A Full Restoration of ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’ Featuring Lost Footage Coming to Disney+
Christmas came early!
The Muppet Christmas Carol came at a time when Muppet fortunes were waning. The Muppets Take Manhattan, while still very funny, made less than a third of The Muppet Movie’s take, and the whole franchise was beginning to no longer feel “hip.” So what did they do? They took just about the least hip story they could find, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and made a surprisingly charming and emotionally powerful feature from it.
It may not have been as funny as its predecessors, but it had something else — pathos.
In many ways, this was due to the return of the franchise’s golden goose, master song craftsman Paul Williams. Often referred to by him as his favorite score — he of Bugsy Malone, The Phantom of the Paradise and, of course, The Muppet Movie — it is therefore surprising that Jeffrey Katzenberg cut the pivotal opening song of the film When Love Is Gone.
Katzenberg alternately claimed that it slowed the film down and that it was “too mature for kids to understand.” It was removed from the theatrical release. Later home video versions restored the song to its rightful place at the opening of the movie but somewhere along the way the original film was lost, thus preventing the footage from being used in any sort of higher definition medium.
However, at a celebration of the film on Saturday at Disney’s D23 Expo, it was revealed that the lost film footage has been found and will be restored in new HD, and later 4k, releases.
The fully restored The Muppet Christmas Carol will be available to stream on Disney plus on December 11.
The celebration of the film included performances by The Muppets; interviews with Brian Henson, Paul Williams and Dave Goelz; and Jodi Benson singing a rendition of the now restored song.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times