A Christmas Carol - 2017, straight-to-DVD

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Single camera one-man performance
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
That’s My Cue Productions
 
Year:
2019
 
Length:
57 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
Martin Prest first performed a one-man-show version of A Christmas Carol on-stage in Cambridge in 2012, and has continued to tour the performance ever since. This recorded version was released straight-to-DVD in 2017 for sale via the production company’s website, and has subsequently been made available on streaming services such as Amazon Prime.

Cast and crew:
Evidently creating this show was a “lifelong dream” for Prest, who doesn’t have more than a handful of other credits to his name in visual media, but whose company That’s My Cue Productions has expanded into further stage shows since that initial Carol production, including Three Men in a Boat and Dracula.
 
It’s also Prest’s adaptation, rather than using Dickens’s own performance version. The director of this recording was Jack Spring. Spring’s first feature film, Destination: Dewsbuy, was released a couple of years after this, in 2019, and according to his website he’s currently working on another Carol-related project, about a struggling director trying to put on a theatre performance of the story, so presumably he’s a fan!

 
Underdone Potato:
This is, at just under an hour, obviously a trimmed-down version of the Carol, although all of the major elements are present and correct. The editing does, however, mean that some of my personal favourite little touches and flourishes of Dickens’s writing are missing – Marley saying that Scrooge’s chance and hope is one of his procuring, for example.
 
Speaking of Marley, he’s portrayed in a much more desperate and whimpering fashion here than is usually the case, and to my mind than comes across in the Dickens. Fred is also a lot more cockney than usual, too, although perhaps it’s true to say that in other versions he’s usually portrayed as being rather too much on the plummy side.

Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past initially seems far more creepy than you might expect, and then after its initial encounter with Scrooge it comes across a lot of the time as a lot more smirking, perhaps. Prest also turns Belle into quite a whiny creature, and there’s an interesting bit in the editing of the text after her scene where the Spirit says that it is going to show Scrooge one shadow more, but he snuffs it out before we get to the second Belle scene of the book.
 
Present:
The Ghost of Christmas Present has probably the least successful of Prest’s attempts at putting on an accent. At first I thought he was doing Welsh, but then it seemed to veer more into Glaswegian at certain points, but he’s in good company with having such a wandering accent for this particular part, with it bringing up memories of Jim Carrey’s unsuccessful efforts in the 2009 animated version.
 
The scene at the Cratchits’ house is the only one – barring any edits, of which more below – where I noticed Prest ever being in danger of losing his way, as he stumbles over a couple of lines in quick succession. There are two way of looking at this. The charitable one is that if they’re trying to recreate the experience of seeing the book read on-stage, then that’s fair enough. The other way of looking at it is that it makes the thing feel a bit sloppy and amateur.
 
On a script note, it’s interesting that while Ignorance and Want are included, there’s no mention in this version of the Spirit having aged through his encounter with Scrooge.

Yet to Come:
There’s another of those bits here which you can more easily forgive if you decide you’re watching a recorded stage performance, as Prest sips from his glass of water a bit more often than he has through the rest of the production.
 
The Old Joe section is slimmed down to him having just the one visitor, and although much of the dialogue abut the bedsheets and such is intact, there’s another of those instances where I miss one of the original lines, her saying that she wasn’t so fond of him she’d have taken the bedsheets if he’d died of anything catching.
 
What’s To-Day:
This section contains the only instance I noticed of an edit. It’s carefully done in that they pick up with him as much as possible standing in the same spot, but unless it’s simply a mistake in the editing, there’s a definite cut here. It comes as Scrooge meets the charitable gentleman in the street on Christmas morning, and as they were happy to leave in those stumbles in the Christmas Present section, makes me wonder what went so wrong here as to cause a cut?

Review:
This is by no means an awful performance. If you’d paid to go and see it in the theatre, I don’t think you’d be disappointed. Prest does a commendable job of maintaining his concentration across such a large chunk of text, and I like the way he differentiates between when he’s playing the narrator and when he’s playing the characters – looking directly down the camera when he’s narrating, and away from it when he’s in character.
 
However, I do also have to say that something about his very ‘Actorly’ style and voice and his determination to show off an array of different accents does make this feel a little like something you might see in a comedy sketch of an actor doing a one-man show of A Christmas Carol. This isn’t helped by the scenery – while the alternating backdrops for inside and out are quite nice paintings, and often well-lit, the shaky manner in which they go up-and-down does give a very amateurish feeling to proceedings.
 
This may well be intentional, of course. I get the impression the whole thing is designed to feel like a theatrical experience. But the problem is it feels a bit too much like an am-dram one, which would be fine in a village hall but I don’t think can quite hack it when subjected to this kind of glare, especially when compared to the likes of the 1982 or 2018 performed reading versions.
 
In a nutshell:
A worthy enough effort, but if you want a one-man-show version, there are simply better options out there.
 
Links:
Amazon Prime
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 2017, animation

Title:

A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Short online animation
 
Country:
Turkey
 
Production company:
Adisebaba
 
Year:
2017 – first posted on YouTube on December 25^th that year
 
Length:
11 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian-ish!
 
