Hacker Cinema
The Muppet Christmas Carol
1992 · Film · 86 min
Directed by Brian Henson
A retelling of the classic Dickens tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, miser extraordinaire. He is held accountable for his dastardly ways during nighttime visitations by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Peter Parker for one. > Hey guys, you ever see that really old movie, The Empire Strikes Back
As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially
A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
I've subjected my kids to a few old films from well before they were born, but they were films from my youth -- Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Men in Black, Muppet Christmas Carol etc. And yes they've seen Star Wars, which was from before I was born (just), but that's an ongoing franchise.
I don't see them watching films from the 1960s like I did though, and I doubt they'll make their kids sit through films from the 90s.
The Muppet Christmas Carol is a great film.
One thing I find very striking about it is that it felt free to swing between being a Muppets movie and being a faithful rendition of the story according to whatever was better for the movie. There are two Marleys in the Muppet Christmas Carol, because the best Muppet personality match to Jacob Marley is a set of two Muppet characters. That's great. But then on the other end, when Dickens has produced a great piece of writing that doesn't translate well to film... Rizzo the Rat can whip out his copy of the book and just read that passage to the audience. Even better!
Someone had a vision for this movie and did an amazing job.
> I feel like since then we have somewhat lost the capability to make these sorts of movies.
Copyright is a big problem here. If you want to find the best possible version of a story, you need to let different people experiment with different ways of telling it.
This is the article I had read: https://www.vulture.com/2022/12/muppet-christmas-carol-song-when-love-is-gone-song-returning.html
In it they say Disney cut it - I had read elsewhere it wasn’t an order but they definitely seemed to have pushed it despite what he wanted.
That article says they then lost it after.
>” While the scene was cut from the theatrical release, Henson very much wanted it to be included. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in November, Henson explained that Jeffrey Katzenberg (yes, the Quibi one, who was then in charge of Disney) was the one who had the scene cut. “He’s like, ‘It’s just a little too adult-emotional for little kids to stay connected,’” Henson recalled Katzenberg saying, adding that the film “certainly plays well without the song, but I obviously preferred having the song in. I think it’s good for kids to be pulled into deeply emotional moments, even if they feel slightly awkward about it when they’re in a movie theater.” According to Henson, Disney lost the original footage soon after, but efforts have been made to recover it. “For years and years, I’d call them every six months and see how they were doing. And they actually even put together a team and a little budget to try to find it, and they still couldn’t,” he told EW. “It’s very frustrating.””
Also at the end of the movie the last song is a throw back “when love is found” which loses some meaning with the other song cut.
The gulf between homage and derivative work is quite wide. Consider a few examples of famous derivative works: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Apocalypse Now, Muppet Christmas Carol. Right now there are no less than 3 different ongoing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (the movie series, the BBC series, and CBS's Elementary series).
These are works that would be patently illegal if the source material were not in the public domain. This isn't just about "remix culture", it's about being able to adapt and interpret what's out there, fully and without restriction. Clearly there is value to allowing such artistic freedom once a work has grown sufficiently old. However, today that age has grown quite impractically long. A movie such as War of the Worlds (a 110+ year old book) can be made without seeking a licensing agreement, but movies such as The Hobbit (a 75 year old book), King Kong (79 years), The Chronicles of Narnia (62 years), Casino Royale (59 years), or The Dark Knight Rises (73 years) still require licensing.
And the sad part is that even in the next 20 years when, say, the Superman IP will be pushing 100 years old and Mickey Mouse even older it seems likely that such things will still require licensing.
The fact that the current IP laws have not utterly destroyed creativity or the productivity of creative industries is not a ringing endorsement. The fact is that they are stifling and they have been responsible for creating an industry which is too heavily controlled by a small group.