Thirty years ago, Brian Henson was hard to get hold of. His debut feature film, The Muppets Christmas Carol, was about to be released. “I was hiding in my apartment in London, on Parliament Hill,” he says. “Disney were very concerned that it wasn’t funny enough – that basically I had done a drama with the Muppets rather than a comedy. They knew it was a good script, they just wanted it funnier.
“The comedy is more situational,” he justifies. “It’s the absurdity of a character being a rabbit, that’s what’s funny, not what the character is doing.”
Brian didn’t need to hide. The film was a great success, and is now celebrated as a Christmas classic. Despite the cast largely consisting of puppets, it has humanity to spare. The message of love, community, generosity, forgiveness and the possibility of redemption is encapsulated perfectly, and three decades on more important than ever.
But it wasn’t just Scrooge who was saved by the film – the Muppets were too. The film grew from a place of great sadness. In 1990, at the age of 53, puppet pioneer Jim Henson died from pneumonia following a bacterial infection. For the best part of four decades, he had been revolutionising puppetry and storytelling was – and still is – exciting children across the world about letters, numbers and being a good person., starring its ragtag bunch of characters, became the biggest TV programme in the world by the end of the 1970s and spawned several big-screen movies. Through the 1980s there was also and a move into fantasy films, and , which remain hugely influential today.