Background:
I came across this on YouTube when searching for a short version I could review today because I was a couple of Carols short on this year’s schedule – due to ones I’d planned to review either turning out not to exist, or not being available. I only had a very small amount of time to put today’s review together, pretty close to the wire, so when I was this one I decided that would do.
 
It’s had one-and-a-half million views on YouTube, so probably far, far more viewers than, say, some of the Amazon Prime films I’ve watched. The YouTube channel it’s from, “Fairy Tales and Stories for Kids”, lists itself as being US-based on its “About” page, but the company behind it, Adisebaba, is Turkish.

 
Cast and crew:
There are absolutely no credits on this whatsoever, so it’s pretty much impossible to find out who did what or anything about them. There appear to be just two performers doing all of the voices, however – one male and one female. At first I couldn’t place the accents – trying to work out if they were Americans trying to do English accents, or South Africans, or what. However, if they’re from people for whom English is a second language, then some of the weird emphasise and intonations throughout do make sense. Most of the story is narrated by the female performer, with occasional bits of dialogue given to the characters here and there.
 
Underdone Potato:
The first thing to note is that this is not, strictly-speaking, A Christmas Carol in the sense that it’s not set at Christmas. Instead, the story has been moved to New Year’s Eve and is more of A New Year’s Carol. The reasons for this are unclear. I could understand if the idea were to completely secularise the story – but on the other hand, the idea of New Year’s Eve in this form surely comes from a Christian calendar anyway, and Christmas (although not, admittedly, Christian) iconography such as Christmas trees still features. They also retain the title A Christmas Carol and released it on Christmas Day, so it’s all a bit weird.
 
As is the naming policy – hardly anybody is named apart from ‘Mr Scrooge’, with Bob becoming his ‘Helper’, as if he’s a live-in carer or something. Said ‘Helper’ wants to go early to buy his son a New Year’s present (what?), but Scrooge quite rightly points out he shouldn’t have left it to the last minute to do so.

Nephew Fred is just a nameless nephew here, and younger than in the book, too – just a child. Marley becomes Scrooge’s nameless ‘friend from work’, who has to ‘walk around the world in shackles’ as if it’s a charity world record attempt, with the whiff of a script that’s been put through Google’s auto-translate or something.

 

Some of the odd performance aspect comes in when Scrooge tells Marley to go, and he very casually replies, ‘Okay then, just wanted to warn you…’ Unusually, Marley – sorry, Scrooge’s ‘friend from work’ – actually tells Scrooge that the three spirits coming to visit him will show him visions of the past, the present and the future.
 
As in the dreadful 1997 version, Scrooge has a mean pet dog – rather pointlessly, as it doesn’t actually do anything.
 
Past:
The Ghost of ‘Last Year’s New Year’s Eve’ is a floating child, who takes Scrooge back to his own childhood. We see young Scrooge and his friends decorating a tree ‘like a Christmas tree’ (no, it is a Christmas tree), and then a party at his ‘first boss’s house’, this version’s equivalent of the Fezziwig party. It’s a weirdly-animated mix of 1950s and Victorian styles, and Scrooge is there with his wife – not named as Belle, of course. Then we see his wife leaving him later, when she’s realised he’s only obsessed with money.

Present:
The ‘Ghost of This Year’s New Year’s Eve’ appears to be a Ghost of Christmas Present tribute act, depicted very similarly to the traditional versions. We see Scrooge’s ‘Helper’ and his family, with a young son in a wheelchair, and Scrooge’s family – his nephew and nephew’s parents (Scrooge’s brother and his wife, we later learn) having ‘So much fun eating’. At the end of the section, we’re very casually told the Spirit informed Scrooge that it was ‘Time for him to die’ before revealing versions of Ignorance and Want, renamed as ‘Greedy and Unconcerned’ which seems a bit of a weird inclusion in such a stripped-down, young child-friendly version.

Yet to Come:
Another tribute act here, this time seemingly to the rapper Flava Flav, as a fairly traditional depiction of the ‘Ghost of the Future’ is wearing a clock around its neck. We’re shown Scrooge’s funeral, where he’s weirdly being buried right next to his Helper’s son’s grave.

What’s To-Day:
All the usual – Scrooge gets into the spirit of Christmas New Year’s Eve, sends toys and food to his Helper’s family, goes and has dinner with his own family, and starts splashing out money on charity.
 
Review:
This is a weird old thing. The animation isn’t actually bad at all, even though some of the design choices are a bit odd. And for an 11-minute version, they actually manage to include quite a large number of elements from the original story. However, the script just has so many odd bits and pieces to it, and the performances are so deeply unusual, that the whole thing comes across as being almost entirely computer-generated, voices and script and all.

That actually gives it some attraction, however. It’s so deeply odd that it’s actually quite funny. And at least it is fairly brief – although absolutely stuffed to the gills with adverts. I’d love to know the story behind the whole New Year’s Eve decision, and the oddness of the script, although sadly I doubt I ever will.
 
In a nutshell:
Actually worth watching for amusement value alone, if you have 11 minutes to spare.
 
