A Christmas Carol - 1970, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Illustrated reading
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
Anglia Television, for the ITV network
 
Year:
1970 – shown at various points by several different ITV regional companies that Christmas season
 
Length:
48 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:

Anglia Television, based in the city of Norwich, were the East of England regional contractors for the ITV network in the UK, going on-air in October 1959. Although they relied heavily on the network output produced by the larger ITV companies for much of their prime-time output, they were also a fully-fledged TV station and production company in their own right, producing a large number of programmes across a range of genres. They became something of a cultural institution in their region, particularly across much of Norfolk, the county where they were based.
 
They still exist, too, although these days pretty much just as the ‘ITV Anglia’ regional news service for the east. They are still based in their original Anglia House home, however, having disposed of many of its extensions and other buildings they occupied in Norwich down the years. Anglia House must surely be the last 1950s television studio still operating in the UK – the story goes that as a condition of the lease, they have to return it (the old Agricultural Hall) to the condition in which they found it should they leave, which is allegedly why ITV have surprisingly not yet downsized the operation.

 
Although many of Anglia’s programmes made during their glory years were purely designed to be shown in the eastern region on Anglia only, they also produced a number of wider-interest programmes screened on the network – they were particularly successful with their wildlife series Survival, their quiz show Sale of the Century and with a number of dramas down the years.
 
A Christmas Carol is another example of an Anglia programme which was clearly designed to have potential network appeal, with no particular regional ties. It’s an interesting affair; when I was kindly given a copy by James, a reader of this blog, he told me that it was animated, but that isn’t actually – bar one winking face and one moving clock hand – the case. It’s more of an illustrated reading, akin to a long episode of Jackanory in which you never see the narrator. It’s made up of an abridged version of the story, read over a series 150 or so still illustrations, with the cameras panning across and zooming into them at various points.
 
What I found especially interesting about this is that, although I’m no technical expert, it’s pretty clear that there wasn’t a rostrum camera or any film involved. The smooth pans and zooms, the occasional camera wobbles and the clean cross-fades all show that this was an entirely video production, with the artworks shot on studio video cameras and the production assembled on videotape.
 
The Transdiffusion TV history website has an article giving some of the background to this production, although it’s not clear where their information comes from. It seems that A Christmas Carol was one of a series of such productions made by the same team at Anglia in the late 1960s and early 70s, following on from a serialised adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and an original serial called The Winter of Enchantment, and followed by four further serials, including an adaptation of Treasure Island.

 
This doesn’t appear to have gained Anglia a network showing at Christmas 1970, but it seems as if it was broadcast by several of the different regional companies of the ITV network at some point or other over that festive season. Southern and Border both showed it on Christmas Eve, at 11.15am in Southern’s case and midday on Border; Anglia themselves put it out at 3.25 on Christmas Day in the afternoon; London Weekend Television at 9.20 on Boxing Day morning; Westward in two parts, at 10.40 on Boxing Day morning and 1pm on Sunday the 27^th. There may have been others too, but those are the ones I could find in The Times’s Christmas TV listings.
 
Cast and crew:
There are just two people mainly responsible for the vast majority of the work on this version. One of them is Paul Honeyman, who produced it, wrote the abridged adaptation, and also performed it for good measure as well. And the other is John Worsley, the artist who produced all of the illustrations which make-up the visual part of the production.
 
Worsley had had a fascinating life; an official war artist during the Second World War, he was evidently the only one to be captured as a prisoner-of-war. He’d also work for famous comics such as the Eagle, and evidently his Carol illustrations for this production also saw release as a large-format children’s book version of the story.

"Come on mate, time to go..."

 
Honeyman was a staff producer for Anglia in Norwich, who had served in the army before joining Tyne Tees Television as an announcer. Moving to Anglia in 1968, he was initially a reporter for their About Anglia news programme, before moving up the ranks to become a producer and eventually Head of Features and later Assistant Programme Controller. Even through these promotions he continued to work on producing and narrating these children’s productions. He died in July 1978, at the age of just 41, shortly after finishing work on another of his children’s serial collaborations with Worsley, The Whisper of Glocken.
 
Aside from Honeyman, there are one or two sound effects used here and there, and also some other voices to give occasional background chatter or laughter. However, the other main presence is the music – by Peter Fenn, who was evidently Anglia’s Head of Music at the time. He employs the services of the Choir of Norwich Cathedral, to give the soundtrack an appropriately festive air.
 
Director John Salway had worked at Anglia for some years, including on the the previous Honeyman / Worsley children’s efforts. Like Honeyman, he also died young, in 1972 while in production on their version of Treasure Island.
 
Underdone Potato:

In spite of the fact that this is an abridged version of the text to fit the running time, we get something here which you get hardly anywhere else – Dickens’s little preface about hoping the story will haunt the readers’ houses pleasantly, which is a nice touch.
 
Aside from that, though, while most of the best-known sequences are all present and correct, most of them have been quite heavily cut down in some way or other. Fred’s best dialogue, the “other creatures on other journeys” bit, is gone, and the two charitable gentlemen also pay little more than a flying visit.
 
