I donât know if I can contain my âThe Muppet Christmas Carol has better costume design than most Oscar-nominated period dramasâ rant until after Thanksgiving you guys, I haveâŚso many Thoughts
Ok, buckle up kids.
Basically they did not have to go as hard as they did here. A Christmas Carol covers 60 years of fashion through flashbacks and they still manage to do nearly everything right.Â
Iâm mainly going to be talking about the human actors here because itâs harder to judge Muppet costumes proportionally, but those costumes are still on point 90% of the time.
First off, A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, and anyone who knows me knows I love the absolute train wreck that was mid-19th century menâs fashion. Do you like plaid? GOOD, BECAUSE ITâS ALL PLAID. Mixed with whatever else your little Victorian heart desires, color schemes be damned. Go wild.
This of course means I absolutely love Fred.
This outfit is hideous and it is also 1000% on point.
We also get to see him in a different outfit the next day, along with his wife and some friends.
First off, MORE PLAID, good for you. Second, I can literally find near-identical images of both these ladiesâ dresses just by googling â1843 fashion plateâ, I shit you not. To the damned year.
A good part of the story involves travelling through Scroogeâs life, so we get to see the costumes varying wildly over the course of several scenes. This was a time when styles were changing rapidly, and you had to keep up if you wanted to be fashionable and keep up appearances. Fashion changed so fast that you can often pinpoint an outfit to within a year or two like the ones above.Â
First, we go to Scroogeâs childhood school. Given the timeline thatâs normally put forward Michael Caine is definitely not old enough to play Scrooge, but ignore that for now. Letâs say if Scrooge is 75ish in 1843, itâs about 1783 when we see him leaving school and going off to be an apprentice. We actually see a few years of Little Scrooge fashion, but itâs fairly standard stuff. Scrooge doesnât have a super childhood and his clothing is pretty plain, but itâs totally on par for the time. Why this haircut though? It makes me sad.
Then we jump ahead a few years and itâs about 1789. The whole group is attending the Fozziwig Christmas party and have gotten tarted up like theyâre about the storm the Bastille, including Gonzo and Rizzo.
Again, they look absolutely ridiculous and it is absolutely accurate.Â
Now, this is super ostentatious and a lot of people would have considered it way too French for their taste in this time period. But it definitely did happen (Iâve seen stripey bubblegum pink menswear in person) and like. Itâs the Muppets. So, Rule of Funny.
Scrooge and Belle are dressed way closer to average Londoners of the time, and itâs worth noting that both are supposed to be somewhat poor. Fozzy pays everyone well but Lilâ Scrooge is still a skinflint and Belle is just getting by. Theyâre both looking darn good but their clothes are much more understated than everyone elseâs and maybe even on the verge of out of style.Â
Even their hair is pretty good. Including his. Also, holy shit does this guy look like he could be a young Michael Caine. Like, he doesnât actually look how Michael Caine looked when he was that age, but if I didnât know that I would totally buy it. Wow.
Then we jump ahead another ten to twelve years or so. This is the period I know the least about, especially when it comes to outerwear, so Jane Austen stans please comment. I donât think it looks too bad though.
Hereâs a couple of fashion plates from 1801 and 1803 for comparison.
Iâd also like to point out that there is a wide variety of costumes based on social class that we get to see in the 1843 âpresentâ that you wouldnât really notice. So while the Scrooge family thatâs doing alright for itself is wearing the latest looks, the rest of the town is not. A few of the women in the crowd dancing around Scrooge during âIt Feels Like Christmasâ are wearing dresses a couple of years out of date. Not too far, but you can see some looks from the tail end of the 1830s before women started shrink-wrapping their sleeves onto their arms.
You can see something similar to these outfits from 1839 in the crowd.
Contrast this with Mrs. Cratchit, who is living in poverty and has put on her absolute best dress for Christmas; itâs silk but itâs ten years out of style.Â
This would have been the height of fashion in the early-mid 1830s.
And thatâs important for making a world look real. Fashion was super important back then, but even so average people werenât necessarily chucking their clothing out every year to keep up with the latest fashions unless they could really afford to. You would get there eventually, but you donât want everyone in your universe, rich and poor, to look like they just stepped out of the latest fashion magazine.Â
Itâs absolutely astonishing to me that they put so much effort into this. I donât tend to go down the rabbit hole of nitpicking historical costumes in movies as much as some, but when a movie that you never expected does it very right it just throws me for a loop.Â
Was everything perfect? No, I donât think any movie is. But this is the damn Muppets. They were under no obligation to do this. Add to that the fact that itâs one of the more accurate renditions of the story, to the point of including a ton of the original dialogue, both through the characters and through the narration, and they just created a masterpiece.Â
Muppets Christmas Carol is the best Christmas film ever. This is the hill I die on.
The more I learn about the movie the more it makes me feel incredibly validated that this is one of my all time favorite movies EVER.
