That time Robert Downey, Jr., and Kermit the Frog made a Christmas special together

The vast majority of holiday specials are doomed to be well-remembered by a very specific micro-generation. Yeah, a handful of stalwarts — your Rudolphs and your Charlie Browns — have been airing annually for decades. But for the most part, holiday specials pop up for five to 10 years, then slide down the memory hole.

Take, for instance, the case of the Garfield specials that debuted in the 1980s. They were wildly popular when they debuted, then aired well into the 1990s, particularly the Halloween and Christmas specials. But eventually, they drifted off broadcast TV. Now, they're available on YouTube and home video, but they seem primarily aimed at people my age, who watched them as kids. If I mentioned A Garfield Christmas to a 22-year-old, they would surely know who Garfield was and what Christmas is, but they probably wouldn't be able to tell me even a few bare hints of the special's plot.

And that's a special that was once immensely popular and that features a still-popular character! When you get to things like Tales from the Far Side or A Claymation Christmas Celebration (to name two specials that aired somewhere in my childhood), you're looking at specials remembered with a certain intense adoration by a very specific group of people who were exactly the right age to enjoy said specials when they debuted.

Thus, microgenerations. If you have fairly strong memories of watching A Claymation Christmas Celebration on TV as a kid, I feel fairly certain that you were born somewhere between 1975 and 1985. There are likely outliers on either side of that line, but the vast majority of people with that memory set will fall into that roughly 10-year birthdate range.

But every so often, there's a holiday special that airs one time and disappears completely, and for the few people who watched it when it aired, it becomes a kind of half-remembered mirage. Did it really exist? Does anybody else remember this thing, or did I dream it? For an example, consider 2002's Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa, which inspired an online treasure hunt to find evidence that its awfulness truly existed.

And so it is with Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree, a production of Jim Henson Productions made during that dark period after Jim Henson's death, when it wasn't immediately clear if the Muppets would ever feel like the Muppets again. (I would argue that the company began finding its own footing again with 1996's Muppets Tonight, not a great show but at least a show that was trying to do its own things and not trying slavishly to imitate a genius.) The special, which starred Robert Downey, Jr.; Leslie Nielsen; and Stockard Channing, aired one time in 1995, then never aired again. It lost 20 percent of its Charlie Brown Christmas lead-in, as per the Nielsen ratings. It has never been issued on DVD in the United States.

There are a surprising number of "lost" Muppets Christmas specials. But most of them follow the same rough trajectory as A Muppet Family Christmas, a much-loved special that aired three times in the late '80s, then fell into a black hole of music licensing issues. (It also features the last on-screen appearance of Henson, which probably contributed to why it didn't re-air after his 1990 death.) They aired just enough times to find an audience that loves them dearly, even if they're not well-known to the public at large. Muppet Family Christmas happens to be the special that hit my microgenerational target, but if I were a bit younger, it might be A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, and if I were a bit older, it might be John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together. All of these specials found small but dedicated audiences of kids who still love these specials into adulthood, because they aired just often enough.

Not so with Mr. Willowby, which fell down a memory hole so vast that even though it aired within my lifetime, in a year when I was assiduously poring over the weekly TV schedule, I was completely unaware of its existence until a few days ago. And then I watched it and figured out why.

A lot of online commentators who've written about this special have dismissed it as being absolutely awful. I don't think I would go that far. The special has its charms, mostly drawn from the Robert Barry book of the same name that was adapted by the Henson folks. In the book, the eccentric Mr. Willowby winds up with a Christmas tree too large for his house, so he cuts off the top and gives it to his maid. She, in turn, cuts off the top, only for it to be gathered up by bears, and so on, until a very small sliver of tree is taken by some mice. The book is cute, and when the Henson special is about animal puppets, it's charming. The review I linked to above thinks the choice to include the various tree-seeking mice as throughline characters was a mistake, and I disagree. I enjoyed Papa Mouse's ongoing explanation of how to find the perfect tree, only to find himself interrupted every time by some new calamity. (Contemporaneous reviews also damn with faint praise.)

But the animal puppets aren't the real draw here. No, the real draw is the various actors in the cast. And that's where Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree starts to feel like a relic that time was right to forget.

Jim Henson Productions has always been great at getting big-name actors to play opposite their creations, probably owing to how beloved by so many the Sesame Street and Muppet Show characters are. And in theory, Robert Downey, Jr.; Stockard Channing; and Leslie Nielsen should fit right in with a bunch of Muppets. (If Downey is feeling impish now that he's done with Marvel, I think he'd be very fun as one of the main human parts in a new Muppet movie.) But all three end up feeling stranded in this special, not in a place to make the best use of their talents.

Now, if you know where Robert Downey, Jr., was personally in 1995, it's hard not to speculate about what might be happening in the more manic moments of this special (like the one pictured above). Leslie Nielsen is even more buttoned down than usual, barely registering his presence, to the degree that I essentially didn't realize he was playing Baxter the butler until midway through the special, despite reading his name in the credits. And Stockard Channing, bless her, is trying, but she's also doing a different accent with seemingly every new line of dialogue. It's like the entire special consisted of director Jon Stone having the actors do one stoic and staid take, then saying, "Now, let's do a fun one!" and that was that.