The gravy pun is retained during Marley’s visit, however.

 
Early on, as we sweep across Worsley’s vision of Victorian London with the dome of St Paul’s dominating proceedings, there’s a pub sign for The Bell in the foreground – coincidence, or perhaps a deliberate reference to one of Norwich’s best-known watering holes…?

Past:

Worsley does a decent job of trying to render Dickens’s description of the Ghost of Christmas Past as both old and young at the same time, although there’s an odd effect given by the shadowing of its face early on which makes it look rather like it has some bushy black beard. It also looks as if it’s carrying a document folder, given how the cap its holding looks when we first see it, giving it a rather officious, middle-management-ghost sort of appearance.

The transition of Scrooge and the spirit being outside the school to inside the schoolroom is a nice effect that works well, although there’s no Fan at the end of the school sequence. Fezziwig, however, gains a first name in this version – Algernon – and in the break-up with Belle scene the young Scrooge gains some fairly extraordinary-looking yellow trousers.

"How can you possibly not want me, with my magnificent yellow trousers, Belle?"

Present:

While the Ghost of Christmas Past appeared oddly bearded on its first appearance, here Worsley goes against tradition and while depicting Christmas Present as the large, robed figure of Dickens, he has no beard in this version.

Another surprising inclusion, given all the tightening up elsewhere, is lingering on the Christmas fare for sale and retaining the mention of “Norfolk biffins” – which, for those like me who had to look it up, are a type of apple. Bless Anglia Television for flying the flag for their region and being possibly the only people in the history of Carol adaptations to keep that mention in. Indeed, so surprising was it that I actually had to check the original book to make sure it was there and not something Paul Honeyman had added in!

 

We get the educational point about the bakers cooking people’s Christmas lunches for them because they didn’t have their own ovens, but the only ‘main’ scene included is the visit to the Cratchits’ house. There’s no dropping-in on Fred and his house guests and party games in this one.
 
Yet to Come:

This is the most unfortunate section, and probably the reason – or at least one of the reasons – why this version isn’t better-known, and is unlikely to get another run-out on television today.
 
The reason being is that there’s a concentration on the Old Joe scene here, which is fair enough. But sadly, Old Joe himself is depicted as a very Fagin-like figure, in the worst possible sense; as every inch the offensive stereotype which Fagin has so often been played as being in the past.
 
While there are arguments to be had about Tiny Tim and the representation of the disabled, for a piece of literature written in 1843 by an author who had known prejudices, A Christmas Carol is pretty much free of such baldly offensive material, which makes it all the more disappointing that nearly 130 years later Paul Honeyman and Anglia Television saw fit to introduce it here.
 
The visit to the Cratchits is changed here, so that Bob isn’t coming back from visiting the site of Tim’s grave when he arrives home, but actually coming downstairs from his deathbed. To tell the family that Tim’s just died, which makes it seem a bit weird that they weren’t all up there with him.

Es are good, apparently...

 
There’s a common spelling error on Scrooge’s gravestone here, with Worsley adding an extra ‘e’ to label it ‘Ebeneezer Scrooge’.
 
What’s To-Day:
This is the only section which actually contains any of what you might call animation; firstly as Marley’s face on the knocker gets a reprise, giving a wink as it appears again, and secondly at the end when Scrooge watches the clock for Bob’s late arrival at work on Boxing Day, and we see the hand move through the minutes.

This is probably the section which departs most from the original; not massively, but there is a bizarrely, Disney-ish diversion when Scrooge laughs to himself at the change which has overcome him, as he does in the original. In this version, however, we see illustrated and are told about the birds on the windowsill outside being surprised to hear this noise from him, and they gather there to hear it.
 

We get the main sections, as per usual – meeting one of the charitable gentlemen, going to see Fred, and then playing his trick on Bob at the end.
 
Review:
When I first began watching this, I did wonder how well it would hold the attention. I’ve nothing against a reading of a book, but usually - unless it’s some sort of performance of the type Dickens himself used to give – you’re not also watching it at the same time. Honeyman’s reading would work equally well as an audio book without the illustrations, although it would fall down on not being a complete version.
 
The illustrations are nice, though, and director John Salway does a decent enough job of not just keeping them statically in frame the whole time, but keeping the cameras moving across and into them.

Worsley doesn’t try to ape John Leech’s original illustrations and has a style of his own, albeit one which feels very in-keeping with the Victorian setting. He’s also good at creating mood and atmosphere, with Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come both being particularly effective in this regard.
 
Honeyman does well as narrator, too – I found a review in The Times from the time of the original transmission crediting him for not attempting to go over-the-top in acting it, but rather giving a good reading instead, and I think there is indeed a difference. It’s just a shame about the Old Joe sequence, which leaves a bitter taste in the mouth and means this can’t, in all good conscience, be recommended as a highlight in the Carol canon.
 
