This Forgotten Muppet Gem Is the Perfect Christmas Movie

When the holiday season rolls around every year, many turn to their favorite Muppets film or special to get into the spirit. For the Boomers and Gen X, that means 1977's Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (streaming on Peacock) or 1979's John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together, or even the Henson multiverse epic, 1987's A Muppet Family Christmas. Meanwhile, Millennials grew up on 1992's The Muppet Christmas Carol or really eclectic television specials like 1995's Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree starring Robert Downey Jr., and the less remembered 2002 television Muppet movie, It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, which is currently streaming on Peacock.

One of only three Muppet feature length television projects, It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie is one of the franchise's under-the-radar holiday musical gems with a fascinating history. It remains NBC's only movie collaboration with Henson Studios, and the very last project to be made with the Muppets before they were acquired by The Walt Disney Company.

As directed by long-time Muppet creative Kirk R. Thatcher (Muppet Treasure Island), It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie is the rare story staged inside the famed Muppet Theater modeled from The Muppet Show. It also features a crazy range of acting talent, and manages to loosely parody It's a Wonderful Life, How The Grinch Stole Christmas! (streaming now on Peacock), Moulin Rouge, and Star Wars.

SYFY WIRE recently got on the phone with Thatcher to discuss how the movie came together and some of his favorite memories from the set.

The state of the Muppets when It’s A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie came out

Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy appear in It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) Photo: Courtesy of Everett Collection

Looking back at 2002, the Muppets were in a place of transition. Their last theatrical release was 1999's Muppets from Space, while their last television series was the Jim Henson created Muppets Tonight from 1996. Earlier in 2002, the Muppets were featured in the direct-to-video release of Kermit's Swamp Years. 

"At that point, I'd worked with the company for 15 years," Thatcher told SYFY WIRE. "The joke was, I'd worked there 15 years, so I was called the new guy."

NBC expressed enthusiastic interest in collaborating with The Jim Henson Company in making an exclusive, feature-length movie with the classic Muppet characters to air during the holidays. "NBC was like, 'We love the Muppets! We would love to have a TV movie/Christmas special,'" Thatcher said.

Fellow Muppets Tonight writer Jim Lewis was joined by writer Tom Martin (The Simpsons) to draft the screenplay using It's a Wonderful Life as the basic framework for the special, with Kermit as the George Bailey-esque character. The frog is despondent because Fozzie  loses the money needed to keep them from being evicted from their theater.

"They asked me if I wanted to direct it. And I said, 'Yeah, I would love to!'" Thatcher explained. "I'd done second unit on Muppets from Space." But this would be Thatcher's solo directorial debut, and he would help punch up the script with gags and musical additions. He added, "Disney had not bought the Muppets yet, so it was basically just going through NBC, which is why there's all these Easter eggs."

From Whoopi Goldberg to David Arquette, guest stars for days in It’s A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie

Thatcher said the project was cast with a huge array of great actors, some of whom were actively working on NBC projects like the cast of Scrubs, and others who were just fans, like David Arquette, Whoopi Goldberg, William H. Macy, and Matthew Lillard. 

For Thatcher, directing humans was a brand new skill, so he was thrilled to get to work with such enthusiastic A-listers. "We got Whoopi Goldberg as God," he said. "She's such a entity unto herself. I remember when she came out to Vancouver, she doesn't fly. So, she came out in her own tour bus. 

"David Arquette was great," he continued, with regards to Kermit's Guardian Angel. "He's a sweetheart. He loves magic and puppets and vaudeville. And then Joan Cusack was awesome."

In fact, this project was the first and only time Cusack worked with the Muppets, playing the unrepentantly mean Rachel Bitterman, who schemed to throw the Muppets out on the streets. "David was in his element, but she felt a little out of her element," Thatcher remembered. "There's a couple moments where I said, 'You can go bigger, bigger.' She just looked at me, like, 'Are you crazy?' And I said, 'You're playing against puppets.' So she does this big thing where she throws her hands up, and she's like, "I don't know what I'm doing." And I'm like, 'That's great!'

Thatcher also remembered that Scrubs star John C. McGinley, who played the infamously cranky Dr. Cox, was not much of a Muppet guy. "The [Scrubs team] were told that it would be an hour long shoot," Thatcher said of the sequence shot at the Scrubs sets in Los Angeles. "But of course, with puppets it was more like a half day. Particularly, John McGinley was not happy," he chuckled. "He's like, 'How long is this going to be?' But he was a professional and did it. It was nice to meet [creator] Bill Lawrence. Zach Braff and the others loved it. In fact, I met and worked with most of them since on other Muppet stuff."

