit here). I am sure Muppet experts can tell the difference, but for a more casual viewer like me it’s hard to tell that it isn’t Henson doing the work, as Whitmire seems spot on.

Writer Jerry Juhl had been the lead writer on The Muppet Show, the original success story, and he brings all of the wit, creativity and verve that was so often on display there to his task of adapting Dickens for the world of the Muppets. He was clearly a man who admired the source material, and it shows – there’s even a line at the end telling the audience that if they enjoyed this, then they should read the book!

"Humbug!"

Underdone Potato:

Part of the charm of this film is that it is “narrated” on screen by Dave Goelz-as-Gonzo-as-Charles Dickenks, accompanied by Steve Whitmire as Rizzo the Rat. Their presence, interjections and relation of some of the original prose of the book really adds a level to the film, and I don’t think it would be quite the same – nor quite as well-loved – without them.

In the initial scene in the counting house, a new character of “Mr Applegate” is added, someone whose home Scrooge is about to repossess, presumably to demonstrate just what a nasty character he is. Applegate is a fairly anonymous Muppet, but does get one of the film’s best lines – “thank you for not shouting at me!”

Steven Mackintosh is not one of the best Freds there’s been, and sadly he loses a lot of the character’s best dialogue – the “fellow passengers” speech is unfortunately absent. There is an interesting change made in that Fred remains present for the visit of the two charitable gentlemen – a perfectly cast Bunsen and Beaker.

The cheeriness of Bob/Kermit’s One More Sleep ‘Til Christmas is nicely undercut at the end of the song by the carol singer Scrooge had earlier seen off shivering and homeless in the cold. The scenes in Scrooge’s house all work very well, although while the Marleys’ – two of them, played by Statler and Waldorf! – song isn’t bad, it does come at the expense of losing most of the original dialogue from the scene. While this doesn’t matter hugely when the intent and message are still there, I do always miss it whenever anyone leaves out the fact that it’s (the) Marley(s) who procured this chance of redemption for Scrooge. They do, however, get a nice moment where they point out what a dreadful old pun the “more of gravy than of grave” line is!

Past:

The Ghost of Christmas Past is an extremely well done original puppet creature, created very cleverly by filming the puppet in a water tank to give it a floating, ethereal presence. It’s clearly a female spirit rather than androgynous as in the book, but is still very much within the… er… spirit of what Dickens suggests, I think.

We see Scrooge at school, although there is no Fan to come and take him away in this version – she’s omitted entirely, which means we lose the dialogue between Scrooge and the spirit about Fred, further taking away some of his presence in the film.

The casting of Fozzie Bear as “Fozziwig” was perhaps irresistible, and for any long-term viewer of the Muppets it’s great to see so many familiar characters in this scene. This includes Statler and Waldorf, with the film perhaps taking a leaf from the book of the 1951 Alastair Sim version by having (the) Marley(s) working at Fezziwig / Fozziwig’s alongside Scrooge.

Like many other adaptations, this version brings Belle to the party. We then see her breaking off the engagement to Scrooge a few years later, and depending on which version of the film you’re watching you may or may not then have to suffer Belle singing a fairly dreadful song. As with a lot of versions, they don’t show Belle at home happily married to her eventual husband on the Christmas Eve when (the) Marley(s) die(s).

Unusually, they're not the stars - but it wouldn't be a Muppet movie without these two!

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present is another original puppet, this one closely resembling the traditional depiction of the character as large, jolly and bearded. His initial exchanges with Scrooge provide one of the very few jarring examples of Jerry Juhl’s script trying a bit too hard to make the story more accessible to younger viewers – Scrooge’s remark about the spirit’s 1800-plus brothers being “a tremendous family to provide for” becomes “Imagine the grocery bills!”

We see the two traditional visions usually provided, of the Cratchits at home and Fred and his wife and their friends at their party. The scene at Fred’s is quite short, and loses something in that we only see them mocking Scrooge in their game, and not the kind words Fred usually has to say about his uncle at this juncture.

Seeing Miss Piggy as Mrs Cratchit and her and Bob/Kermit’s little family of pigs and frogs is a joy, though, and this scene is pretty much played straight and by-the-book. I love the production design of the street on which the Cratchits live, with its skew-whiff, higgledy-piggledy houses that really do look like something out of a faitytale.

The spirit ages, as in the book, although quite suddenly towards the end of his sequence, rather than gradually across it. There are no Ignorance and Want, which is usually a sign that the message of the story has been softened a little, although any thoughts of that are excised by the following section…

Yet to Come:

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is everything you would want of the spirit – tall, hooded, imposing and silent. The film itself signals that things are going to be taken very seriously here, with our narrators Gonzo and Rizzo decide to scamper off and leave the viewers to it until the finale.

We have the businessmen discussing Scrooge’s death all present and correct, and then a slightly truncated but basically all there version of the scene with Old Joe being sold Scrooge’s belongings. I can only imagine how surprised audiences back in 1992 must have been by what then follows, with Kermit and Migg Piggy basically doing ‘straight acting’, as it were, mourning the death of Tiny Tim… Robin the Frog, dead! Bob/Kermit gets to keep the line about “…this first parting between us,” from the book, all of which helps add to the impact of the scene.