In a nutshell:
This isn’t a bad version by any means. It’s well-read, and the illustrations are nice – it’s just that there are better-read unabridged versions if that’s what you want, and more exciting versions visually, making it hard to think of a particular reason to recommend it.
 

 

Scrooge - 1970, film

Title:
Scrooge
 
Format:
Colour musical feature film
 
Country:
UK (although made with American money)
 
Production company:
Westbury Films, for Cinema Centre Productions
 
Year:
1970
 
Length:
113 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian – specifically, 1860

Background:
In 1968, Dickens’s work had seen enormous success on the big screen with the release of Oliver!, a literally all-singing, all-dancing colour spectacular, adapted from the equally-successful stage musical version of 1960 by Lionel Bart. The success of Oliver! must have made the idea of creating a musical film from another of Dickens’s best-known works almost irresistible, although in this case the film was made directly for the screen. In fact, in something of a reversal of the way in which these things usually work, Scrooge was adapted into a stage musical in the early 1990s, and has often been revived since.
 
While Scrooge didn’t go on to achieve quite the same impact as Oliver!, it was certainly successful, being nominated for four Academy Awards. This included a nomination in the Best Original Song category for the showstopping Thank You Very Much, which is probably the song from the film which made the biggest impact and is its best-known number. The film itself turns up on British television every Christmas, often on one of the major channels, and is probably one of the most widely-known and best-loved versions of the story in the UK.
 
As is not uncommon with adaptations of the Carol, although this was made in England with a British cast and crew, the film was backed with American finance and produced for an American company. This rather works in its favour, though, having the authentic feeling of something made in the Carol’s home country, but with the budget to provide the spectacle you’d expect from a full-scale Hollywood musical.
 
Cast and crew:
One of the reasons for the great success of the film and its standing the test of time is surely down to the fact that it contains some of the absolute cream of British acting talent available at the time.
 
The cast is led by Albert Finney as Scrooge – as he was only 33 here, he’s aged-up surprisingly well for most of the scenes, but is also able to play the younger Scrooge in the Christmas Past section more convincingly than is usually the case when the same actor does both. Finney had come to prominence as part of the ‘Angry Young Man’ new wave of young British actors of the 1960s, starring in the likes of The Entertainer, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and Tom Jones. One of his co-stars in the latter was Dame Edith Evans, a three-time Academy Award nominee and a Victorian by birth herself, who here appears as a rather different, matronly interpretation of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

There are some hugely esteemed names in other ghostly parts as well, with none other than Sir Alec Guinness seeming to enjoy himself hugely with a rather sarcastic and mischievous Marley. The Ghost of Christmas Present is played with the customary gusto by Kenneth More, who’d been the foursquare hero of black-and-white war films such as Reach for the Sky and Sink the Bismarck, as well as the acclaimed Titanic drama A Night to Remember. A major UK star of the fifties and early sixties, More was just past the peak of his movie fame here, but had recently enjoyed something of a renaissance as one of the leads of the enormously popular BBC television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga.
 
Speaking of British television, many of the supporting parts are filled with faces which will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of some of its most popular programmes of the late 20^th century. David Collings is well-remembered for his supporting roles in a huge number of popular drama series, including the likes of Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and his recurring part of Silver in Sapphire and Steel. Catweazle’s Geoffrey Bayldon appears as toyshop owner Pringle, while renowned comic actor Roy Kinnear is one of the two Charitable Gentlemen.

 
Anton Rodgers appears as Tom Jenkins, a character not featured in the book, a hot soup seller who owes Scrooge money. Rodgers would later achieve TV fame as the star of sitcoms Fresh Fields and May to December, but his role here in Scrooge stands out as it’s he who gets the memorable Thank You Very Much number.
 
In fact, you could name pretty much anyone who has a speaking part as being a memorable turn from some other British film or television programme – Mary Peach, for example, as the wife of Scrooge’s nephew, who these days is well-remembered by Doctor Who fans for her role as Astrid Ferrier in the serial The Enemy of the World. 
 
Behind the cameras, Leslie Bricusse was responsible for the music and lyrics and also for the film’s screenplay as a whole. By this point, Bricusse had a strong reputation for his success with musical feature films. He’d provided the songs for the 1969 musical version of Goodbye, Mr Chips, and as with Scrooge had taken on screenplay duties in addition to the songs for the 1967 version of Doctor Dolittle. Bricusse won an Oscar for his work on Dolittle, and had also co-written the James Bond themes Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice – so he certainly had the sort of pedigree needed for the job of turning one of English literature’s best-loved stories into a musical.
 
Director Ronald Neame was by this point nearly sixty, and had enjoyed a long and successful career in film, initially as a cinematographer and then a producer. In the latter role he had experience of success with Dickens adaptations, having produced David Lean’s versions of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist in 1946 and 1948 respectively. Neame had turned to directing in the 1950s, notably helming the war film The Man Who Never Was, and after Scrooge went on to direct the Hollywood disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. Coming into Scrooge, his previous film had been The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had won a Best Actress Oscar for Maggie Smith.
 
