TV Review – Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas

Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977)
Written by Jerry Juhl and Paul Williams
Directed by Jim Henson

There is nothing else quite like the Muppets. Growing up in the 1980s & 90s, the Muppets were a constant presence in the media. Sesame Street lives on, and everyone knows who Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest are, but the Muppets and Jim Henson were more than that. You had films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. There were shows as different as The Muppet Show, Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock, and other less successful attempts. The throughline in all these things was the belief of Henson and his cohorts that incredible storytelling could still be done through the ancient art form of puppetry. Good puppetry completely blows the best digital effects out of the water. How a highly skilled puppeteer can manifest a multi-dimensional character is always more impressive.

I never saw Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas as a child, or at least I have no vivid memory of ever seeing it. It was not part of my family’s immediate Christmas canon. It debuted on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) in 1977 and would later be syndicated to HBO in 1978 and ABC in 1980. I remember the special being something you could only see on HBO when I was aware of the Christmas season and the annual shows. As we never had cable television growing up, I never had a chance to see it. I wanted to see how it would hold up for an adult who didn’t have nostalgic memories attached. Most films & television that fall into that category end up not being very impressive for me, which has led me to think about my own rose-colored memories of media and how they are objectively not as good as I remember.

Based on the children’s book of the same name by Russell Hoban, and follows Emmet, the titular otter who wants to buy something nice for Ma. She and Emmet do laundry and odd jobs to get by, both still mourning the untimely passing of Emmet’s father. The village of Frogtown Hollow announces a Christmas talent contest with a $50 prize attached. Emmet wants to win so he can buy Ma a piano. Ma decides she will secretly enter to buy that guitar Emmet has his eye on. The story is an adaptation of O. Henry’s famous “Gift of the Magi” but with an Americana style of music running throughout courtesy of Paul Williams. There are elements of gospel, blues, country, jazz, and rock, but the special never pins itself down beyond anything other than having a love for song.

I can’t say I connected with it the same way I would have if I had seen it during childhood, but it was excellent. The songs are wonderfully done, the performances fantastic, and Henson manages to pull off some brilliant pieces of puppet craft. The boat sequences with the puppets singing were incredible. It was like a magic trick, trying to figure out how they managed to do that. Those are the elements that continue to impress me as an adult. With a digital canvas, what can be achieved is not that astonishing anymore. It becomes less impressive when you have fewer impediments as well. To pull off what Henson & company did with puppets in a limited physical space is incredible. The amount of work that went into designing and constructing sets to allow these characters to feel like they could move about freely is astonishing.

The heart of this special is what made it so enduring to me. The story features a single-parent family living in poverty. While a lot of American society has looked down on poverty for generations, the story here is about the dignity & beauty of love people have for each other, even in challenging circumstances. I’ve been tremendously disturbed by the inhuman language used towards the poor & homeless in the States. It’s led to a rash of murders by mentally disturbed people who are conditioned to dehumanize these people, seeing them as easy targets that “no one cares about.” The poor are a reminder from capitalism of what will happen to you if you don’t submit to the hierarchy. 

To take those people whose lives have served only as warnings to others and imbue them with respect & admiration is a revolutionary thing. Poverty is not associated with “laziness” in this special. Emmet and his mother work harder than either of them should have to for the meager existence allowed to them. They do not love each other differently or any less than a family with more significant means. I loved that this special let the melancholy emotion in, something we rarely see in contemporary children’s media. So much of the entertainment put forward today focuses on overstimulating the audience and making a constant barrage of jokes. There isn’t room for authentic emotions; at most, we get cliche, maudlin crap. Here, the feelings are complex, challenging, and honest. 

The ending is not where the protagonists’ lives are dramatically transformed, and all their problems are solved. They experience a moment of love & are happy. Another concern with contemporary kids’ fare is that the endings must be so detached from real life that it’s hard to feel that any characters on-screen are human. I felt the humanity of Emmet, his mother, and his friends. It’s a piece of art coming from hippies who were very genuine in their beliefs about humanity and the ability for people to have good lives. There is such warmth in this Christmas special, far more than I’ve seen in almost any new media from the last twenty years. Of everything I’ve watched for this December, I don’t think any of it deserves to be firmly planted in the canon more than Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.