Links:
YouTube

A Christmas Carol - 2018, film

Title:

A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Digitally-released feature film for online streaming
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
Zoghogg Studios
 
Year:
2018
 
Length:
75 minutes
 
Setting:
Contemporary Scotland
 
Background:
Another straight-to-streaming effort of the kind we’re seeing with increasing frequency, this was released direct to Amazon Prime’s video service in 2018, although according to its IMDb page it has also had some television screenings in countries such as Greece and Turkey. It’s one of the few adaptations of the Carol – the first that I know of for sure, anyway – to have been shot in Scotland, where production company Zoghogg is based.
 
Cast and crew:
Zoghogg is run by David Izatt, who directed A Christmas Carol – his first feature film. Izatt seems to have been primarily a photographer, before moving into cinematography and then full-blown directing with this film. He wrote the script alongside producer Stuart Brennan, who also stars as Scrooge. Brennan has a long list of producing, directing and acting credits on his IMDb page, but frankly nothing you’ll have heard of.
 
Izatt himself makes an appearance as a baker, and fellow Zoghogg team member and ‘face of Scotch Beef’ Chris Capaldi is another original character, which probably gives you some idea of the talent pool from which they were fishing. Probably the best-known cast member is Bonnie Wright as Nell – as a child, Wright featured as Ginny Weasley throughout the Harry Potter film series.
 
By far and away the biggest name involved in the production, however is Roger Taylor – yes the drummer from Queen – who provided the music. Taylor’s wife Sarina also appears in the film, as this production’s version of Bob “Cratchett”.

Underdone Potato:
Scrooge in this version is the owner of a whisky distillery, although this doesn’t actually become clear until a little way in. What does become clear fairly quickly is his mean streak, firing a couple of his 2500-odd employees for being five minutes late, and pointing out to them the calculation for a month’s worth of someone’s salary he’d lose across the year if everybody was five minutes late.
 
Back in his office, we get versions of all the standard opening segments, although with some interesting changes made to them. The charity collectors, for example – a pair of young women called Charity and Grace, in not the script’s only example of not being particularly subtle – are called back in after initially being dismissed, and given a staggering donation of a quarter of a million pounds. Bob is amazed, until when they’ve gone again Scrooge points out that the money is the £100 Christmas bonus all his employees were entitled to, which he can now make tax deductible. I suppose his assumption is they’ll look churlish complaining that he gave their bonuses to charity – specified as the British Heart Foundation in this case.
 
Fred also turns up during this sequence – indeed, we’re told it’s he who let the charity collectors in – but rather than being Scrooge’s nephew on this occasion, their roles are reversed and he’s his uncle. He asks Scrooge to come around for Christmas the following day, but of course Ebenezer is not keen. For reasons which are not explained, Fred has turned up in full Scots ceremonial dress.

There’s a version of the exchange with Bob about her not working on Christmas Day and being in all the earlier on the 26^th, before an odd scene with a woman called Carol – again, not very subtle – who I mistakenly assumed was this version’s interpretation of Belle, as she appeared to be a ‘lost love’. She asks Scrooge for a lift home when he’s just got into his chauffeur-driven car, as she just happened to be passing for some reason, but what she sees what a miserable bastard he is decides to get the bus instead.
 
Someone who does join Scrooge on the way home, however, is Marley, who appears to him on the journey. It’s quite a harsh and brutal interpretation of the character, and as his warnings continue once Scrooge has arrived home there is some dialogue from the ghost saying that he was always bad but Scrooge wasn’t, which is why he can be redeemed. No chains in this version, although they are mentioned so are presumably meant to be more on the metaphorical side.
 
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past is a young woman in this version, played very well by Rebecca Hanssen despite the fact that she’s unfortunately been saddled with a costume which looks as if the Spirit picked it up from Ann Summers.

The Ghost of Ann Summers Past...

 
Fortunately this doesn’t distract too much, especially as we rarely actually see her during the visions – while Scrooge is present in all of them, for much of the time the Spirit herself is only a disembodied voice. A good job too, as she’d catch her death of cold going around various Decembers in that get-up.
 
We learn quite a bit about Scrooge’s early life through this section. We see his schooldays, but rather than a sister coming to collect him to return him home, we see him being told of hits parents’ death in a car crash – Fred, we learn, raised him through most of his teenage years.
 
There is then a surprising relocation to the USA, which I’d assumed was done by getting hold of some stock shots of an American city and one or two Scottish-based American actors, but there are some credits at the end for a US production unit, so it appears at least some shooting was actually done there. Scrooge and Marley set up their business over there, seemingly originally with this adaptation’s version of Fezziwig as a partner, before Scrooge persuaded Marley to base the operation in Scotland – despite Marley not being keen to return home. Fezziwig, being an American, presumably didn’t make the journey.

Nice Christmas jumper, young Scrooge!

There’s a link back to the start here, with Scrooge witnessing Marley fire an employee for being five minutes late, and explaining how much money it costs the company. The younger Scrooge was clearly troubled by this, but doesn’t intervene on the employee’s behalf, another indicator that Marley was always the harder of the pair.
 
