As much as I love the Muppets, I have to admit that not everybody can work with them. I've seen great performers flounder and sink as guest stars on The Muppet Show, apparently because they couldn't handle the weirdosity and bizarritude. There's an old saying among actors: "Never work with kids or animals." That has to go double for puppets, who have all the cuteness of kids and animals rolled into one felt-covered package. However, some performers can work with the Muppets, and even steal the scenes back from them. You have to admire anybody who can appear on the same screen as the Muppets and still grab your attention. Michael Caine turns in a stellar performance as Ebenezer Scrooge, playing the character absolutely straight, even when surrounded by muppetational mayhem, and compels your attention. There really ought to be an award for performers who can do that.

Note: If you, like I, permanently swore off Muppet movies after the crushing disappointment that was The Great Muppet Caper, or Muppets Take Manhattan, I should let you know that this film is evidence that the Muppets eventually got their groove back. I only found it while flicking channels one night, and I was delighted to see that the silliness, originality, and fun of the first movie was back.

Oh, I had all kinds of reasons for thinking that this flick was a Bad Idea. For one thing, generally, when a classic is "updated", the updated version loses a great deal in the translation. For another thing, with Henry Winkler playing the character analogous to Ebenzer Scrooge, well... back in those happy days, I think it was understandable to think that having the Fonz play the central character would have been more of a stretch than he was capable of carrying off.

I am very happy to admit that I was wrong. The writing was certainly adept, depression Era Concord is a suitable stand-in for Dickensian London, and Winkler's performance is admirable. (In fact, the scene in which he reveals his solution for the Tiny Tim analogue is still one of my favourite scenes of all time.)

My only grump is that Winkler's Scrooge analogue was named Benedict Slade. Why is it that characters named Slade in the movies are always the bad guy? First, there was Evil Roy Slade, and now this.

There are at least three versions of Miracle on 34th Street, and all of them feature excellent performances. In this version, Edmund Gwenn is spot on as Kris, and Natalie Wood is delightful as Susan, and even actors who only get a single scene (like the posties deciding to deliver all the letters to Santa in the dead letter office to the courthouse) turn in performances which are both believeable and hilarious.

However, with each progressive remake, the plot gets watered down. (If they remake it again, I expect that the judge will end up letting Kris Kringle go just because "he's a nice old man with whiskers." ) The original version is the one where it is made most explicit that pretty much everybody in the movie (except for Kris and Susan) end up doing unselfish things for selfish reasons, and that's the whole point of the story: the miracle of the title is that, for once, people's selfishness is used to produce good ends. As each remake added changes to the plot to "improve" it, it got farther and farther from that delightful central premise.

If you just can't bring yourself to watch a movie in black and white, many DVD versions allow you to choose between the black and white original or a colourised version.

Scrooge is not the first film version of Charles Dickens' classic story A Christmas Carol to be filmed (according to IMDB.com, it's the 15th), but it's long been considered the definitive version. Alastair Sim gives a terrific performance as Ebenezer Scrooge, and the rest of the case is equally strong, right down to people who only had a couple of lines. (Compare that to contemporary films, where the quality of the performance tends to drop off sharply once you get past the core characters.)

I won't rehash the plot (after all, if you have just arrived from another planet, you have more important things to catch up on than old movies), but the secret to any portrayal of this story is that Scrooge must be believeable, both at the beginning of the story, when we seem him as a bitter, miserly curmudgeon, and at the end, once he has been transformed into the incarnation of benevolence and goodwill. The reason many attempts to tell this story fail is that the audience either can't buy the miserly Scrooge, or they can't believe that he has truly changed. (Or, sometimes, the audience simply can't believe either version.) In this version, you absolutely believe both the "before" Scrooge and the "after" Scrooge.