Hi ho! On this day in 1992, everybody’s favorite mistle-toad, Kermit the Frog, and the rest of the merry Muppet gang first brought snow business cheer to audiences in The Muppet Christmas Carol, the fourth Muppets movie. In this first film made after the untimely death of Muppets creator Jim Henson, the original Muppet crew continued making spirits bright, including Dave Goelz, who started his Muppet career in 1973 and first brought life to Gonzo in The Muppet Show. “My great joy in that film is that the film came off as a really faithful rendition to the feeling of Dickens,” he said. “I just really loved working with Michael Caine, he’s just a wonderful actor, so disciplined and yet easy to work with. The interesting part of the movie and one of the reasons it works so well was that when Jerry Juhl was writing it, he really wanted to find a way to get the Dickensian narrative prose in. To add a disembodied narrator would have intruded into the film so he came up with the idea of using Gonzo as sort of a Greek chorus, an unseen Charles Dickens, narrating and bridging the story. It worked incredibly well, and he also came up with the idea of adding a sidekick for Gonzo, who was Rizzo, and that sort of began their relationship as a duo.”
