This topic is raised directly when Bunsen and Beaker implore Scrooge for a donation to help the poor and homeless. As a child, the novelist was sent to work in a shoeblacking factory while his father was locked in a debtor’s prison. The only way that Bob Cratchit can persuade him to give his workers Christmas Day off is by appealing to his bottom line - since all the other businesses will be closed, it would be a waste of heating fuel to remain open.Īs Gareth Jenkins has pointed out, the class consciousness Dickens expressed in stories like A Christmas Carol was informed by his own life experiences.
Such levity is intolerable to Scrooge, who prizes profitability over all other values. Like the kitchen rats in The Muppets Take Manhattan, who scat sing and bang out rhythms on pots and pans while they mix batter and grease the griddle, these office rats build fun into their workday. The Muppets are inherently lovable and delightful the fact that Scrooge has nothing for contempt for them can only be the result of a kind of warped value system - the only human character in the room is the one who exhibits the least humanity.Īs soon as Scrooge leaves his office, the gloomy room becomes a cavern of strange wonders, as rats in waistcoats catapult each other into the air and use the furnace to give each other steam baths as they tidy up. By casting Scrooge as a human in a world mostly populated by Muppets, The Muppet Christmas Carol emphasizes the distance this kind of logic creates between haves and have-nots. With the character of Scrooge, Dickens creates an almost cartoonish personification of the cutthroat callousness and greed that animates capitalist logic. When the rats line up behind Cratchit to petition for another shovelful of coal to warm the freezing office, Scrooge responds by threatening to fire all of them. Scrooge then rhapsodizes about how December is “harvesttime for the moneylenders” as borrowers fall behind on their loan payments. “Very well, you may gift wrap them,” the boss retorts, placing an oversize pile of documents in the frog’s skinny arms. “Tomorrow is Christmas, Sir,” Cratchit protests. Cratchit,” Scrooge sneers as he returns to his desk. “Let us deal with the eviction notices for tomorrow, Mr. Scrooge picks him up and tosses him into the street, drawing frightened winces from his undercompensated clerk Bob Cratchit (played by Kermit the Frog) and a chorus of pencil-pushing office rats. Applegate is waiting to ask him for forbearance on his mortgage. When he arrives at his office on Christmas Eve, a Muppet named Mr. Scrooge is introduced as a “moneylender” who makes his fortune by renting out “dark and drafty houses” to the poor. “Harvesttime for the Moneylenders”Īt the heart of The Muppet Christmas Carol is Michael Caine’s icy portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge - “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” whose only love is making money - and even that doesn’t make him happy. As holiday films go, you can’t do much better. But perhaps more than any other work in the Muppet catalog, The Muppet Christmas Carol is a story of moral transformation with a powerful message of social responsibility.
Like all Muppet movies, The Muppet Christmas Carol is perfectly calibrated to entertain children and adults simultaneously, weaving silliness with serious insights. Much of its comic relief comes from the slapstick antics of Rizzo, who remains Gonzo’s faithful sidekick despite being set on fire, frozen solid, squished, flung into a snowbank, stuck in a chimney, and partially cooked along with the Cratchit family’s Christmas goose. The Muppet version is narrated by Gonzo, assuming the role of Charles Dickens and using passages lifted directly from the text to frame the action. The story’s sentimentality is both tempered and deepened by the presence of Muppets, who add warmth and humor to the source material.
GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST MUPPETS SERIES
The film is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, the story of a miserly misanthrope who is visited by a series of spirits on Christmas Eve. So begins The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), the fourth feature film starring the Muppets and the first to be produced by Jim Henson’s heirs following the creator’s untimely demise. Gonzo admonishes him, but Rizzo snaps back with an economic self-justification: “Hey, I’m creating scarcity! Drives the prices up.” Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat are selling apples for a tuppence a piece, but Rizzo keeps eating the inventory. It’s Christmastime, and the cobblestone streets of London are packed with pigs in top hats trucking cartloads of talking vegetables.
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