Ebenezer Scrooge
Ebenezer Scrooge is an old, mean, miserly money-lender who hates Christmas and only reluctantly allows his employees to take the day off. He is visited by three ghostly specters who show the past, present and future in an attempt to redeem him and teach him how to love again.
Bob Cratchit
Bob Cratchit is Scrooge’s underpaid, overworked and unappreciated long-suffering clerk. He is married and he and his wife have many kids, but the youngest is very sickly. He is also a talking frog.
Tiny Tim
Tim Cratchit is that young sickly child and because he is so undernourished and sickly, he has earned the family nickname Tiny Tim. Tim’s condition is so serious that he is not expected to live see another Christmas unless the Cratchits can somehow afford medical treatment.
Ghosts of Jacob and Robert Marley
Jacob gets a brother in this adaptation; a character not in the original story. They both worked alongside Scrooge and shared his greed and lack of compassion for anyone else. They appear as ghosts to warn him to change his ways lest he end up shackled for eternity like them.
Ghost of Christmas Past
A wraithlike figure with the voice of a child takes Scrooge on a visit back in time which reveals how he transformed from a basically happy child into the lonely, hateful man he’s become. Scrooge’s greed became so all-powerful that, ultimately, he chose money over love when the one love of his life--a young woman named Belle--forced the issue. The absence of from his life has made Scrooge what he is: the most hated man in London.
Ghost of Christmas Present
A large, hearty, affable red-headed ghost who ages a lifetime in a single day. It is this spirit that reveals to Scrooge for the first time how difficult a life Bob lives on what he pays him. He is also exposed to the true extent of Tiny Tim’s health problems.
Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
A large, cloaked, silent and terrifying creature guides Scrooge to the world of the future, showing him what lies in wait if he doesn’t change his hateful ways: two deaths. The death of Tiny Tim accompanied by grief and his own lonely death which no one grieves, but instead moves quickly to profit from.
Gonzo the Muppet (as Charles Dickens, the Narrator)
Gonzo is one of only two Muppets who are presented as their usual characters. While Kermit, Miss Piggy and other familiar Muppets are playing roles, Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat (the other Muppet playing himself) stand outside the action as narrators and commentators upon the action, unseen by anyone even as they enter the settings of the actual narrative. While Gonzo is dressed and acts as Charles Dickens when narrating the events, it is acknowledged explicitly by Rizzo and more ironically by himself that he is not actually playing Charles Dickens, but rather himself playing Dickens as the omniscient narrator who knows everything about the story extending to what characters are thinking and even has the ability to affect objects within the narrative such as lamps.