Underdone Potato:
One issue with making a musical version is that you have to compress some of the other elements to make way for the songs. While there is nothing major or important missing from this version of the story, some nice bits are slimmed down – for example, the visit of Scrooge’s nephew, Harry in this version, loses some of the best bits of dialogue from the book.

Right from the very off, however, Finney’s, snivelling, sneering, meticulously coin-counting performance as Scrooge dominates and delights. It could, perhaps, risk falling into a kind of cartoon caricature, but Finney is far too fine an actor for that. All the little bits of business around his coins and his keys and his safes simply add flourishes, rather than detracting or distracting from what’s at hand.
 
David Collings makes for a much more charming and less wet and insipid Bob Cratchit than is often the case, and the same can be said for Richard Beaumont’s performance as Tim, who while having a boyish innocence to him is again stopped from being too sickly both by the acting and the scripting. He gets an early appearance in the story here, joining his father and one of his sisters on the walk home, a song number through the Christmas shopping. The walk home’s a bit harsh on Mrs Cratchit though, as we see him buying a Christmas pudding rather than her own home-made one being a triumph as described in the book. When Bob first meets them they are busy peering into the window of a toy shop, in a scene which makes me wonder if it may have been inspired by Tim also doing so in the 1951 version.

If you think fourpence is a bit steep for it, then you ought
to have let your wife make one like she does in the book!

 
Scrooge also gets a song on the way home, a journey upon which he checks up on various of his debtors. Even against the Christmas Carol opening and Father Christmas taunting of him by the carol singers, his song is perhaps the best of the opening section. It seems an odd choice in an uplifting Christmas family musical to have a song called I Hate People, perhaps, but it feels appropriate particularly to a British audience as you can easily imagine the song being performed by the main villain in a traditional festive pantomime.
 
Scrooge encounters the charitable gentlemen on his walk home rather than in the office on this occasion, but his dialogue with them is substantially similar. We then get one of the big name actors in supporting parts, as no less than Alec Guinness turns up clearly enjoying himself immensely as quite a darkly comic and at times even camp Jacob Marley.

Past:
Edith Evans is, of course, absolutely nothing at all like the Ghost of Christmas Past as described in the book. But her performance as the gently nagging, matronly ghost is such good fun that I find I can forgive it.

 
The school scenes are comparatively brief, although there is an interesting change in that one of the children happily leaving the school for the Christmas holidays is Scrooge’s sister, Fan, which makes you wonder how they’d both been sent away to the same school together, and then she was allowed home but he was not. We do then get the scene from a later Christmas where she comes and takes him back home. She refers to him here as “Ebbie”, which is mildly distracting if you’ve seen a later version where that’s the name of a female Scrooge!

Much of this section, however, concentrates on the Fezziwig party, with a riotous depiction of the festivities at their Christmas party accompanied by the jolly December the 25^th song. As is common – almost usual, really, for adaptations – Belle is present at the party. Less commonly, she’s also made the Fezziwigs’ daughter in this version – it a rare but not absolutely unheard-of change, with Jack Thorne also having done it in his stage version, for example.

 
Belle is actually referred to as Isabelle throughout, and there’s a bit of a cheat here – we drift away from the Christmas party to see Scrooge’s memories of being with her at sunnier times of year, boating and carriage-riding. Much of this is in the presumably chaperoning company of Mr and Mrs Fezziwig, presumably standing in for the function of the second Belle scene, which isn’t present – showing Scrooge the married life he could have had through their example, rather than through Belle’s actual marriage to another man.

 
Having Finney young enough to play the young Scrooge is a definite example here, and works particularly well in the scene where Belle eventually leaves him. Finney’s putting on a voice for the older Scrooge, and is half-way to it in the scene where she leaves him, giving a more convincing link between the older and younger versions than is often the case in adaptations where it’s a different actor involved – or where you’ve got Seymour Hicks trying to get away with pretending to be several decades younger than he actually is!

Finney also does a terrific job as the Scrooge saddened and even crushed by what he’s seen, telling the Spirit to remove him from the place where Belle has left him as he can stand it no longer. He has some heavyweight competition from the likes of Caine and Stewart, of course, but it’s possible he could be the best actor ever to have portrayed Ebenezer on screen. I would go that far.
 
Present:
Speaking of terrific actors, however, we’re treated to another one as one of the great British film stars of the mid-20^th century, Kenneth More, pops in for a turn as the Ghost of Christmas Present, looking and being introduced pretty much exactly as described in the book, at the head of a enormous pile of Christmas treats and delicacies.

There’s a longer sequence than in the book of the Spirit and Scrooge within Scrooge’s rooms before they go out and about, due to the Spirit – unlike the past – having its own musical number, I Like Life, which is great fun and one of the more memorable songs from the film. He also has a line I’ve always really liked which is specific to this film and not in the book, where he calls Scrooge a “weird little man” – something about the way More delivers this always tickles me.
 
