Jim Henson’s ‘The Christmas Toy’: A holiday classic buried by Disney
It’s hard to imagine that any delightful holiday film in The Muppets canon wouldn’t be available to stream on Disney+ right alongside The Muppet Christmas Carol, but as many elder Millennials have long been aware, the arguable ‘Golden Age’ of Jim Henson Christmas flicks has actually been relegated to maddening obscurity due to decades of corporate shake-ups and licensing issues.
Along with the heartwarming Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977) and the banger-laden sing-a-long special A Muppet Family Christmas (1987), perhaps the best of this lot of lost Henson classics is 1986’s The Christmas Toy, which once seemed destined for annual re-watches before the arrival of a certain Disney film a decade later made it an inconvenient piece of the Henson Company library.
The Christmas Toy originally aired as an ABC Network made-for-TV movie on December 6th, 1986, and like most puppet-based Henson productions of the day, it balanced sweetness, smartness, and song in a manner that both kids and their slightly more cynical parents could enjoy. Though it features a cameo by Kermit the Frog in the film’s intro and outro, The Christmas Toy is not a Muppet special with the usual cast of characters, but instead tells the story of the cuddly toy Rugby Tiger, the cat toy Mew Mouse, the cabbage-patch-esque doll Apple, and the other toys of the playroom that all come to life when people aren’t looking.
Trouble arises on Christmas Eve, when the self-absorbed Rugby – favourite toy of the human girl Jamie – mistakenly assumes he will be Jamie’s gift for a second consecutive Christmas. Of course, he soon discovers that his role as ‘The Christmas Toy’ has been overtaken by a stunning newcomer, a warrior space princess / action-figure named Meteora, who is clueless to the fact that she is merely a toy. At first, Rugby tries to give Meteora the boot, but his friends Apple and Mew help him understand what Christmas is really about (in a secular sense) and that he also shouldn’t be racist against cat toys. Everyone winds up singing together in the end.
If this plot sounds more than a little bit familiar, it’s because Disney/Pixar seemed to follow its blueprint with 1995’s Toy Story, about a child’s favourite toy who becomes jealous of his replacement – a cocky character from outer space who’s unaware that he is just a toy.
Even if we assume that the parallels between Toy Story and The Christmas Toy were down to innocent coincidences, there was no doubt that Disney’s increasing involvement with Muppet-based properties would ultimately spell the death knell for The Christmas Toy as a holiday tradition.
While the film was available on VHS in the 1990s, it wasn’t included as one of the pieces of IP gobbled up by Disney in their official acquisition of The Muppets in 2004. That could have been good news, as the independent Jim Henson Company retained the rights to The Christmas Toy, Emmet Otter, and various other specials from their library.
Unfortunately, though, the use of Kermit the Frog as a “guest star” and narrator in both Emmet and The Christmas Toy – as well as the disputed licensing over the music used in these specials and A Muppet Family Christmas – created a boatload of new legal complications.
A DVD version of The Christmas Toy was finally released independently under the banner of “Henson Classics” in 2008, but it was a ramshackle affair that sloppily chopped Kermit’s appearances and the closing musical segment completely out of the film, so as to not rankle the execs over at Disney’s new Muppet machine.
Not much has changed since, as the original, complete version of Henson’s The Christmas Toy can only be found via fuzzy VHS rips on YouTube. The same goes A Muppet Family Christmas, one of the few specials to feature characters from the Muppets, Sesame Street, Muppet Babies, and Fraggle Rock all in one place.
Since Disney recently announced that it would finally be putting the original theatrical cut of the Star Wars trilogy back in cinemas for A New Hope’s 50th anniversary in 2027, it probably wouldn’t break their coffers to give The Christmas Toy a 40th anniversary remaster in 2026, with Kermit back where he fucking belongs, singing ‘We’ll Be Together at Christmas’ with Rugby Tiger and Mew Mouse. There’s reason to believe it’s possible, as Shout! Studios was finally permitted to release Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas with Kermit’s scenes restored for that special’s 40th anniversary Blu-ray release in 2017.
By the way, if you’ve never seen The Christmas Toy, do be aware that it’s actually a bit darker than Toy Story in some respects. For example, if a toy doesn’t return to where a human last placed it, and the human sees them out of place, the toy instantly “freezes forever,” or dies – a fate that befalls several characters. It’s a wonderful holiday film, though, I promise!
