The Muppet Christmas Carol is one of the most iconic of Muppet Movies, also it's one of the best adaptations of A Christmas Carol, it came at a dark time in Jim Henson's Production with the death of Jim himself a year before, but the movie directed by his son Brian and produced by Disney was a success. However it's appearance on this page is due to a deletion of it's best songs. The song When Love Is Gone has had a long troubled history and while the song does exist it suffers from being unusable in general release.
Song[]
The song comes at the end of the Past life of Scrooge, he is engaged to Belle but is delaying their wedding because he wants enough money for them to be comfortable and while he claims that he loves her, Belle realises that he is too love with money and this is probable for the best. The song is displayed as a solo for Meredith Braun (who is a Musical Theatre Actress), but near the end Scrooge sings as well breaking down realising she was right. The song clearly was important to the plot because it was promoted highly in a behind the scenes feature.
Deletion[]
As the film was produced by Disney Jeffrey Katzenberg the chairman had final say on the film, for him, the song was too sad or would bore the young children in the audience so he forced Henson to remove the scene from the theatrical release.
Addition to Video Release[]
While Disney had removed the scene from the Cinema Release, they decide to restore the song to the Home Video release. The song was presented on both Video and Laserdisc, however on TV Broadcasts the song is cut. While there was a DVD release with WLIG, the Laserdisc is the only version that uses a Wide Screen transfer, the DVDs used a Full Screen version.
Existence Status[]
While the scene does physically exists, it only survives in the Video version, it can be watched as a bonus on Disney+ and on the Blu Ray, but in 2018 Brian Henson has declared that the scene will never be added back to the film, as the Disney Studios lost the Scene's Film Element after it was used for the first Video Release. While attempts were made to add the scene to the current Blu Ray using the existing VHS transfer it looked terrible compared to the crisp Film Version. However the Staff at the Disney Archive have claimed the film element exists in the massive library. Hopefully it can been rediscovered.
Update[]
The Scene has been found: On the 9th of December Brian Henson announced on BBC Radio 2 that the Film Element was rediscovered by Disney Archivists. He was surprised with the discovered, two weeks before when he went to look over the 4K restoration and they will include it in all 4K releases of the movie.