After they do eventually get out and about, we have the two main scenes usually present in this section, of the Cratchits’ Christmas and Scrooge’s nephew’s Christmas party. There’s an interesting line, given, the circumstances, added here about the nephew being “haunted” by his Uncle Ebenezer, which is technically true in this instance! They do a really good job of showing it to be the jolly party of the book, however, relating what Dickens describes as Scrooge’s excitement at joining in with the games being played.

There’s then a touch of what comes out on a few occasions through the film and works very effectively, even after his later redemption – the melancholia of Scrooge, when he’s shown the error of his ways. The time and the opportunities wasted, and the inability to ever get those chances back again, shown here as he drifts off into a reverie about those long-ago Fezziwig Christmases as his nephew’s guest say their farewells at the end of the evening.
 
There’s no reference to the ageing of the Spirit, and Ignorance and Want do not appear, although there is a nice bit of new dialogue from the Spirit where he tells Scrooge that you can’t do everything that you want in life, but it’s important to do as much as you can in the time that you have.

Yet to Come:
There’s a decent little scare from the figure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come being suddenly and silently present in Scrooge’s rooms, with its sleeves covering its arms so that even its traditional pointing finger does not emerge, rendering is very mysterious and enigmatic indeed.

We’re transported to the future, and to perhaps the best-known moment of the film and certainly its best-remembered musical number. Tom Jenkins, the hot soup man who was one of several characters we met near the start who owe Scrooge money, leads an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular chorus in the anthemic Thank You Very Much – which sounds cheery enough when you hear the song in isolation, but of course in the context of the film they’re all delighted that Scrooge has died. So I suppose really it’s an alternative to the scene of the relieved young couple in the book.

After that, there’s the comedown of a visit to the Cratchits, although no Bob – instead we travel to the graveyard to see him tending Tim’s grave, before Scrooge is shown his own. There’s a bit of a misstep here as the intended jump scare reveal of the Spirit’s skull face and skeleton hands as Scrooge falls into the grave looks more comic than anything, the Spirit looking a bit too much like a cheap Halloween toy.
 
There’s a radical departure from the novel here as we see Scrooge’s descent into hell, where Marley and a lot of sweaty, muscular, topless devils carrying his chain are waiting for him. It’s perhaps a bit much, but when you have as big a star as Alec Guinness then I suppose of course you want to make the most of him. I do like the way he does the same little wave through the closing door as he did when leaving Scrooge’s room earlier in the film.

What’s To-Day:
The final section is a sort of ‘Greatest Hits’ of reprises of some of the big hooks from earlier in the film – Father Christmas and of course Thank You Very Much, although when Scrooge first awakes from his night with the Spirits he has a nice, slower number about having the chance to begin again.
 
The boy who Scrooge meets – standing at his doorway rather than shouting down from the window on this occasion – gets a slightly bigger role here, having a sled with him on which he helps convey Scrooge and his purchases around the snowy streets on the way to the Cratchits’ house. With all the song-and-dance numbers there’s no time for a visit to his nephew’s house before the end of the film, but there is a meeting with him and his wife in the street, when he says he’ll come for dinner later – and he charitable gentlemen get their donation, too.

 
After buying a Father Christmas costume and half a toyshop, Scrooge finally arrives at the Cratchits to deliver their gifts. It may be pathetically soppy of me, but I always get a little twinge at the moment where he pretends to have forgotten a toy for Tiny Tim – then gives him the carousel he’d been admiring in the toyshop window near the start of the film. Nice line from Tim, too, again just about undercutting any sickliness – “you didn’t steal it, did you?”
 
I do also love the very end of the whole thing, which unlike most versions doesn’t go for some sort of version of the book’s closing passage as narration. Instead, as the singing and dancing continues off into to the distance, an exhausted but happy Scrooge steps away towards his house, and the melancholy feeling the film offers up at various moments returns. Scrooge is redeemed, and happy, but there is a kind of bittersweet moment to it. He gives an earnest, almost desperate-seeming “Merry Christmas!” to those around him who no longer seem to have any consciousness of him as they dance and whirl away.
 
There’s a sense of the regret, and the wasted years… But there’s still that happiness in it all, as he puts his Father Christmas hat and beard onto the doorknocker and tells Jacob Marley that they finally made a Merry Christmas after all.

 
Review:
I have to admit that this wasn’t exactly an adaptation I was coming into blind. It’s a version of A Christmas Carol which I have watched many times and loved ever since I first saw it when it was shown on BBC1 one Christmas when I was a very young child – I can’t say for sure exactly how old, but it must have either been the 1991 showing on the 22^nd of December when I was seven, or perhaps even the 1989 Boxing Day showing when I was five.
 
Either way, in my young mind it became – along with the 1984 George C. Scott version – one of the two default ‘proper’ versions of the Carol, and I’m not sure I’ve ever quite shifted from that opinion. For one thing, it perhaps has the greatest cast of any adaptation yet made. Finney is wonderful as both the miserly Scrooge and the one full of joy at the end. The breadth and depth of the casting is perhaps shown by the scene in the toyshop after Scrooge’s redemption, with Geoffrey Bayldon doing a superb job as the bemused toyshop owner and Finney throwing himself into it as the manic Scrooge who seems obsessed with buying up everything. Both star turn and bit-part player actors of great calibre, and the whole film is absolutely stuffed through with such quality.

However, if I wasn’t coming into it blind, nor am I absolutely blind to its faults. It does some of the things I’ve always been critical of other versions of the story for on here, namely making changes that seem to be for change’s sake, rather than for any particular reason. So, setting the story in 1860 rather than 1843, and calling Scrooge’s nephew Harry instead of Fred. Why?
 
Something more substantial which you could genuinely take exception to is Marley’s reappearance towards the end, with Scrooge’s descent into hell. But for some reason, I have a hard time getting upset about this. Perhaps because it’s nice to have a chance to see Alec Guinness pop up again as one of the best screen Marleys. But perhaps it’s also because – as with the Muppet version – when the whole film is taking place within a heightened reality anyway, in this case as a musical, it’s perhaps easier to forgive the story being messed about with than it is in a supposedly ‘straight’ adaptation.

Speaking of it being musical, while not every single song is a classic, there are plenty of anthemic numbers to really lift you up – particularly the opening Christmas Carol overture, and I Like Life, and the justly-lauded Thank You Very Much, which has very much become the film’s signature song. Bricusse hits just the right festive note with the songs, Neame has assembled an absolutely stellar cast, and on the whole this is a terrifically cheerful and uplifting Christmas film. A joy from the first peel of bells to the closing title card.
 
In a nutshell:
Obviously it depends on whether or not you enjoy musicals. But if you do, then this is very much one of the finest and most enjoyable adaptations of the Carol that you could possibly hope to see.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb

Bugs Bunny's Christmas Carol

Title:

Bugs Bunny’s Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Short segment of an animated television special
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
DePatie–Freleng Enterprises, for Warner Brothers Television and CBS
 
Year:
1979 (first broadcast on the CBS network in the USA on November 27^th that year)
 
Length:
8 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy Victorian
 
Background:
Bug Bunny is, of course one of the most famous American cartoon characters ever to have been created, having appeared in animations of various lengths for Warner Brothers since the 1930s. In those earliest days the cartoons would have been designed to form part of a cinema programme, although by this stage they were of course being made for television.
 
Bugs Bunny’s Christmas Carol wasn’t actually an entirely separate entity in and of itself; instead it was one of three cartoons which comprised Bug Bunny’s Looney Christmas Tales. These featured various of the Looney Tunes stable of cartoon characters in assorted seasonal situations, with the Christmas Carol segment forming the first of the trio.

Cast and crew:
The famous voice of Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc, is present and correct here, not just as Bugs but as… well, pretty much the entire cast, really!
 
Director Frez Freleng was a veteran of the Looney Tunes stable and had been handling Bugs Bunny cartoons for over thirty years by this point, so he certainly knew what he was doing. Freleng also co-wrote the script, along with Scots scriptwriter John W. Dunn and fellow animation veteran Tony Benedict.
 
Underdone Potato:
Given that this is a very short version of the story, you would expect them to speed through everything very quickly – and indeed they do – but despite that, the opening section is the one lingered on the longest. Probably because it has all the set-up and you only then need to go a quick pay-off, I suppose.
 
Yosemite Sam is cast in the role of Scrooge – ‘Sam Scrooge’, evidently, given a line he has near the end – with Porky Pig as Bob Cratchit. Porky asks for another lump of coal to put in the stove in his office and is of course abruptly refused. Mind you, he’d probably be a bit less old if he put some trousers on.

Put some bloody trousers on, Bob!

 
Bugs Bunny – who’s also the frame narrator of the whole thing – turns up as a sort of Fred character, although he’s never explicitly introduced as such. After failing to convince Scrooge of the need to celebrate Christmas, he’s kicked out of the office. He goes for dinner at Bob’s, where we briefly see Bob’s mostly-porcine family – except for Tiny Tim, played here by Tweety Pie and thus raising some awkward questions about what Mrs Cratchit has been up to. Not the last piggy Mrs Cratchit we’ll ever see in an adaptation, of course.
 
As happens occasionally in other versions, Cratchit is actually fired by Scrooge, and is to have his home repossessed too. Bugs decides that enough is enough, and hatches a plan to change Scrooge’s ways, sneaking into the house Sam Scrooge shares with Sylvester the cat. (Who he’s actually surprisingly nice to, letting him sleep in the bed with him!)

There is a suggestion of Marley as Bug dresses up in a ghostly sheet and chains, although Scrooge never sees this and only hears the noise of them. What’s interesting about this version is that there are no ‘real’ ghosts – Bugs explicitly states to the audience that he’s going to play a trick on Scrooge by only making him think there are.
 