"We also went to New York to shoot with Molly Shannon," he said. "I literally traveled more for that movie than anything else I've ever done."

Muppet Legacy Stories

Joan Cusack and all the muppets appear in It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002). Photo: Courtesy of Everett Collection

It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie opens with a hugely ambitious location shoot which shows the hustle and bustle of shoppers, Muppets, and even a Mel Brooks-voiced snowman narrator setting the stage for the movie's overall story and vibe.

"In terms of scale, it's the biggest one I've done," Thatcher said of his Muppet resume. "When we did that opening, we literally took up three blocks of a small town in Vancouver and snowed it with fake snow and had fake snow falling. We had like 60 to 80 extras. And we had Mel doing the voice of Joe Snow, which was riff on the snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

One of the most special elements of the movie is that its primary set is the Muppet Theater, which was modeled on the sets from the original The Muppet Show. "It was way larger than the one they actually shot on for the real The Muppet Show," Thatcher shared. "We built the actual theater. Like, you could walk from backstage where Kermit was and the dressing rooms, all the way to the top of the house. We worked really hard on it and had an amazing art director up in Vancouver. He got actual theater seats, and we packed it with a real audience for a day of shooting. People were super excited.

"We even held the set for two or three years up in Vancouver just because we thought, 'Gosh, we built the thing...'" Thatcher continued, recalling their hopes to reuse the set again. "Of course, Disney was not interested, which was frustrating. While it was being held, that's when Disney bought us, and then I think it was just a line item they didn't need to pay for anymore."

A personal win of great importance to Thatcher was the film's prominent use of Pepe the King Prawn (voiced and performed by Bill Barretta), who first debuted on Muppets Tonight. "I love that character and I was very involved in creating him," he shared. "When I started writing for the Muppets, which was in the mid '90s with Treasure Island, I kept saying, 'We need our Daffy Duck. We need our selfish jerk. Everyone is so nice to each other that it's mushy. It's becoming Sesame Street.'"

In the film, Pepe gets to play the bad guy for a bit when he leaves the troupe to do Bitterman's bidding as her toady. "Bill just brings so much craziness to it," Thatcher laughed. "It was great to have him be a key character in it, because he was new for a lot of people if they hadn't seen Muppets Tonight."

Directing also earned Thatcher some lifelong memories ,earning the praise of his venerable peers. "Brian Henson was super supportive," Thatcher remembered of the Muppeteer/executive producer who performed Scooter in the film. "He gave me some some pointers when I started, and said, 'You're doing great,' so that was really nice.

"But the biggest compliment I got was from Dave Goelz after two weeks of shooting," Thatcher said of Gonzo's voice and performer. "He came up to me, and put his hand on my shoulder — this was one of those 'bucket list' moments — and he goes, 'You know what? You found your calling. You are so good at this.' I was taken aback, because I wasn't expecting it. I was just happy they hadn't fired me. But he was just laughing and said, 'You know what you want, and it's fun, and you don't beat us to death with takes.'"

Looking back on It’s A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie two decades later

When It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie debuted November 29, 2002 on NBC, it was a huge hit for the Muppets and a ratings win for the network. Although it did have its detractors. Some in the audience were taken aback by the dark turns in the story after Kermit wishes he had never been born, resulting in a cheeky look at what the lives of friends would look like without him, including a single, cat-lady Miss Piggy and a cage dancing Scooter. 

Thatcher said he took the feedback with stride. "What I tried to bring over the years to the Muppets was being adult with a lot of silliness," he explained. "You can't do naughty with them, but you can do bananas. Ever since I first saw them, to me, they were Monty Python with puppets. When I started working with Jim, he absolutely agreed. And Jerry Juhl too, who I wrote with on Treasure Island. To me, if you're not doing crazy stuff, why are you doing it with the Muppets?"

Still working with the Muppets as a writer and director, Thatcher said of his first movie with them, "I had a blast. It was nice that the critics and audiences in general seemed to really vibe with it. Nobody talks about it much anymore because Disney bought them two years later. Which is why you don't see it promoted, because they don't own it. But I loved it because we got to do a classic Muppet stage play parody. We had the Muppet theater. We got to do Muppet theater bits. I got to have scenes with God. And then scenes in the world without Kermit were dark. It was fun to do all that stuff."

Watch It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas on Peacock all this month!