From GQ, in 2016:
The best thing about Michael Caine is his laugh, which is a warm, loud “heh heh heh.” The second-best thing about Michael Caine is The Muppet Christmas Carol, the greatest puppet-based holiday film of all time. Caine sings. Caine does a restrained jig. Caine wears an old-timey dressing gown… Michael Caine loves it just as much as you do…
Michael Caine: To start, my daughter, who is the mother of my grandchildren, was then seven, and she had never seen me in a movie. I had never made a movie that a 7-year-old can see. And so a man mentioned the Muppets and I said, “That’s it! I’ll do that!” And it’s A Christmas Carol, it’s a fabulous tale! You’ll be old Scrooge, it’ll be marvelous! And it was absolutely perfect at that time for what I wanted. I could make it, and my daughter could see it. That’s why I did it. And it was lovely…
When you’re talking to Kermit, where do you look? Do you look him in the eye?
Yes. You look him straight in the eye. It’s like talking to a real actor. And the guy is just down below, buried in the floor. And it’s very funny when you see [the puppeteers] rehearsing, because they’re in the corner, and they haven’t got the dolls on their arms, and they’re just talking to each other with their hands. It’s very funny. One of the best things about it is that puppeteers, compared to actors, are much nicer, gentler, kinder people. They’re really the loveliest of people. I’d never worked with a cast where every single person was lovely. You always get a couple of actors who think too much of themselves. But these were all kind, gentle, loving people and I had the best time…
NYMag‘s culture blog Vulture, in 2017:
“You know you’re an alcoholic when you misplace a decade,” says songwriter Paul Williams. “And, essentially, the ’80s were gone for me.”…
Two months after Williams got sober, Jim Henson died.
“We already knew that Jim wanted the Muppets to live beyond him, because that’s why he was selling to Disney,” says Dave Goelz, a veteran Muppeteer best known as the Great Gonzo. “The question for us was: Were we up to it? Did we want to try it? And we all felt that it was our life’s work — it wasn’t just a job — so we decided to try.”
Rather than making yet another movie about the backstage antics of this zany menagerie, the team decided to cast the Muppets in roles from a classic book: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Jerry Juhl, head writer on The Muppet Show, wrote a screenplay that surrounded Dickens’s own prose and a human Ebenezer Scrooge — played by Michael Caine — with Kermit as Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy as Mrs. Cratchit, and Gonzo as the narrating Dickens himself. The result was a charmingly faithful adaptation of the famous redemption story, with a never-better Caine playing Scrooge utterly straight, treating his Muppet co-stars as if they were, as he said at the time, “the Royal Shakespeare Company.”…