Yet to Come:
As there are no ghosts, there are no visions, and there is also only one spirit – the ‘Ghost of Christmas’, combining all three spirits into one as was also done in 1908 and 1910 silent versions. Although with a sheet covering his head and Bugs occasionally stretching his arm out to point, the one he most resembles is indeed Yet to Come. It’s perhaps no surprise that the structure of this adaptation should have something in common with those from the silent era, given that it is similarly short.

As Bugs can’t show Sam any visions, he instead makes a threat, instead – telling Sam that he will meet the guy in the red suit, but not Santa. Scrooge asks if he means ‘downstairs’, and Bugs as the Ghost of Christmas confirms that he does, which panics Sam into pledging to change his ways and be nice to people.
 
What’s To-Day:
To show how great he now is, Sam even rushes to his wardrobe to find and dress up in a Santa suit – although why he owned such an item in the first place is anybody’s guess! It’s all a bit showy and shallow, his ‘redemption’, clearly not a case of him actually wanting to change his ways, but simply wanting to put on the appearance of being a reformed character to avoid having to go to hell! Still, he does make Porky Bob a partner in the business, thus at least giving him some sort of financial security!

Review:
Obviously it’s hard to make much of this, given how sleight it all is. I have to confess that I don’t remember ever being a particular fan of the Warner Brothers cartoon stable, even when I was a child. I certainly remember them being on television a lot, and I certainly watched them, but they were the kind of thing I watched more than enjoyed. Something to sit through as filler while you waited for the ‘proper’ children’s programmes.
 
I realise of course that’s rather unkind, and that these are characters which resonate with a huge number of people who hold them in high affection. And there’s obviously no doubt whatsoever that there’s a great deal of skill involved here, both on the animation side and from Mel Blanc doing a tour-de-force on vocal duties and making everyone sound sufficiently different.
 
It’s difficult to rate it particularly highly as an adaptation of the Carol, but of course there’s nothing at all wrong with existing fictional universes adopting the story to make their own parodies and versions. Indeed, it’s a tribute to the power of the story that so many of them do.

In a nutshell:
If you’re a fan of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters I’m sure you’ll enjoy it very much.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb

The Stingiest Man in Town - 1978, animation

Title:
The Stingiest Man in Town
 
Format:
Animated television special
 
Country:
USA / Japan
 
Production company:
Rankin/Bass Productions and Topcraft, for NBC
 
Year:
1978 (first shown on the NBC network in the USA on December 23^rd that year)
 
Length:
50 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy Victorian – a London where talking and singing animals are unremarkable, and everyone speaks with American accents
 
Background:
The Stingiest Man in Town had originally been a live-action – and, indeed, live broadcast – television production for NBC back in 1956, and while not being as big a success as other stage or feature film musicals of the time, it did receive a soundtrack release. 22 years later, NBC commissioned the well-known Rankin/Bass animation house to make this new version for Christmas 1978. Rankin/Bass were best known for their festive specials, although they usually worked in stop-motion animation rather than traditional drawn animation as here. Perhaps because of this, for The Stingiest Man in Town they collaborated with the Japanese animation house Topcraft, with whom they had an existing relationship from several other such collaborations throughout the 1970s – including an adaptation of the poem The Night Before Christmas broadcast on NBC in 1974.

Cast and crew:
Starring as the voice of Scrooge is Walter Matthau, best known at the time for his curmudgeonly starring role in the film The Odd Couple. You’d think that in an animated version they wouldn’t necessarily need to get someone else in to play the young Scrooge, but perhaps they felt Matthau’s voice wouldn’t convince as a younger man, so Robert Morse – later to be a star of the 21^st century TV drama Mad Men – plays young Ebenezer. Weirdly, Matthau’s then-teenage son Charles – who is in the voice cast in another, minor part – didn’t get the role, which you’d think might have made more sense if they were having him in it anyway.
 
Happy Days star Tom Bosley plays B. A.H. Humbug, Esquire (get it?) a sort of narrator figure who guides us through the action. Paul Frees, who was a stalwart of animation voices over many years for Disney and others, is both the Ghost of Christmas Past and Christmas Present, while Austrian-born movie veteran Theodore Bikel voices Marley.

While the songs are adapted from the original, the script is a new one from Romeo Muller, who was a Rankin/Bass regular for their Christmas specials. Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin themselves directed the American side of things, with Katsuhisa Yamada directing the work of the Japanese animation team.
 
Underdone Potato:
There is a very interesting little tweak at the start here, in that the story begins post-redemption – our humbug narrator tells us that Scrooge is known to be the kindest and most generous man in town. However, they’re clearly a bit over-delighted with this conceit, as he then rather archly asks if we’re surprised by this, before explaining that it wasn’t always the case. To underline the point, we even have Scrooge referred to as the “Devil’s stooge!” (Although this, presumably, was more for want of a rhyme…)
 
I thought for a moment we were going to cut almost all of the pre-Marley material altogether, but it seems jumping to Scrooge in bed is just a little tease ahead into the opening titles. Once those are over and done with, we’re back into the offices of Scrooge & Marley for a visit from Fred, who as well as serenading his uncle also brings him some presents.

