Muppets at Christmas

A non-alcoholic eggnog toast to Paul Williams*

1992 was a good year. I graduated high school and escaped my home life, and that was the year of The Muppet Christmas Carol. I am pretty sure I saw it in a theater, though my memory from that time period is admittedly hazy.

I always disliked Charles Dickens as a rule. I found A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations to be exceptionally dry and uninteresting. I recall one of my English teachers in high school mentioning that Dickens spent time in debtors prison and was being paid by the word, which honestly explains a lot. I do think the book A Christmas Carol is good, but partly because it is mercifully short. The turbo version is that a very stingy rich landowner with no friends gets visited by ghosts who scare him into becoming a good person by making him face his past and possible future. It’s been interpreted on film numerous times. The first one I ever was was the one with George C. Scott, but the one with Patrick Stewart is also pretty great. I’m also a fan of Scrooged with Bill Murray.

A lot of holiday music grates on me, but I also can paradoxically be a total softie for the right music or movies or TV specials. Two of my favorites are Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas and The Muppet Christmas Carol. Both are Jim Henson produced Muppet musicals. Both are only tangentially about Christmas, when you really think about it. And, like with the Muppet Movie, all the songs for both were written by Paul Williams. Paul Williams, or (@paulielama2 on Instagram) is a prolific songwriter who in addition to writing for the Muppets was also responsible for Carpenters “We’ve Only Just Begun” and Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” from A Star is Born, the latter of which won him a little gold statue at the Academy Awards.

Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas is out on the internet somewhere, not on Disney+. Not sure why, but it’s not. I remember first seeing it when I was 5 (1980) on HBO, but according to IMDB, it was released in 1977. The story revolves around music, as Emmet Otter, and his mother, Alice Otter, enjoy singing together and apart throughout the tale, so music is a character of its own in the story. The below Spotify list is the soundtrack in all its glory.

The essential story is a riff on The Gift of the Magi. Emmet decides to enter the talent contest so he can win money to buy his mother a present for Christmas, but he has to put a hole in the washtub she uses for work so he can make a washtub bass. Alice decides to enter the talent contest so she can win money to buy Emmet a guitar for Christmas, so she hawks the tool kit Emmet uses to do odd jobs so she can buy material for a costume. Neither win. The prize goes to a heavy metal band called The Nightmare, but Emmet (and his jugband) and Alice get jobs playing music at the local restaurant, which is worth more than $50 in the long-run. I love it because the lesson it tries to teach is that sometimes not getting exactly what you want can lead you toward something better.

The thing that’s great about the songwriting specifically is that Paul Williams has created different styles for different characters. He wasn’t writing in his own voice, he was writing for the characters. Perhaps there was some of his voice in there, since he also wrote Rainbow Connection, and tonally, When the River Meets the Sea gives me the same kind of feels as Rainbow Connection, which he wrote for The Muppet Movie, but still, he also wrote Riverbottom Nightmare Band, featuring such great lyrics as “we don’t brush our teeth so our toothache can help us stay mean.” I mean I don’t care who you are, that’s gold.

Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas was a story with music in it, so it was kind of exempt from the ‘rule’ in musicals that the songs move the story forward. A Muppet Christmas Carol; however, was a traditional musical, and it was written as such. Also I daresay that not only does the song “Marley and Marley” move the plot forward, it is also way creepier than many other non-musical versions!

Below is the Spotify link to the Muppet Christmas Carol soundtrack, which actually has more songs than the film, but includes instrumental interludes, and credits each song with vocals to the Muppet or character that sings it. The songs that were not included in the movie either didn’t move the story forward (“Room in Your Heart", “Chairman of the Board”) or made the movie studio sad because they didn’t understand the story (“When Love is Gone.”) Also mad respect to Michael Caine for playing the entire film as though he was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

So we watched Emmet Otter and Muppet Christmas Carol a couple days ago, and this morning I did a yearly holiday themed 5K race called the Reindeer Run. I usually like to put on Christmas music while I’m running this race, so I queued up the Muppet Christmas Carol soundtrack. I can’t really say why I enjoy it so much. Part of it is nostalgia, and part of it is that it’s just really great.

Anyways, you can thank songwriter extraordinaire Paul Williams for all of this, and even if he hadn’t written anything other than Muppet stuff (and I didn’t even touch The Muppet Movie), I think that’s a pretty damn fine legacy of making people happy through music.

*asterisk from the subheader: I am reasonably sure Mr. Williams would prefer the non-alcoholic toast, as would I.

Meanwhile, I got Whamageddoned a week ago. I don’t want to talk about it.