Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol

Title:

Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol

Format:

Animated television special

Country:

USA

Production company:

UPA, for sponsors Timex, first broadcast by the NBC network

Year:

1962 (first broadcast on NBC in the United States on December 18^th that year)

Length:

53 minutes

Setting:

Well… It’s complicated. There’s a framing narrative of Mr Magoo appearing as the star of a stage version of A Christmas Carol in the then-present day, and the version of the Carol we see is the one Magoo is acting in on-stage – presumably so that UPA could make sure their character wasn’t really seen as being as mean and nasty as Scrooge is, in a similar manner to the Barbie version in 2008 where she’s just telling a story. The on-stage version seen in the cartoon seems to have a Victorian setting, and as with the 1949 US television version, shillings are mentioned but the accents are mostly American. As they’re supposedly starring in a Broadway theatre production of the story, however, this can probably be accepted!

Background:

Mr Magoo is very much a second division animation character, and in the UK at least has made a negligible impact on popular culture. However, in the USA he seems to be more popular, despite his adventures almost entirely revolving around his being very short-sited and therefore bumping into things and having accidents – nothing with any more wit or imagination than that. UPA had been producing Magoo cartoons since the 1940s, and not long after this special there was a short-lived weekly television series starring the character.

Cast and crew:

Jim Backus takes on the roles of Magoo and Magoo-as-Scrooge, having been the long-time voice for the character. Director Abe Levitow had worked for various animation studios before joining UPA the year before this special was made, and he would later have another brush with the Carol – he worked as an animator on the 1971 version which returned Alastair Sim and Michael Horden to the roles of Scrooge and Marley 20 years on from their live action film. Scriptwriter Barbara Chain later worked on several animated series beloved of children of the eighties, such as He-Man, Alvin and the Chipmunks and MASK.

Underdone Potato:

Much of the opening part of the story is taken up with the above-mentioned framing device, with Magoo experiencing various mishaps as it makes his way to the Broadway theatre where he is inexplicably performing in the starring role in an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Once we’re actually into the story itself, there’s pleasingly little of Magoo’s usual myopic bumbling, and it’s a surprisingly straight adaptation. We see the two charity gentlemen, but no nephew Fred; however, Scrooge’s line to Fred about being boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart is given to Scrooge / Magoo as he walks home, mumbling to himself.

Marley’s face is seen not just in the door knocker but in Scrooge’s fireplace as well, and unexpectedly we do see something of the other spirits Marley shows Scrooge out of his window. In a change to the book, however, Marley only tells Scrooge when the first of the spirits will come – the timing of the others is left as a mystery.

Scrooge Magoo

Present:

In an adaptation that’s more faithful than you’d expect to the source material, the reason for changing the order of the ghosts is a mystery to me, but here it is – we have the present before the past, for no purpose that I can fathom. As with the 1923 version, the Ghost of Christmas Present looks very Father Christmassy here – although I suppose as we’re in an American production, that should be Santa Clausy – with a long white beard. He only shows Scrooge one vision, of the Cratchit family schmaltzing their way through a dreadful song, ending with the Star of Bethlehem shining above them… yeuch!

Past:

So after the present we now have the past. The Ghost of Christmas Past itself is one of the more faithful versions, suitably androgynous and with a flame burning over its head – although no cap with which it can be snuffed out.

We see young Scrooge – who gets his own awful song – but no Fan, although a sister is mentioned in a drawing of his family he’s done on the school blackboard. We’re then off to the Fezziwigs’ party, and as with many adaptations they’ve chosen to have Belle attending the occasion. Oddly, the Fezziwig-era Magoo looks incredibly unconvincing – how the hell can you give an animated character a rubbish wig?

We see Belle breaking the engagement, and apparently there was then also the scene of Belle and her husband, with him telling her about seeing Scrooge – this is for some reason missing from the DVD version, from which the version I watched was sourced.

Yet to Come:

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is represented very faithfully, a hooded, silent figure with skeletal-looking hands. Very much the Grim Reaper, perhaps surprisingly so for a production which must predominantly have been aimed at children.

Scrooge knows the names of the men who are discussing his funeral. Old Joe and those who have come to sell things to him get their own musical number, and as Scrooge and the spirit look in on this, a fleeing mouse suggests – as the 2008 Barbie version did – that animals in the visions can actually see them.

There’s also the visit to the Cratchits, to see the grief over Tim’s death, and Scrooge being shown his gravestone.

What’s To-Day:

In my piece about the 1935 film version, I suggested it might be the only adaptation where the boy in the street gives his “Walk-er!” response of the book to Scrooge, but I have been proved wrong – he does it here as well, perhaps rather surprisingly.

Scrooge send the Cratchits a big turkey, and then later pops around himself – as is also done in several other versions, pretending to be angry with Bob for not coming to work, before revealing it’s all a jape and he has turned over a new leaf.

It all comes to an end with him handing out piles of cash to the Cratchit family, which all seems a bit capitalist and not exactly what Dickens had in mind.

Razzle-what?

Review:

To give this version its due, it was a lot better than I had expected it to be. There’s not much of Magoo’s short-sighted pratfalling when he’s actually playing the part of Scrooge, and a lot more of the original dialogue from the book survives here than you might expect from a children’s cartoon version. It also looks very nice, in that you can see time, effort and skill was invested in its animation – which is far superior to the rather soulless CGI of, for example, the Barbie effort.

The songs are uniformly awful; sugary, schmaltzy messes which serve to do nothing other than irritate and bring the whole things grinding to a halt several times throughout the proceedings. If you thought that some of the songs in The Muppets’ Christmas Carol were a touch on the syrupy side, that’s nothing compared to everything you’re inflicted with here – and there’s nothing even remotely as good as the Muppets’ superb opening number “Scrooge” with which to make up for it.

This version possibly means more to American viewers, as it has been regularly repeated on television there down the decades and Magoo is a better-known character in that country than he is elsewhere. Outside of the States, however, this is a pretty forgettable entry into the canon of Carols.

In a nutshell:

There’s a decent adaptation buried under here somewhere, but it’s sadly obscured by crap songs and a boring framing device. The main thought you’ll be left with after all this is “What the hell *is* ‘razzleberry dressing’ anyway?”

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol

Title:

Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol

Format:

Short all-film production made for sale to US television stations

Country:

USA

Production company:

Jerry Fairbanks Inc, for The Teletec Company

Year:

1949

Length:

25 minutes

Setting:

Victorian – a mention of Bob’s wages being “15 shillings” suggests we’re supposed to be in Britain, although the accents are almost all American, and evidently shillings did survive as common currently in parts of the USA deep into the 19^th century.

Background:

We’re in the very early days of television here, and this is what the Americans would later come to call a direct-to-syndication production – meaning not something made by or for one of the main broadcast networks, but made independently for sale to individual stations across the country. This is presumably part of the reason why it’s a film production, rather than something made live in a television studio as was still common in the USA – and remained so for much longer elsewhere – at the time.

Cast and crew:

The most famous name on display here is that of Vincent Price, the actor most commonly associated now with his horror film roles, or perhaps his narration on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Only really being personally familiar with him from the latter, I was rather surprised by his somewhat camp performance here. Still, he’s a cheerful enough presence as an on-screen narrator who provides linking scenes “reading” from a copy of the book in a modern living room – although you’d think that if they had a copy of the book handy, they might have at least got the title right…

Speaking of errors, Taylor Holmes here plays “Ebeneezer” Scrooge, with two Es in the middle, although I’ll be kinder on them for this mistake as it’s one I myself made for several years when I was a younger man! Holmes had enjoyed a long career on the stage and in film, managing to survive the transition from silent to sound films, and perhaps his highest-profile screen credit is a small part in Marilyn Monroe’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He was in his 70s by this point, and quite lively for it, but his melodramatic and over-the-top “Ebeneezer” will not go down as one of the great screen Scrooges.

Future Bond girl Jill St. John, who appeared opposite Sean Connery in Diamonds are Forever, has a small role as one of the Cratchit children. She was just nine years old at the time, and credited here as Jill Oppenheim.

Adapter and director Arthur Pierson had been both an actor and a director for some years, but probably did his most notable work after this, as a story supervisor on animated classics The Jetsons and The Flintstones.

Underdone Potato:

Just a visit from Fred to the money-changing chambers, with no businessmen trying to solicit a donation from Scrooge. Fred’s visit is brief, before Scrooge heads off home, and we don’t even have the door knocker scene here. Marley looks quite good, and the scene between him and Scrooge probably plays out about as faithfully as anything in this production does – things go off the rails a bit later on!

Vincent Price - he's no Gonzo, more's the pity.

Past:

As you’d expect from such a short version of the story, all of the visitations from the spirits are quite brief. However, one thing this version does get surprisingly right – and almost no other version does – is that Scrooge is so shocked by his visitation from Marley that he goes to bed still dressed, and remains so throughout his time with the spirits. (Although having said that, the original’s illustrator, John Leech, seemed to make the same mistake back in 1843).

The Ghost of Christmas Past is male rather than androgynous, and doesn’t have any sort of cap for snuffing out. He shows Scrooge a single vision of himself as a boy at school, and then oddly threatens to show him his love leaving him (Belle isn’t named here), specifying that it was “forty years ago.” However, Scrooge begs him to leave him be before he can present this vision.

Present:

He has the fur-lined coat but not the beard of traditional versions, and this Ghost of Christmas Present is more of a stern, muscular bully than a jolly giant. He doesn’t seem at all celebratory, as he shows Scrooge the Christmas dinner scene at the Cratchit household. Martha is there but doesn’t hide, there’s not even a small goose to be had, and Robert Hyatt looks utterly delighted with himself for managing to remember his “God bless us, every one,” line as Tiny Tim.

Yet to Come:

An intriguing-looking Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He has something of the traditional appearance, but the fact we can see his hands and more importantly, his eyes in a thin slit between his hood and some sort of scarf covering the lower part of his face makes it look more like he’s wearing a niqab than a grim reaper costume.

He shows Scrooge the Cratchits mourning Tiny Tim, and then his own grave, although by this stage Scrooge was already well on the way to becoming a reformed character, having submitted fairly meekly quite early on.

What’s To-Day:

Scrooge does shout down to a boy, although we don’t see him – just Scrooge at the window. He isn’t sent for a turkey, either, as the whole thing suddenly goes drastically off-piste. We go to the Cratchits and find Fred and his wife surprisingly coming to the door – Bob seems oddly happy to see them, but apologises that they can’t offer much. Fred says that’s fine… and in comes the reformed Scrooge behind them, carrying gifts and food. Cheerful “Ebeneezer” also tells Tiny Tim that he met “an old friend of mine, a famous surgeon” at church, and that he’s going to help make Tim better again.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I am a mean bastard!"

Review:

Despite having the advantages of twenty-odd years’ worth of production advances and most importantly the addition of sound, this doesn’t even manage to be as decent a retelling of the story as the 1923 silent version, which had a similar running time. When they don’t even have the attention to detail to get the title and the main character’s name correct, you can tell that they aren’t really paying attention.

It’s a cheap version, and cheapness is no sin in itself as many a necessity has been the mother of great invention in film and television down the years. But it all seems very slapdash, especially when skipping so quickly through so many of the visions. What’s all the more inexplicable, given the short running time, is that it spends the first two minutes just having a choir warbling over the opening titles.

In a nutshell:

Another one for the completists. Save your attention for any version which at least manages to get the title right.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

It's Christmas, Carol!

It was happening across this version online a couple of years ago which actually first planted the seed of the idea in my mind for this blog - the fact that there are just so many vastly different versions of this one story doing the rounds...

 

Title:

It’s Christmas, Carol!

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Entertainment One Television, for the Hallmark Channel

Year:

2012 (it was first shown by Hallmark in the USA on November 18^th that year)

Length:

90 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

Since it was launched in 2001, the Hallmark Channel in the United States has devoted much of its programming in November and December to seasonally-themed fair. These have included the commissioning of various of its own new Christmas-themed productions, of which It’s Christmas, Carol! was merely the latest in a long line. This wasn’t the first time they’d made a TV movie updating A Christmas Carol to a contemporary American setting with a female lead, either, having previously done the same with A Carol Christmas in 2003, which we will doubtless come to on here in due course!

Cast and crew:

Canadian actress Emmanuelle Vaugier stars as the film’s Scrooge figure, Carol Huffler. She has the sort of face that made me convinced I’d seen her in something else before, but looking through her credits there’s nothing that seemed familiar to me. She has the look of something of a cross between Angellina Jolie and Star Trek: Voyager’s Jeri Ryan, though, so perhaps it was just that. She’s had recurring roles in a variety of popular US TV series, including CSI: NY, Two and a Half Men and Smallville, though, so will indeed be a familiar face to many.

She’s quite engaging as Carol when she’s an unpleasant character at the beginning, but less convincing when she’s nice and friendly following her redemption, especially in the scenes when she’s now being nice to her staff – the character is a successful publisher in this version. One of said staff is the character of Fred, a link to the original book in name only. Fred is played like an over-the-top stock camp character from the 1980s by Carson Kressley, not primarily an actor but evidently something of a reality TV star in the US following his appearances on the show Queer Eye.

By far the most famous performer here though is Carrie Fisher, of Princess Leia fame, who takes the Marley role as Carol’s late boss, “Eve” – another Christmas pun, you see…

Director Michael Scott seems to have made a career of undistinguished TV movies, while screenwriters William Penick and Chris Sey don’t seem to have done a great deal of anything else at all – or that’s found its way onto the IMDb, anyway.

Underdone Potato:

We’re in modern day USA and the world of publishing, here – it’s not made clear in the film, but I have read that it’s supposedly Chicago. Carol is a successful but unpleasant publisher, so mean to her staff that several of them are on the point of walking out to form their own company, a plan formed during a drunken piss-up on Christmas Eve. Her Bob Cratchit figure is her assistant, Kendra, whom Carol refuses to allow to have a transfer to London to go with her boyfriend who is moving there with his job.

One noteworthy aspect of this film is that it’s set in a world where A Christmas Carol exists and is known about, and Carol becomes fully aware that she is experiencing her own personal version of it. Early on, we see Carol’s mother and her carer watching an adaptation on television – I think it’s the 1935 Seymour Hicks version, from the brief glimpse shown. Later in the film, Eve claims that spirits have been visiting the Earth in this fashion for centuries, and that “Chuck was just the first person to write about it.” I’m not sure I approve of Dickens’s imagination being denigrated in such a fashion, or the over-familiarity of referring to him as “Chuck”!

Past:

After appearing to Carol in the toilets at a swish publishing do, her former boss and mentor Eve – chainless, and not at all an unpleasant character – takes on the role of all three spirits, past, present and future. She first takes Carol briefly back to 1985, where in a nice little gag we see a big sign for Back to the Future playing at a cinema. We see how hard her mother worked to support her as a child, then we fast forward to the year 2000 as book-loving Carol meets fellow bibliophile Ben in a bookstore. Ben – the Belle character here, obviously – is the wettest drip you can imagine, and quite why anybody would fall for him is a mystery.

They exchange some horribly wooden dialogue about how great books are, written by people who seem unlikely ever to have read any of the authors mentioned – the most accurate line probably being Ben’s “you just listed all the greatest writers ever.” Yes, presumably after Penick and Sey Googled “best writers ever.” Still, at least Dickens gets a mention.

They move in together, but we see them split up in 2002 as Carol moves on with her career while  Ben continues to struggle to be a great writer.

Eve takes Carol back to 1985.

Present:

It’s only at this point that Carol realises “I know this story…” Eve teasingly wonders if she means Miracle on 34^th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life – both of which have their own shades of the Carol to them, of course – before perhaps inevitably mentioning Star Wars.

There’s a “landing in a pile of snow” scene which seems to be something of a common feature of many adaptations of the tale, as they travel to one of the locations Eve wants to show Carol. We see the struggles of Tanya, a woman Carol fired, as well as how her attitudes are hardening Kendra and how much her mother misses her.

Yet to Come:

The Yet to Come section is possibly the best part of the film, and the one point at which they attempt to do something interesting with the story and to put their own mark on it.

Carol having to look up the plot of the Carol online to find out it’s the future next perhaps makes her seem a bit slow on the uptake, but the gag of Eve pretending to be a reaper-type spirit is quite good fun. Where this section scores is the fact that Carol isn’t the least bit surprised by being shown her grave – “I know I die in the end,” is her pragmatic response, and unlike so many of the more condensed adaptations of the take, simply the sight of her own grave isn’t enough to scare her into being a better person.

There’s also a nice idea in that she is shown a potentially happy future, with friends and family around her at a pleasant Christmas, and told this is merely one potential future, not necessarily what will happen. Mind you, why anyone would want a lifetime with drippy Ben and then her over-sugary grandchildren around her is beyond me.

What’s To-Day:

There’s no boy to call out of the window to, but a nice modern equivalent is found in Carol phoning directory enquiries to ask what day it is, before offering a cheerful “Merry Christmas!” then having to apologise and offer a “Happy Hanukkah” instead.

She then manages a whirlwind tour of Christmas merry-making, with employees apologised to, a whole load of Christmas provisions bought for them (that was some doing on Christmas Day) before managing to get to her mother’s who she hardly ever visits yet seems to live close enough to get there and back to in not too much time, and then to Ben’s sister’s for the big make-up with him.

There’s a very weird bit in Ben’s sister’s house where she asks to be left alone with Ben’s typewriter with all the reverence of someone asking for a few moments alone with a deceased loved one’s body.

Review:

This lacks most of the soul and all of the wit of the original story, although it’s not completely and utterly charmless. There are a couple of nice gags and one or two interesting touches, but it certainly lacks any of the punch of the original, and as you’d perhaps expect for something made for a greetings card company it’s all incredibly saccharine.

But it certainly looks very nice, and even though it was probably quite a cheap-and-cheerful TV movie by US standards, the production standards seem high across the board. Aside from the two main male characters – drippy Ben and camp Fred – the cast are all quite amiable and well-performed.

In a nutshell:

There are worse TV movies, and probably worse adaptations of the Carol, but this isn’t a version I would recommend anybody other than a fanatical completist seeking out.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

Hallmark Channel