We also see Scrooge’s romance with a fellow English person, a woman called Nell – not sure why they thought that was preferable to Belle as it’s an equally old-fashioned, and indeed Dickensian, name. There’s no happy ending for Nell in this version after she and Scrooge part – we learn that she died a year later, although we’re not told how.
 
Speaking of death, the final vision of the past with which Scrooge is presenter is his scattering of Marley’s ashes, soon after they’d brought the business to Scotland. Again, there’s no explanation as to how or why he died, but given his reluctance to come back home, Scrooge’s admission that he forced him into it and his earlier having chastised Marley’s ghost for “leaving”, I wonder whether there’s supposed to be an implication of suicide here?
 
Present:
Mark Lyminster’s performance as The Ghost of Christmas Present is one of the weaker ones here, not helped by being saddled with lines such as being called “The Goose of Christmas Present” because he “likes a good stuffing” – a line straight out of the old Alan Partridge Christmas special and Mark Eldon’s “Fanny Thomas” celebrity chef character.

 
The script does redeem itself somewhat, however, with an interesting twist on the start of this section – the Spirit asking Scrooge to pick any random passer-by on the street for them to follow their Christmas. Scrooge picks what turns out to be an unemployed and ill man named Reginald Thompson, who it turns out helps run a children’s choir and is picking pennies of the street to try and help pay for a horse for a Christmas present for one of the children in it and… Yeah, okay, perhaps the script hasn’t redeemed itself that much.
 
There’s a nice version of the Cratchit – sorry, Cratchett – scene, however, with another interesting difference in this version in that Tim is Bob’s husband rather than one of the children. He’s dying, in fact, of cancer, and interesting at the end of the film there is no indication that Scrooge will be able to do anything to help him after his redemption.

Not-so-Tiny Tim

 
Instead of there being a party at Fred’s house, we see him and some friends and family out walking, but their discussion of Scrooge is substantially similar to that from the book, even comparing him to an animal as happens there.
 
Yet to Come:
This Spirit is never seen, but only heard – yes, it speaks in this version, although only the odd, heavily-treated word. There does seem to be something which appears to Scrooge, however, as he does look at it.

There’s a nice mix of both the businessmen and Old Joe scenes into one, as Scrooge sees a group of schoolgirls discussing his death, and as well as talking about what a disagreeable person he was, they mention how his bedsheets were probably worth more than a car.
 
We also get a scene of a rather bleak Christmas at the Cratchetts after Tim’s death, and finally Scrooge learns who the children were discussing when he sees his tombstone.
 
What’s To-Day:
In a modern update I quite liked, Scrooge hears the news that it’s Christmas Day by switching on the radio, rather than shouting down to a boy in the street. Although I suppose the radio itself is quite an old-fashioned way of doing it, these days!
 
Having already given the charity collectors a quarter of a million pounds right at the start, he doesn’t meet up with either of them again. Instead, there’s a bit of business with two bakers at a bakery, whose entire stock of cakes and treats he has bought-up and sent to where he knows the community will soon be gather to present that horse to the little girl from the choir.

He goes along to that part of town himself and knock on the Cratchetts’ door, firing her and then re-hiring her on a much better salary. He also re-hires the two employees who we saw him getting rid of at the start of the film. “He’s not as bad as you said he was, mum!” one of the Cratchett children points out, which I thought was quite a nice touch.
 
Finally, he meets up with Carol again, and heads off to Fred’s for Christmas dinner with her and the family. Carol gives him a scarf as a present, which he is very touched by, in a scene reminiscent of Scrooge being given the same gift in the Muppet version.
 
Review:
It’s funny how similar versions sometimes come only a few days apart, quite by chance, here on the blog. Two days ago I posted a review of a very similar American versionfrom 2019 – a low-budget but mostly competently made and performed direct-to-streaming version, set in the present day among a certain community, with the lead actor playing Scrooge not being part of that community. In that case it was the Hispanic community in Florida, whereas here despite being a Scottish production Scrooge himself is English.
 
The feel of the production – a slightly other-worldly, almost parallel-universe atmosphere to it – also put me in mind of the Black Mirror episode Crocodile, which had a similar alternative reality aesthetic with its British cast in Icelandic locations. The dialogue here also contributes to the feeling of it not quite being the real world as we know it. Despite being set in the present day, Scrooge speaks in a very Victorian or cod-Victorian manner much of the time. He also has a sword in his house, for some reason, which he uses early on to try and warn off the coming Spirits.

"Listen, have you heard the one about the three ghosts...?"

I didn’t dislike that approach, however, and it does make this version feel quite distinctive. That’s not so say it’s a perfect script – the whole Carol thing is a bit odd and unexplained, and information sometimes comes at you in an odd order. However, it’s shot well, the performances are almost all decent, and as you’d expect when you have Roger Taylor on duty the music is very good, particularly some nicely atmospheric eighties-style synth parts over bleak Scottish landscapes. There’s also a very nice graphics sequence for the opening titles, too.
 
In a nutshell:
While not a top-rank version, this isn’t bad and is a perfectly good watch if you want a more obscure version of the story.
 
Links:
Amazon Prime
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 2019, film

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Digitally-released feature film for online streaming
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Salgado Studios
 
Year:
2019
 
Length:
73 minutes
 
Setting:
Contemporary Miami
 
Background:
Like many of the low-budget versions made available direct to online streaming services, this seems to have been made due to the driving force of one person – in this case, director and production company owner Steven Salgado. Salgado and his company are based in Miami, Florida, which is where this version is set and that actually works well to its advantage as something a bit different, especially with a predominantly Hispanic cast.

Cast and crew:
Very unusually and commendably for one of these things, despite also being an actor according to his website, Salgado didn’t succumb to the temptation to give himself a role here. Also according to the self-same website, he’s also a children’s author in addition to his acting and directing.
 
The opening titles for the film give a “story by” credit to one Charles Wendel, “based on characters created by Charles Dickens”, which is a bit bloody cheeky given that, no, it really is the same story, updated. Wendel appears to only have this credit on his CV and nothing else, to go by his IMDb page, anyway.
 
None of the cast are particularly known or have any big credits to their names, although Scrooge actress Kate Katzman had appeared in the Walt Disney biopic Walt Before Mickey as his wife, Lillian Disney.
 
Underdone Potato:
Our female Scrooge on this occasion is one Ellen Scrooge, owner of the successful drugs company Scrooge & Hernandez, which she founded with her partner Marley Hernandez who is now deceased, having died one year ago rather than the usual seven. The opening sequences show a very sparse and spartan existence for Scrooge, which I thought might be a budgetary and practical thing but the film did open out a little as it went along, so I think it was more of a stylistic choice to show the coldness and isolation of her life, which certainly does come across.

 
We get to know three of the harassed and harried employees at Scrooge’s office – Santiago, Gabe and Roberto, the latter of whom has a sick grandson called Tim. I did half-wonder whether Gabe might be named in honour of the original Scrooge prototype, Gabriel Grub, but I suspect it’s probably actually just coincidence.
 
There’s quite a lot of non-specific pseudo-business talk about “the numbers” which doesn’t really convince. From a 2020 perspective there is a certain resonance in Scrooge cynically wanting to know what the biggest-growing diseases are so they can be telling the most profitable drugs with which to treat them. She’d have loved the covid vaccine scramble!
 
The version of Nephew Fred here is Ellen’s sister, Jennifer, who calls her to invite her to Christmas dinner but is casually dismissed. There is a sort of version of the two charitable gentlemen, too, with Ellen pretending to make a phone call to avoid a charity worker in an elf outfit selling candy canes in the lift of the building where her company has offices.

The Marley sequence runs a little closer to the original – ‘runs’ being the operative word, as Scrooge is confronted with his spirit while out jogging at night. It’s quite a brutal scene in some ways, with Marley grabbing and squeezing her around the neck, which does feel quite jarring and I’m not sure really suits the style of the film at all.
 
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past arrives almost immediately after Scrooge’s traumatic encounter with Marley – he’s an Uber driver, or perhaps more accurately a fellow passenger in what appears to be a driverless Uber. Very modern.
 
We see some scenes of Ellen’s childhood, firstly a happy Christmas with her mother and father and then a less happy one when her mother has died after having her sister, and her father is struggling with the young Ellen’s anger and resentment about it all.
 

We also see the founding of her drugs company with Marley, and her romance with a man named Jack – the Belle equivalent here. Ellen seems to have some sort of superpower in this scene, when she gets home from work and says she’s going to freshen up in the shower, and is all done and made-up and in a different dress in about 10 seconds flat!
 
Jack asks her to marry him, but she is horrified by the idea and the whole relationship ends. There’s no version of the second Belle scene, but Scrooge does tell the ghost that she heard Jack got married and had children.
 
Present:
Ellen wakes up after her visions of the past thinking it was all a bad dream – but as she gets out of bed and walks through her flat getting ready for work, the Ghost of Christmas Present – a young man in a suit – is sitting on her couch waiting for her. She resigns herself to the fact that there are now going to be further visions.

 
We see her sister and her sister’s partner Carlos, with him trying to point out to her that it’s no good waiting for Ellen to change her ways; Jennifer will always be disappointed and let down by her. We also learn more about Roberto, Santiago and Gabe. The latter two come back to the office midway through a Christmas Eve drinking session because Santiago’s left his wallet there, and end up having a fight over whether Santiago is in love with Ellen.
 
Roberto we see caring for Tim, who we learn is a mad soccer fan – or “football” as he refers to it, which surprised me for an American production, but perhaps that’s more common in the Hispanic community there or else he’s just a stickler for terminology! The Spirit tells Ellen that Tim could be treated by a drug Roberto can’t afford – one her company took off the market because it wasn’t profitable enough.
 
Yet-to-Come
This is by far the most striking of the ghostly visitations, with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come realised as a masked, goggled figure all in black, like some kind of sophisticated home intruder or SWAT team member.

The latter feeling comes across from the green night vision-type lighting the whole section is done in, while the former comes from the aggressive and frightening way in which the Spirit suddenly enters Ellen’s home an basically abducts her into the visions. Indeed, so shocking and violent is its attack that the Spirit grips its hand tightly around her throat at one point, which like Marley doing the same earlier feels unnecessarily violent and out-of-step with the rest of the film.
 
Once it’s dragged her away – literally – it shows her a vision of a weeping Roberto about to kill himself after Tim’s death, and Santiago crying in the company’s office because she has died. This was one part of the film which I found a little frustrating, as we weren’t given any reason or explanation for why Scrooge might have died at such a young age.
 
What’s To-Day:
Perhaps unsurprisingly after such a violent final visit, Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning a thoroughly changed woman. She puts on a bright red dress and goes to visit her sister, where she learns that Jennifer is pregnant and she is thus going to be an aunt.

 
The following day she goes into the office and gives Santiago and Gabe raises, as well as starting a programme to try and get drugs to those in need more fairly and cheaply. She also gives Roberto another week to do the work she’d set him, and somehow she’s managed to buy some football tickets from somewhere for Roberto to be able to take Tim to what is presumably a big game.
 
There’s also the little implication that romance might, perhaps, blossom between her and Santiago, as they have rather a sweet little moment where she says she drinks beer sometimes, and he tells her that he knows a place which has some good ones.
 
Review:
In my review of the 2012 Irish version, I mentioned how easy it is for a low-budget version to simply get lost and ignored among all the others, and how in my view they would have been much better off doing something more distinctive. Rather than attempting to make it a Victorian English version, they should have taken advantage of their location and made an actual Irish-set version of the Carol.
 
This is something which this version gets absolutely right. Okay, so there are a fair few contemporary US-set versions with female leads. But this adaptation’s Miami setting and predominantly Hispanic cast and characters definitely gives it a unique flavour.

 

It’s also a cut above the 2012 Irish version and others of the Amazon Prime monstrosities by actually looking and feeling like a proper film. The picture quality is good, and while the camerawork is occasionally a little too shaky above and beyond the calls of naturalism, the performances – with the exception of Reinaldo Gonzales as Roberto, who I found quite wooden – are generally good and overall it’s a polished production for its level of budget.

The script is mostly decent, although it is a little clunky at times and could have done with another pair of eyes over it. Ellen’s sister referring to her as such so the audience knows who they are is one example, as is Marley explaining their company’s entire business plan to her in the Christmas Past section, when you presume she would already have known all that!
 
Tonally the only misstep is, I think, the violence of the attacks against Ellen from Marley and from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I think even in a version with a male lead, Scrooge being gripped so aggressively around the throat would have seemed a bit much, and here it’s a very uncomfortable shift in tone from most of what’s around it.
 
But overall, this is certainly an enjoyable watch for a contemporary version with a bit of a difference to it. While I certainly couldn’t place it in the first rank of adaptations, if you’ve seen quite a few versions in the past and want to try something you haven’t watched before, then you could do far worse than to give this one a try.
 
In a nutshell:
A good stab at doing a contemporary version on a low budget. Very watchable.
 
Links:
Amazon Prime
IMDb

A CBeebies Chistmas Carol

Title:
A CBeebies Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Pre-recorded Christmas pantomime special, shot on multi-camera HD video
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Television
 
Year:
2013 (first shown on the CBeebies channel in the UK on December 20^th that year)
 
Length:
40 minutes
 
Setting:

Fantasy Victorian
 
Background:
The BBC has a long and proud tradition of high-quality children’s television, and the Christmas pantomimes on its CBeebies channel have become a new part of this tradition in the 21^st century. CBeebies – a corruption of ‘CBBC’, or ‘Children’s BBC’ – is a channel aimed at the under-sevens, and was launched in 2002. As with all of the BBC’s public-service channels, it is available on all television platforms in the UK, whether through a rooftop aerial, a cable or a satellite dish.
 
As with a traditional stage pantomime this took place in a theatre, in this case The Crucible in Sheffield – well-known as the home of the World Snooker Championships. Presumably one of the reasons it was chosen was due to how close the audience can get to the thrust stage.
 
It was recorded and edited for television transmission.

 
Cast and crew:
This was the sixth CBeebies panto, and as usual it featured a mixture of the channel’s presenters and the stars of some of its most popular programmes. For the first time, this one also featured some guest stars who’d been well-known on BBC children’s programmes of decades past, presumably to delight the parents or grandparents watching alongside the young children. So seventies and eighties presenters Iain Lachlan, Floella Benjamin and Derek Griffiths all poke their heads around the door, as does nineties Get Your Own Back host Dave Benson Phillips.
 
Of the contemporary generation, long-serving CBeebies presenter Andy Day stars as Scrooge, with fellow presenter Cat Sandion as the narrator and Children’s BBC stalwart Chris Jarvis as Bob Cratchit, and a host of other guest appearances and familiar faces from the channel alongside them of course.
 
Jon Spooner directed the theatrical production, with Bridget Caldwell directing the television recording – Caldwell was an experienced TV director who’s worked extensively on both multi-camera studio productions and live theatrical events. The producer was Jon Hancock, who’d worked on various other CBeebies productions, and the script was written by Claire Duffy, who later scripted a very well-received young children’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the channel.
 
Duffy’s script for A Christmas Carol is available to download from the BBC Writersroom website: click here.
 

Underdone Potato:
After an opening song and introduction from narrator Cat, we meet Mr Scrooge – quite a young incarnation this, although probably seeming old enough to the target audience – and his three employees. When the audience are told that Scrooge hates Christmas, it’s interesting to see him being booed like a pantomime villain. I know this is a pantomime, but it’s interesting because of course the story doesn’t really have a villain, as such, as Scrooge is technically the hero, in some ways.
 
We get a version of the Nephew Fred scene, before Scrooge heads off home to bed. There’s no Marley scene, although the animated character of Tree Fu Tom provides an equivalent. He doesn’t appear to Scrooge, but is projected onto the back of the stage once Scrooge is asleep, telling the audience that Scrooge will receive visits from three ‘friends’ of his, before there’s a bit of audience participation to create the magic to make them appear.

 
Past:
Derek Griffiths delights the older members of the audience with his appearance as… Well, the first ‘present’ to Scrooge. There’s never any mention of ghosts throughout the whole thing, or even whether it’s the past or the present, but Griffiths certainly looks ghostly in his costume, and the implication is clear enough for the members of the audience who know the story.

We visit a school, although not Scrooge’s own schooldays as such. Instead, he’s encouraged to join in with some messy antics around decorating a Christmas tree. Following this we get the Fezziwigs’ party, with Mr Tumble himself Justin Fletcher as Mrs Fezziwig, and long-serving presenter Pui Fan Lee as Mr Fezziwig.
 
It’s in this section where all of the other old Children’s BBC faces appear as guests at the party, with Floella Benjamin even bringing Humpty along for a rare outing! Griffiths points out that Scrooge enjoyed all the dancing, which he denies, and we get classic bit of panto “Oh yes you were!” business.
 
Present:
CBeebies presenter Katrina Bryan is the second ‘friend’, with a nod to the original’s appearance by wearing a crown of holly around her head.

 
She only shows Scrooge one vision – the Cratchits’ house, with Bob and his wife and their two children, a boy and a girl. The boy is never named as Tim, and doesn’t have anything wrong with him.
 
Yet to Come:
Steven Kynman as his Michael McIntyre-like CBeebies character Robert the Robot is the third ‘friend’, and there’s a bit of comedy business where he initially appears under the traditional cloak and hood, before stumbling his way onto the stage. He does specifically claim to be “from the future”, however.

 
He doesn’t show any visions of what’s to come, though – instead, simply teaching Scrooge, through the medium of song, how to be nice to people. This seems to do the trick, and by the end of it Scrooge is fully redeemed and regretful of his previous actions.
 
What’s To-Day:
Scrooge decides to throw a big party for everyone, sending out invites without saying who they’re from, and gathering everyone together on stage for the big reveal that it’s actually him, and he now loves Christmas. There is a hint of the little joke Scrooge plays on Bob on Boxing Day as he pretends to be cross with him before revealing he’s the one behind the party, before it all ends – of course! – with a song and a dance.
 
The two Cratchit children sign off with a version of Tim’s traditional toast – although, interestingly for a Christmas special, Duffy’s script makes it as secular as they can by changing it to, “Bless us all at Christmas, every one!”

Review:
I can imagine how difficult it is to try and create a version of A Christmas Carol which is suitable for very young children, and yet done in live action rather than with animation or with puppets. While this is clearly a very child-friendly version of the story, it does go to show that if done with attention and care even an adaptation so far removed from the source material can demonstrate what a strong framework the fine old story is.
 
Obviously I am very much not in the target audience for this, but I could appreciate that it was done well. There’s something rather charming about seeing the children in the live theatre audience erupt with glee and tumultuous applause when various of their favourites appear. Matched only, perhaps, by the similar reactions from the parents and grandparents in the audience when some of the familiar faces from their own childhood make guest appearances. All of them looking pretty pleased to be there, too.
 
If I had to make a criticism, I would perhaps say that none of the songs are up there with the best ones from the 1970 or the Muppet versions. But really, it’s hard to find fault with this – a fun little production which achieves exactly what it sets out to do. Certainly it’s a cut above the vast majority of other young child-oriented versions out there.
 
In a nutshell:
I’m sure this will be remembered fondly by many who were young children at the time as their first memory of A Christmas Carol.
 
Links:
BBC blog entry
CBeebies Wiki

The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol

Title:

The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Animated straight-to-DVD short film
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Sony Pictures Imageworks and Duck Studios, for Sony Pictures Animation
 
Year:
2011
 
Length:
22 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy
 
Background:
The titular Smurfs have a long history in the popular cultures of many countries around the world, having been created as comic book characters by the Belgian artist Peyo in the late 1950s. Their international popularity resulted in a 1980s animated TV series, and even when new stories were not appearing their distinctive appearance meant that they remained regular cultural touchstones.
 
Sony had released a Smurfs feature film in 2011, and this short special was commissioned to be released as an extra feature on the DVD release of the film in December that year. In a nice nod to the past, while the Smurfs are CGI as in the 2011 film in the framing story here, the main part of the story is done in traditional hand-drawn animated, harking back to the 1980s TV version.

Cast and crew:
Given the nature of its production, many of the same actors who provided voices for the 2011 cinema film are on duty again here. George Lopez stars as the Scrooge-like ‘Grouchy Smurf’; a stand-up comedian and American sitcom star, I have to confess he was not someone of whom I’d previously heard.
 
Probably the best-known names internationally are Hank Azaria as Garmagel and Anton Yelchin as ‘Clumsy Smurf’. Azaria has voiced a variety of regular characters in The Simpsons throughout that show’s history, while Yelchin found all-too-brief fame as Checkov in the Star Trek movie reboots, before his tragic early death in 2016.
 
On the production side, director Troy Quane gained his first such credit here, although he’d been working as an animator since the 1990s, including on various direct-to-video spin-offs from big animated feature films. Writer Todd Berger seems to have a primary career as an actor, but had credits on various animations since the year 2000 – like Quane, he’d also previously worked on such spin-offs from cinema animated cinema films.

Underdone Potato:
We begin with the CGI Smurfs singing their way through Christmas Eve and enjoying all the decorations around their village, until they get to Grouchy Smurf’s house and find he hasn’t decorated at all. Smurfette, in particular, reacts to this as if they have just come across the scene of a murder.
 
It transpires that, perhaps not particularly surprisingly given his name, Grouchy Smurf isn’t interested in celebrating Christmas. He hates everything about it, and that’s that. Rather than simply leaving him be, the other Smurfs decide that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Grouchy being cheerful for the day and agreeing to put the Christmas star on top of their tree. Papa Smurf prepares a special potion to… Well, it’s not quite clear whether it gives him actual visions or this is all a dream or what. But it knocks him out, anyway.
 
Past:
When Grouchy Smurf awakes, he is in a world of traditional hand-drawn animation, and pleased to be looking a lot slimmer because of it. Smurfette arrives down his chimney as the Smurf of Christmas Past – also fulfilling the Marley role, as she informs Grouchy that she will be the first of the three spirits to visit him this evening.

She shows him a vision of a past Christmas when he used to enjoy it, only to become frustrated over the years by never receiving the hang-glider he always wanted, and only a new hat each and every year. He eventually becomes so frustrated that he snaps and declares his hatred of Christmas, also discarding the hat he’d been given, much to the upset of Papa Smurf who’d given it to him.
 
Present:
‘Brainy Smurf’ fills the role of ‘Smurf of Christmas Present’. He shows Grouchy that without him to put the star on the top of the tree, Clumsy Smurf had a go at doing it, and set off a chain reaction that ended up with the village tree and Christmas lights all destroyed.

Grouchy also learns that Papa Smurf made all the new hats he gave them every year personally, tailoring each one to the specific tastes of each individual Smurf. He regrets having been so dismissive of the hats he was given in the past.
 
Yet to Come:
‘Hefty Smurf’ – no, me neither – plays the role of Smurf of Christmas Future, initially in the traditional black robe although he soon takes the hood down and wears it rather more casually. He doesn’t show Grouchy very far into the future – just the next day, when the Smurf village is abandoned because they all went to the ‘West Forest’ to try and find a new tree to cheer Grouchy up.

While there, they were captured by the Smurfs’ enemy, Gargamel, who also captured Papa Smurf when he came to look for them. Grouchy realises the error of his ways, but too late as he goes tumbling into the bubbling vat of Gargamel’s cauldron…
 
What’s To-Day:
Grouchy wakes up, back in CGI land, and gets up early to restore all the Smurfs’ Christmas decorations. Everyone’s happy again and Grouchy even enjoys his new hat from Papa Smurf, who apologies for once again not getting him a hang-glider. While at the top of the tree putting the new star he’s made (put of his toy hang-glider, in a nice visual but not stated bit), he realises – or gambles – that if Papa Smurf knew he wanted a hang-glider, and he tailors each hat to its wearer, then his new hat must have some glider-like properties. In something of a brave move, he leaps from the tree, and it does indeed function as a sort of parachute.
 
I wouldn’t have risked it, though!

Review:
The Smurfs are one of those pop culture things that are big enough that I was aware of them and certain things about them, but I’d never actually watched or read any of their adventures before. Seeing them properly in action for the first time, I do have to say that they do rather come across as thinly-veiled knock-offs of the Seven Dwarves from Snow White.
 
There’s an interesting question raised about Smurfette, too. Even glossing over the fact she appears to be the only female member of the tribe, she talks more than once during this about them celebrating Christmas “as a family”. But it’s clear that more than one of the other Smurfs fancies her, and there’s even a gag about loads of them queuing up to kiss her when she’s standing under some mistletoe. Which makes you wonder about what kind of “family” they are, exactly…

 
I’m sure the change from CGI to traditional animation would have been a nice nostalgic touch for those who grew up with the older Smurf cartoons. However, while it is a nice idea to delineate between Grouchy’s ‘real’ and dream worlds, one drawback is that the contrast doesn’t really work in the CGI’s favour. I’m in no way anti-CGI, but here the traditional animation just seems much warmer and better-suited to the style of the Smurfs. They were originally comic book characters, after all.
 
In a nutshell:
Not a bad little production for a straight-to-DVD spin-off, but probably only really worth seeking out if you’re already a fan of the Smurfs.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb