30 years ago, Muppet Treasure Island redefined how we think about The Muppets

A recurring prompt on social networks asks which movie or book people would like to see remade with Muppets replacing all the humans except one. Brian Henson, who directed The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, can take that as a compliment: the prompt’s ubiquity shows how heavily those two films loom over the characters’ history, even 30 years after Treasure Island’s release.

The idea of staging classics as essentially all‑Muppet productions is largely a 1990s phenomenon, with a few exceptions on television. The three films made while Jim Henson was alive — The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan — were mostly reconfigured origin stories full of meta winks; The Great Muppet Caper is the closest to the storybook conceit, but it remains a pastiche rather than a straight remake.

The Muppet Christmas Carol helped cement the notion of an all‑Muppet cast fronted by a single human, although it includes many human actors; Michael Caine’s steady Ebeneezer Scrooge tends to dominate memory.

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