Scrooge then comes, as he must, to have his grave and admit to himself who it was who was being talked of earlier… There’s a nice little bit of business from Caine here, as with a movement of the arm and a half a glance to the spirit, he tries to indicate a sort of “surely you actually meant this stone over here, didn’t you…? Oh…”

What’s To-Day:

I can’t remember if this is done in other versions, although it may be – the boy Scrooge calls down to after his redemption is the same carol singer who he chased away from his business at the start of the film. (Bean Bunny, for those of you who know your Muppets!)

This is quite a well-known bit of trivia now, I think, but watch out for shopfronts bearing the names of Statler and Waldorf, and Caine’s own real name, Micklewhite.

We see Scrooge briefly visit Fred, and he does make up with the two charitable gentlemen as well – receiving Beaker’s scarf in return, which is rather nice. (Incidentally, is Beaker – clearly addressed as such earlier on – the only Muppet in the film aside from the narrators who maintains his Muppet name ‘in character’ in the story…?)

While various other adaptations have had Scrooge visit the Cratchits’ household in person after his redemption, and have had him be there to pretend to be angry at Bob not being at work, the Muppets take this pretence to its logical conclusion and have Mrs Cratchit absolutely furious at him and determined to give him a piece of her mind, until all is revealed.

Gonzo-as-Dickens, of course, gets some of the closing narration from the book, which is often included, sometimes read by a narrator and sometimes by the character of Fred – there can rarely have been a more triumphant “who did NOT die!” when it’s being delivered, though. Everyone and their brother is then at the Cratchits’ household for the final singalong, so it’s just as well that such a big turkey was sent for. The film as whole, however, is very far from being a turkey of any size.

Our intrepid narrator... plus the one who's only here for the food!

Review:

In some features about Michael Caine and his career, I have seen this film dismissed as being a part of his “I’ll do anything, me…” phase, when he was appearing in absolutely any old tat that paid well, not bothered about the end result as long as it paid for a new house or a swimming pool. Perhaps that may be true – perhaps Caine was only in this for the money. But if that is the case, then not only did he get incredibly lucky, but he’s also capable of putting in a pretty decent performance for a man who’s not that bothered.

Make no mistake, ultimately this is the film for which Caine will be remembered down the decades. When the likes of The Italian Job, Alfie and Zulu have faded from the memories of anyone other than the film buffs and media historians, this will still be a great festive favourite, beloved of the generations.

And that is no bad legacy for anybody to have, because it is a wonderful film.

The decision to cast Gonzo as a narrating ‘Charles Dickens’ was a stroke of genius, and fits in perfectly with the style of the book, and indeed of Dickens’s writing generally. For although A Christmas Carol is written in the third person, it is not simply told. It really is narrated by Dickens, with a narrative voice which quite happily and frequently stops to chat to you along the way – hence why Dickens always had such great success with it as a public reading.

Gonzo’s cheekiness works well with conveying Dickens’s tone, and enables the inclusion of some great bits of Dickens’s non-dialogue writing which usually has to be left out of most adaptations. There have been narrators before in other versions, of course – such as Vincent Price in the 1949 television version. But in that version Price was separate from the action, reading the book somewhere else. This is as if he’d stepped onto the set and joined in, and it’s amazing to think that nobody else has ever tried this, although admittedly it may be difficult to make it work in a more ‘straight’ adaptation of the story.

All of the other pieces of Muppet casting work excellent as well, down to Fozzie Bear as a renamed ‘Fozziwig’ in the Christmas Past section. The one which probably does just pull you up short is Statler and Waldorf as the Marley Brothers. I have no problem with there being two Marleys, but the fact that we are so familiar with these two and their usual Muppet characterisations means that it’s actually quite difficult to imagine them having any kind of guilt or repentance for their meanness. This is why the casting of Caine as Scrooge and of brand new, traditional to Dickens creations as the three spirits, works much better, as we don’t have as much of a pre-conceived, fully-formed idea of their characters.

Aside from that, if there is a weak link here then it’s the songs, a traditional stumbling point for any musical version of the story. The opening number, Scrooge, is wonderful, but that’s part of the problem – it sets such a high standard that none of the others ever quite live up to it. One More Sleep ‘Til Christmas, Marley and Marley and It Feels Like Christmas are okay, but everything else is a touch over-saccharine for me, the latter being a constant issue which Carol adaptations have to beware of. This is mainly a problem with the lyrics, however – the music itself is lovely, and works very well as an opening theme.

Overall, though, these are minor quibbles. Adults may cringe a bit during one or two of the songs, but outside of that this is an utter delight from end to end, a film that really does seem to have something for everyone. It’s terrific fun, but unlike some of the other versions aimed primarily at a younger audience, it doesn’t really pull any of the story’s punches, with perhaps the exception of the absence of Ignorance and Want at the end of the Christmas Present section. If you’re a fan of the Carol but haven’t seen this adaptation, then I beseech you to seek it out immediately – it’ll be the best Christmas gift to yourself that you could possibly have.

In a nutshell:

One of the ‘Big Four’ adaptations of the Carol which stand head and shoulders above the others. Real love and effort clearly went into this, and the end result is superb.

Links:
Muppet Wiki

Wikipedia

IMDb