I think the key mistake the special makes is that it doesn't let the actors interact with the Muppets. Occasionally, Nielsen or Channing will pick up one of the mouse puppets, but for the most part, the humans are stranded in an altogether different, not that interesting special. The main character of the special, after all, is a tree, and the ways in which it brightens the lives of the characters who interact with it should probably be made more explicit. And yet within the reality of the special, it wouldn't do to have, say, Stockard Channing duet with a bear. (SHE SHOULD HAVE, THOUGH.)

Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree aired as part of something called "Nabisco Family Classics," which I would assume was an attempt by the snack food giant to create something vaguely similar to the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Yet so far as I can tell, Christmas Tree was the only special ever produced under this particular moniker.

In the end, Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree is just a fascinating failure, one that fell into obscurity by simple virtue of the fact that it never seemed to garner enough of an audience to be brought up again in the years to come. Even Muppet super-fans seem largely uninterested in it.

A lot of old specials are like this. They're disposable pieces of flotsam that disappear if enough people don't have strong memories of watching them. This one is notable mostly for the company that made it and the people it features. I wouldn't say it's "worth watching," but also, it features Robert Downey, Jr., singing an Emmy-nominated song called "The Perfect Tree." So maybe that's your thing!

What I've been up to: I wrote a piece at Vox about the ways in which our definitions of "family" are increasingly incapable of matching up to the pain and hurt sometimes caused by our families of origin, and how queer ideas of chosen family are stepping in to fill that gap. Reporting this was a lot of work, and I hope you like it!

We are, in 2021, somewhat more acquainted with the ways that concepts like toxic relationships and gaslighting can warp families beyond recognition and turn these bonds sinister. Many people are conscious of the idea of setting boundaries, and understand that the definition of family can be elastic enough to include, say, beloved friends. None of these ideas are new, but the language we’re using to talk about them has a clinically detached vibe that allows us to confront incredibly painful experiences with some degree of distance. It feels precise; it captures an inexact idea we know to be true in our bones: Sometimes, family isn’t worth it.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: We had two excellent pieces go up last week! Priyanka Aidasani wrote about why The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is such a groundbreaking animated movie, while Naomi Elias wrote about the food TV pleasures of the United Kingdom's Big Zuu's Big Eats.

Big Zuu’s Big Eats’ mission to redefine food doubles as a mission to redefine Britishness. Zuu occupying the host role already offers a welcome change to the unbearable whiteness of British television and food media. Certainly, it defies the ruling sentiment that Britishness and whiteness are synonymous. On the show, there are the usual quips about seasoning food properly (unlike the Brits), but there’s also the intentional work Zuu does to highlight the diversity of the UK population. In his British kitchen, the ingredients are sourced from local ethnic grocers instead of chains, the meals take into account the faith-based constraints of the second largest religion in the UK in the face of rising anti-Muslim sentiment, and tradition is meant to be broken.

Read me: I'm fascinated by stories of people who experienced the intense trauma of suddenly having the internet turn on you, all at once, and I love this story by Justin Ling about Simone Veil, whose webcomic became incredibly popular, only for Veil to feel increasingly uneasy about that popularity and the ways her readers felt like they owned her. I wrestled with this piece a lot!

The enigmatic artist behind Pictures for Sad Children became something of a cause célèbre. By her own estimation, hundreds of thousands of readers checked picturesforsadchildren.com every month. In 2008, she was interviewed by the New Yorker website. “It is a dark comic, and a good one,” wrote the interviewer in a brief introduction. “I beseech you to read it.” In 2011, more than a thousand fans contributed to a Kickstarter to fund a physical collection of the comic strips.
That’s where things went wrong.

And! Stephen Sondheim died on Friday. I'll have a little writing about him at Vox later this week, but for now, please read this absolutely astonishing piece on his legacy by Helena Fitzgerald.

If we are lucky to live long enough, we start to lose the world from which we learned what the world was. If we are even luckier than that, and live to be old, we come to exist in a world that holds no traces of the one in which we first learned to live. Eventually nothing remains of the things that formed our ideas of how things would always be. Sondheim is part of a generation that is aging and dying, a generation whose luminaries largely created the world as I have understood it my whole life. It is their vision of work and art, friendship and achievement, value and striving, from which I assembled for myself what a life might look like. Sondheim seems eternal, and he is, but he is also a moment in time. This is how lives recede into history—Sondheim becomes part of the story of an era, understood in context. He becomes part of how things once were, which is not how they are anymore.

Watch me: The death of Sondheim hit me hard, as it did so many people who adore musical theater. I can think of no better tribute than to watch his 90th birthday celebration, which was just a bunch of brilliant theatre performers offering their takes on some of his best songs.

And another thing... I didn't realize there was a whole YouTube subculture of people reading children's books out loud, but I suppose I should have. Anyway, here's someone reading the original version of Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree.

Opening credits sequence of the week: It's always surprising to me just how popular the comic strip Blondie was for a long time. Here's an effort to turn it into a TV series, and when you think about it, what would a Blondie TV series even look like? It's just every other family sitcom...

A thing I had to look up: I spent a fair amount of time researching Robert Downey, Jr.'s history of drug use, which is, of course, how a girl wants to spend her holiday weekend.

This week's reading music: "Finishing the Hat" and "Move On" by Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters

Episodes is published three times per week. Mondays feature my thoughts on assorted topics. Wednesdays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. Fridays are TV recaps written by myself. The Wednesday and Friday editions are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.