Mel Brooks and Joe Rogan Appear in a Seriously Unhinged Muppet Christmas Special

The Muppets and holiday entertainment go hand-in-hand with a rod attached to it. Obviously, there’s The Muppet Christmas Carol, which some would say is the greatest adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic story (the worst being that musical with Kelsey Grammer). And then there was A Muppet Family Christmas, which teamed up the Muppet Show characters with the Sesame Street gang — only to have it all ruined by a bummer of a teaser for Nightline.

But the Muppets also starred in a number of other holiday specials, including a musical show with John Denver and A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa. Yet, while all of those shows mostly kept their shit together, the 2002 TV movie It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie went to some truly weird places. 

Okay, first of all, the most notorious aspect of this movie, which we’ve talked about before, is that it popularized the “Muppets did 9/11” conspiracy theory. That’s because the movie is an It’s a Wonderful Life riff, in which Kermit the Frog is shown a version of the world in which he never existed by his guardian angel (David Arquette, dressed like a 1920s silent movie weakling for some reason).

But when Kermit visits the Kermit-less version of America in 2002, the World Trade Center is still standing, thus implying that America’s favorite frog had something to do with the national tragedy.

But even apart from this bombshell revelation/graphics department error It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie is a fever dream of a film. While most Muppet projects involve celebrity cameos, this one features an odd assortment of guest stars, including the cast of Scrubs, Whoopi Goldberg playing God and Mel Brooks as the “Joe Snow,” the Snowman narrator.

In what is perhaps the most unhinged sequence, Fozzie attempts to deliver a sack of money to save the Muppet Theater from foreclosure, but ends up being chased by a Crocodile Hunter-like reality show host. As he attempts to take down Fozzie, the hunter inadvertently tranqs the snowman. Merry Christmas!

Fozzie then gets painted green and mistaken for the Grinch by a bunch of angry Whoville residents, who try to lynch Fozzie for stealing Christmas. 

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that Joe Rogan shows up in Kermit’s alternate reality as himself, because Rizzo is forced to take a gig on Fear Factor. Yes, this is a Christmas movie in which Joe Rogan instructs a screaming woman to eat Rizzo the rat. 

There are a number of other bizarre narrative choices in the Kermit-less timeline as well — the Muppet Theater has been turned into a nightclub, in which Beaker is a jacked bouncer, and Scooter spends his nights gyrating in a cage.

At one point, Kermit discovers that if he was never born, Doc Hopper, the villain from The Muppet Movie, would have expanded his fast-food frog leg business. So Kermit basically finds out that he’s responsible for a frog genocide.

But, again, on the plus side, no 9/11.