It’s frustrating when something you love becomes a meme. Perhaps it’s just the digital methane that makes up my popping, winking algorithmic social media bubble, but November 1st, which, depending on your liturgical flavour, used to be best known as All Saints Day, or one of a couple of Days of the Dead, is now much more recognisably as the day that the Muppet Christmas Carol memes start.
Halloween is over! So bring on the identikit Mariah Carey TikToks, and following that, a thousand captioned stills of Rizzo the Rat and Gonzo (the ?) flying through the air, the Ghost of Christmas Past floating diaphanously in the air like a blob of mayonnaise in a bucket of water, and the crowning glory: BTS shots of Michael Caine in full top hat and tails surrounded by his knee-height fuzz co-stars, a towering Gulliver of human flesh completely outnumbered in felt Lilliput.
Let’s face it: these memes are annoying. The sheer weight of them is exhausting on its own. But it’s also something about the people who post them. Every year, people who obsess over Muppet Christmas Carol become more and more like the creepy goons of the Muppets’ parent company - Disney adults. These are grown human beings with jobs and responsibilities and ISAs who have forgotten that nostalgia only maintains its delicious honeysweet sting when the objects of its fantasy remain in the past. Rose-tinted spectacles only work if you occasionally take them off. Every year, the ever-so-slightly-self-aware fandom that sickly twinkles in their eyes at the prospect of a new live-action Beauty & the Beast reboot spin-off prequel from the perspective of the chest-of-drawers seeps fungally further across our cultural landscape, spores wafting into even the most niche of our IPs. And that now means The Muppets. The Muppets have gone off.
And yet. Despite my Scrooge-like tendencies, I do genuinely love the Muppets, and particularly Muppet Christmas Carol, which has drama, and gags, and, I will admit, staying power. The Muppets have that iconic strength, that stickiness, partly because, of course, Jim Henson made them colourful, and naive, and funny. Obviously it helps to have a banging story too, even better if you can nick it from Dickens. But, and hear me out on this, I also think the Muppets have stuck in the cultural consciousness for so long and with such repeatability because they are…quite scary.
Think about it. Obviously in the confines of the narrative they are just the entertaining showmen of a variety night, but in the real world - where they so often find themselves - they are fucking creepy. Think of their eyes - wide, buggish, alien, predatorial. Think of the way they move in a herd, panicked, screaming, jerking their bodies around, flinging their arms in the air. Think of the few times when you see a Muppet’s legs. The way their bandy linguine-like limbs move gingerly, jankily, across the ground, without a puppeteer in sight. Now imagine that in the real world. Imagine you saw Kermit advancing slowly towards you in broad daylight across a park. You would run a fucking mile. And it’s not just Kermit - imagine any of the Muppets just staring at you quietly across a room. It puts the chills in me. There’s something very wrong about them. Somehow, Jim Henson managed to smuggle the haunted ventriloquist dummy into modern entertainment, and we’ve all behaved like that was absolutely fine.
Even conceptually, the Muppets are disconcerting. Where the Sesame Street crew exist in a sweeter, clarified realm, to teach morals and the alphabet to children, the Muppets’ intentions are much shadier. Who are they? What do they want? A failed theatre troupe with no fixed business address presided over by a repressed frog in an abusive relationship with a violent pig. A rock/honkytonk band, perpetually half-cut, kept to time by a drummer who is chained to the stage, like a K-Pop starlet in an exploitative contract, the Animal. A suicidal amateur daredevil. Burlesque chickens. And worst of all, a comedian. Are they really a business? Or a cult? A commune? A mixed-species polycule? If they are just a creative troupe - why do they have an in-house scientist? What is connecting these people? It wouldn’t be a surprise if the Muppets were the combined subletting tenants of a warehouse in Manor House. The whole thing has the whiff of, at best, tax evasion, at worst, an orgy interrupted.
That inherent unpredictability, that scariness, gives the Muppet movies jeopardy. You actually don’t know how moral they are, whether their characters will be virtuous or villainous, what they stand for, when their bursts of anger will arrive. And, crucially, in the very best of the Muppet films, as they operate in real-world, immersive environments, the consequences of their chaos have real edge.
That’s why the world they occupy has to be chosen with such care. The more recent Muppet films - The Muppets (2011), Muppets Most Wanted (2014) - really fail this test because they locate the Muppets in fake cartoonish worlds where anything can happen, Hannah Barbera-style, Looney Tunes-like. Where’s the jeopardy? Where’s the third dimension? What you need to achieve the full escapist effect is a rollicking, sweeping orchestral score and a practically-built, immersive locale - the swooping Dickensian rooftops in Muppet Christmas Carol, the genuine naval timber of Muppet Treasure Island, the ‘50s Hollywood stage sets of The Muppet Movie. Hell, even the ‘90s Late Night talk show sound-stages of the TV show Muppets Tonight. These are real environs, replete with the kind of attention to detail that makes people return again and again to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Experience or a Blade Runner Secret Cinema, like moths to an LED.
The debate rages online about whether Disney should do another classic adaptation film, and often the arguments miss the mark completely. No, obviously, they should not remake other movies. Yes, obviously, there should be good corresponding characters to cast the Muppets as, with a balanced sense of hierarchy and ensemble. Yes, obviously, there should be one or at most a handful of human actors to compliment the vast array of puppets. No, obviously, it should not be someone too famous who comes with too much cultural baggage. Yes, obviously, it should be a British character actor. And yes, obviously, of course, they should play it, to quote the meme, ‘as straight as a car crash’.
But the real decisions are all about setting. As far as I see it you have three options. You could go full Gothic - do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The sweeping Transylvanian castle would be breath-taking, the potential for an angry mob has good comic potential, but perhaps there’s too much re-tread of Christmas Carol with the supernatural elements. Plus, the Muppets have already done a Haunted House movie. You could try something a bit more rural and English - Wind in the Willows, Robin Hood. The Hensons have form in doing a mean forest scenario with the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth - big gnarled oaks, fireflies, the giant Sweetums brandishing a big wooden staff. Perhaps the richest seam is some kind of country manor-adjacent comedy of manners - Pride and Prejudice, any Agatha Christie - but I fear for the lack of movement, of adventure, plenty of buckles, but none of them getting swashed.
Perhaps it’s best we just let the tired musical-variety-sex-cult of the Muppets lie low for a bit. They are in their 70s after all. If they did make a new film, however perfect it was, the internet would inevitably dice it up into memes within a month, carving and slicing it until there was nothing left. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, I don’t know, but maybe we should all just restrain ourselves. I watch Muppet Christmas Carol once a year with my family, which is just enough to germinate the central kernel of nostalgia within it without overexposing it to the sun and letting it go to seed. Any more that that is, I’m sorry, indulgence.
Ben’s Gigs
A couple of fun gigs coming up to round off the year! See you there…
Nov 26th - Ben Pope: Work in Progress @ The Bill Murray, Angel
Dec 9th - Alex & Ben’s Christmas Carousel
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