I never knew Marley was such a bighead...

 
Bob Cratchit is surprisingly over-confident in this version, being so bold as to say to his employer that he, “didn’t think he’d have to ask” to have Christmas Day off. Scrooge then pulls a bit of emotional blackmail, pretending to be hard-up and unable to spare the money himself, so Bob says he doesn’t have to pay him or Christmas Day.
 
As was the case in the original version of The Stingiest Man in Town, Scrooge has actually already gone to bed before Marley appears and warns him of the coming of the three spirits. Perhaps surprisingly, before Jacob takes his leave he does a bit from the book not included in all that many versions – showing Scrooge the other spirits hopelessly wandering the world outside his window.
 
Past:
Quite a short section this, and with the Spirit rather different to the norm – he keeps the flame-like characteristics of Dickens’s description, but as with the original 1956 version of The Stingiest Man in Town he is depicted as an old man.

We only really get two scenes with Belle and that’s it. The first one does the common thing of bringing her to the Fezziwigs’ Christmas Party, although the party isn’t named as such. Indeed, we don’t actually really see anything much of the party at all – instead, Ebenezer and Belle go outside to cool down from the warmth within, and debate whether or not they can afford to get married.
 
We then get the first Belle scene from the book, where she releases him from his obligation. Interestingly, it’s sort-of merged with a version of the second Belle scene – but instead of Scrooge seeing her actual husband and children, he sees a vision of what might have been had they married and had children of their own.
 
There’s a suggestion that perhaps Belle didn’t end up happily married as she does in the book – we are given a brief glimpse of her as a rather sad and lonely-looking old woman, mirrored with the present-day Scrooge in a split screen, with the hint perhaps being that he didn’t only ruin his own life, he ruined hers, too.

Poor old Belle... Literally, in the latter case

 
There’s a nice moment when Scrooge wakes up after snuffing out the ghost, and he is reaching across and using a snuffer to put out a real candle on his bedside table.
 
Present:
The Spirit looks even more Father Christmas-like than usual here – he already has a white hair and beard, so doesn’t age across his time with Scrooge. This is probably very deliberate, as there is a moment when Santa Claus is being sung about when we see a shot of him with his green cloak turned to red, linking them very much as one and the same figure with a tad less subtlety than usual.

 
We get the two main visits of the section – to Bob’s house, and then to Fred’s. One thing that struck me about the animation here is that the Cratchit children, or at least the boys, really do have grotesquely thin legs. It’s a wonder any of them can stand up without the things snapping beneath them.
 
There’s a very syrupy song that slows the whole thing down into a kind of second-rate version of Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus, and then when we get to Fred’s there’s only a brief bit of the party before we get into a very religious mode, with stained glass-style shots of the Nativity and the same reminder of the Christianity of Christmas as in the 1956 version. Still a good point about the gold being a pointless present for a king, though.

Oddly, it’s after the visit to Fred’s that Scrooge asks whether Tiny Tim will live. This then all gets sidetracked into another rather mawkish and forgettable song.
 
Yet to Come:
Quite a brief rendition, here. There’s the tiniest glimpse of the Old Joe segment, and then the Spirit – depicted in traditional fashion – shows Scrooge his gravestone. We also get a revisit from the spirits Scrooge was shown outside of his window, and the Devil himself makes a brief cameo appearance – harking back, I suppose, to that earlier line about Scrooge being his stooge.

 
What’s To-Day:
Scrooge not only sends the boy to go and buy the turkey, he also gets him to deliver it to the Cratchits – not even having to give the boy their address. In a scene which evokes memories of the 1970 musical, Scrooge then heads off to the toyshop, although unlike in that film he has the toys sent to the Cratchits, rather than delivering them himself.

He then heads off to Fred’s party, and the next day we have the usual closing scene of him playing his little joke on Bob. We then also get various little glimpses of Scrooge handing out piles of gold coins to people with abandon – including a pair who I assume to be the two charitable gentlemen, who didn’t feature in their usual place near the start. The Ghost of Christmas Present did refer to Scrooge’s “surplus population” remark, however, so I wonder if perhaps they were originally included but then cut for time.
 
Review:
As with the original live television version of 1956, there are a few nice songs – the opening number especially, with its lines about a Christmas story written long ago. But few of them are as memorable or striking as the biggest hits of the 1970 or Muppet versions. Those in the Christmas Present section particularly transgress what’s sure a cardinal sin of musicals – slowing the whole story down rather than moving it along.

Aside from that, though, there’s little that you could say was really bad here. The animation’s of a high standard, and there are some very interesting touches like the old, sad Belle. It’s certainly miles ahead of many if not most of the other animated versions I have so far covered here on the blog. But it’s difficult to say it’s particularly great, either.
 
The 1956 version was impressive because of its nature as a live action musical done as a live television production, and managing to pull that off. No matter the skill involved – and there certainly is that – this animated version can never quite match that, really.
 
In a nutshell:
Not at all bad, but even if you want a child-friendly version there are better ones out there.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb