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Tuesday, Nov. 03, 2009
Holiday spirits: A timeline of the classic 'A Christmas Carol’
From Dickens to Barrymore, Mr. Magoo and Jim Carey, a timeline of 'A Christmas Carol.'
By ROBERT PHILPOT
dfw.com
What's your favorite incarnation of 'A Christmas Carol'?
If Charles Dickens could receive royalties every time someone did a version of A Christmas Carol, he’d be a very rich, albeit dead, man.
The latest comes this weekend, with Robert Zemeckis’ animated version featuring Jim Carrey as Scrooge and about half the other characters. Because of the talent and marketing involved, the movie is bound to outgross every other Christmas Carol ever made.
And there have been a lot of them.
With this newest one premiering, we decided to look into the history of past Carols, which is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you have a touch of OCD. A simple title search for A Christmas Carol on Internet Movie Database brings up 26 direct hits, as well as 12 indirect ones, and those don’t even include all the things that borrow from Dickens’ tale about a miser who, shown the error of his ways by spirits who visit him one Christmas Eve, turns into a money-throwing (and a bit impish) philanthropist on Christmas morning.
Here’s a Christmas Carol pop-culture timeline featuring, but not limited to, past movie versions. Believe it or not, we omitted a lot.
December 1843: The original A Christmas Carol is published. The first of five Christmas stories Dickens would write through 1848, it’s by far the most enduring and well-known. Everyman’s Library will publish all five in one book, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, due out Nov. 14.
1844: Two months after Carol’s original publication, eight stage adaptations are produced, even though by now it’s closer to Valentine’s Day than Christmas. The first production is generally credited to Edward Stirling, who adapted many of Dickens’ works for the theater. According to The Victorian Web, stage adaptations of A Christmas Carol would decline by the end of the decade, with relatively few revivals before the end of the 19th century. But Dickens would stage readings, including some in the United States, in which he acted all the parts.
1901:Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost, a silent film that’s the first known film adaptation of A Christmas Carol, is released. The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come didn’t foresee YouTube, where you can view the film. The story will be adapted at least five more times in the silent era.
1935:Scrooge, featuring Seymour Hicks in the title role, is the first feature "talkie" adaptation. Hicks had been playing the role onstage since 1901 and also starred in a 1913 silent version.
1938: Reginald Owen stars as Scrooge in a well-known version. Lionel Barrymore reportedly was the original choice for the role, but when he had to withdraw from the project, he recommended Owen.
1939: Orson Welles narrates a Mercury Theatre Group production featuring Barrymore as Scrooge, with music by Bernard Herrmann, who will do the music for Citizen Kane. Barrymore also plays Scrooge in a popular 1954 record-album version.
1943: George Lowther directs a version for an experimental TV broadcast. This is the first sign that A Christmas Carol will become a TV staple, turning into a perennial by the 1950s, when many of that decade’s drama anthologies feature versions of the tale.
1947: According to an essay by Dave Duggins on the Web site Horror-Wood, 1947 nearly brought us A Universal Horror Christmas Carol, which would have featured such stars of classic Universal Pictures horror movies as Boris Karloff (playing Scrooge), Bela Lugosi (as the Ghost of Christmas Past) and John Carradine (as the Ghost of Christmas Future, aka the Grim Reaper). For script excerpts, go to www.horror-wood.com/carol.htm. Beware — it begins with Bob Cratchit eating a spider.
1951: Alastair Sim plays the title role in Scrooge; nearly 60 years later, it’s still considered to be the definitive portrayal, despite many strong actors playing it in his wake.
1962: A baby-boomer classic, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, featuring the nearsighted Magoo as Scrooge, doesn’t get the airplay it used to, but it brings back fond memories for people of a certain age.
1970: Albert Finney plays the lead in the musical Scrooge. According to the trivia section of the movie’s Internet Movie Database page, Richard Harris and Rex Harrison were offered the role; Harrison had to back out because of another commitment, so the role went to Finney — who had earlier turned it down.
1971: Twenty years after playing Scrooge in Scrooge, Alastair Sim reprises the role, this time in an animated TV version that also features Michael Hordern reprising his role as Marley from the earlier film. This won an Oscar, even though it was made for television.
1976:The Six Million Dollar Man presents the episode A Bionic Christmas Carol, in which Steve Austin (Lee Majors) "uses his bionics to emulate the Charles Dickens classic," according to a synopsis on TV.com.
1978: Impressionist Rich Little does a one-man Christmas Carol, with impersonations of W.C. Fields as Scrooge, Paul Lynde as Cratchit, Richard Nixon as Jacob Marley, and many, many more. The same year, Marvel Comics publishes a Classics Illustrated-style version, which you can see in its entirety at www.sheeplaughs.com/scrooge/comicpage05.htm. (Sheep Laughs, a Christian site, has by far the most Christmas Carol info found for this story.) Classics Illustrated had previously done its own versions.
1979: An American Christmas Carol moves the setting to the Great Depression during the 1930s, with Henry Winkler playing the Scrooge-esque Benedict Slade, who gets the traditional spiritual visits.
Also 1979:Skinflint: A Country Christmas Carol features singer-songwriter Hoyt Axton as the Scrooge-like Cyrus Flint in an adaptation that features such classic-country stars as Lynn Anderson, Tom T. Hall (as the Ghost of Jacob Burley), Larry Gatlin, Barbara Mandrell, Mel Tillis and Dottie West. Sadly, this Emmy-nominated pop-culture artifact does not appear to be available on DVD or even in excerpts on YouTube.
1983: The biggest surprise about Mickey’s Christmas Carol, with Mickey Mouse as Cratchit and Scrooge McDuck (naturally) as Scrooge, is that it took Disney till 1983 to get around to doing it. (Scrooge McDuck made his first appearance in the 1947 comic Christmas on Bear Mountain, but although his name came from the Dickens characters, this is apparently the first time he was featured in a Christmas Carol-inspired story.)
1984: George C. Scott plays Scrooge in a TV adaptation; his portrayal is so well-regarded it may be second only to Sim’s in the Scrooge pantheon.
1985:A Jetson Christmas Carol has Mr. Spacely (of course) as the Scrooge, making George work late. Meanwhile, the Jetsons’ beloved dog Astro gets sick, and may die a la Tiny Tim (ruh-roh!). This being The Jetsons, the Ghost of Christmas Past is a robot.
1988: Scrooged, starring Bill Murray, becomes the most successful modernization of A Christmas Carol. Murray plays Frank Cross, a cynical TV executive who is shown the error of his ways by spirits played by Carol Kane and David Johansen, a former member of pioneering punk group New York Dolls who at the time was better-known as lounge singer Buster Poindexter.
1992: In The Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine is the lone non-Muppet as Ebenezer Scrooge, surrounded by punning, wise-cracking felt-covered creatures such as the wonderfully named Marley brothers — Jacob and Robert.
1994: In A Flintstones Christmas Carol, Fred Flintstone plays Scrooge onstage and becomes so obsessed with the role that he ignores his family and friends, which really seems out of character for Fred, who may have been a goofball schemer but always seemed to be a nice guy.
1997:Ms. Scrooge features Cicely Tyson as Ebinita Scrooge in a modernized, feminized version.
1999: Patrick Stewart plays an even meaner-than-usual Scrooge in a made-for-TV version that features Richard E. Grant as Bob Cratchit and Joel Grey as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
2000:A Diva’s Christmas Carol presents another female take on the story, with Vanessa Williams as mean-spirited singer Ebony Scrooge, Rozonda "Chilli" Watkins of R&B group TLC as Marli Jacob, and a pre D-List Kathy Griffin as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
2004: Kelsey Grammer plays Scrooge in a TV-movie musical loaded with such familiar names as Jane Krakowski, Jesse L. Martin and Jason Alexander (they play the three spirits, and Alexander doubles as Marley). The same year brought A Carol Christmas, a modernized version of the story featuring Tori Spelling (yes, that one) as a Scrooge-y talk-show host and a wacky cast including William Shatner and Gary Coleman as a couple of the spirits.
2008:Barbie in A Christmas Carol features Barbie in a dual role (dolls are so malleable), as herself and as the Scrooge-esque Eden Starling, a Victorian-era actress who learns a lesson about selfishness. Barbie tells Eden’s story to her own sister, Kelly, as a way of teaching Kelly — and this video’s very young target audience — to be more generous.
2009: Fort Worth’s Circle Theater will present A Lone Star Christmas Carol (Nov. 19-Dec. 19), a world premiere musical that gives the story a Texas twist. And Stage West plans to present A Don’t Hug Me Christmas Carol (Dec. 10-Jan. 17), a musical twist that finds Gunner Johnson, in a coma after a snowmobile accident, being taken on a trip through his life by his nemesis, Sven.
We’d tell you about all the past local stage productions of and variations on A Christmas Carol, but that would double the length of this article. But we won’t overlook last year’s Uncle Duz Christmas, a production by Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theater, in which Uncle, the Scrooge figure, is a curmudgeon who spoils everyone else’s good times — till some ghosts set him straight.
Sources: Star-Telegram archives; Internet Movie Database ( www.imdb.com); The Literature Network ( www.online-literature.com/dickens); The Victorian Web ( www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens); YouTube; Horror-Wood ( www.horror-wood.com); All Movie Guide (via Fandango.com); The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh; Global Oneness ( www.experiencefestival.com); Sheep Laughs Records ( www.sheeplaughs.com); TV.com.
ROBERT PHILPOT, 817-390-7872
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