How To Watch The Muppet Christmas Carol With When Love Is Gone Included

The Muppet Christmas Carol is the greatest Christmas film of all time, and if you don’t agree with us on that one, frankly, you can go and argue with the wall.

Not only is it one of the most faithful adaptations of Charles Dickens’ seasonal novella, it’s also jam-packed with all of the heart-warming fun and silliness that is synonymous with The Muppets.

As Christmas Day approaches, fans around the world will be getting ready to settle in and give The Muppet Christmas Carol its annual rewatch – but for those streaming on Disney+, what you might not know is that there are two different versions available.

Since 2022, when the movie celebrated its 30th anniversary, the streaming platform has featured a “full-length version” of The Muppet Christmas Carol in addition to the standard version, featuring a previously-deleted song, When Love Is Gone.

Hold on, why are there two different versions of The Muppet Christmas Carol, and why was the When Love Is Gone number cut?

If you’ve only ever seen the theatrical cut of The Muppet Christmas Carol, you probably won’t be aware of When Love Is Gone, a song performed to the young Scrooge by his fiancée Belle, during the “Christmas past” sequence.

Effectively a break-up ballad, the song is reprised at the end of the movie with the When Love Is Found number, performed by Scrooge and all of the Muppets to celebrate him having changed his ways.

Despite director Brian Henson being a fan of the song, it was cut from the film at the behest of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was then the head of Walt Disney Studios, as he felt it might bore children in the audience (he had previously tried to do the same to The Little Mermaid’s Part Of Your World a few years earlier), on the condition that it be put back in for the home edition.

“[Katzenberg] felt that kids just want to go to the bathroom in the movie theatre during a love ballad,” Henson told HuffPost UK in 2022. “And it’s true, a kid under five doesn’t enjoy a love ballad. And that’s why Disney wanted me to cut When Love Is Gone from the actual release.

“They were worried about these kids getting antsy for about three minutes, and then it might lose the audience a little bit.”

Henson added that, had he a bit more film industry experience under his belt at the time, he “probably would have not removed the song”.

“Jefrrey Katzenberg didn’t force me to remove it,” he insisted. “He wanted me to remove it – it was a strong suggestion, and he made me preview the film twice, once with the song and once without it, so he could say, ‘do you see that nobody went to the bathroom?’. But he didn’t force me to do anything.

“The deal was, ‘OK, we’ll take it out of the theatrical release, but then it goes back in [for home release] and for eternity it’ll be back in the movie’. And Jeffrey Katzenberg totally agreed.”

Unfortunately, the team at Disney then “lost the negatives” for When Love Is Gone, meaning that it couldn’t be included on any high definition re-releases of the film that have come out in the decades since its release.

In 2022, an HD version of When Love Is Gone was finally compiled, and a cut of the film featuring the ballad was made available to stream on Disney+.

How do I watch the cut of The Muppet Christmas Carol with When Love Is Gone?

The trouble is, if you just stream The Muppet Christmas Carol as normal on Disney+, what you’ll be presented with is the regular theatrical version, sans When Love Is Gone.

If you want to see the longer version, with When Love Is Gone added back in, you’ll have to load up the film on Disney+, but before hitting play, head into the “extras” section.

From there, you’ll have the option to view what’s billed as “The Muppet Christmas Carol (Longer Version)”, which clocks in at one hour and 30 minutes, compared to the original edit’s one hour and 26 minutes.

Of course, if you’re with Jeffrey Katzenberg and think that the ballad slows down the film, you can just watch the normal version, too…

“I’m upset that it’s been not in the film ever since high-definition video has been around, because of what happened,” Henson added back in 2022. “It was very sad.

“But the post-production group who are at Disney now were fantastic trying to find it. They really worked hard. To finally have it together is just fantastic.”