Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Bah! P.S.

Thanks to a Christmas Eve e-mail from the all-knowing Rick Scheckman, I corrected a minor factual error in the preceding post.

Also, several folks have written me to note that while Fields never played Scrooge, impressionist Rich Little did play Fields playing Scrooge. Chris Smigliano offers the following recollection...

It was a cable TV special, late seventies/early eighties, if i remember, called Rich Little's Christmas Carol. It wasn't a concert performance. It was a fully setted and costumed presentation, the idea being that Little would play about every major role in the story and each character would be based on a "celebrity," which basically meant there were a lot of back of the head shots as the camera cut back and forth between Little and a stand-in when his characters "interacted." The video tape editor for this special must have gone nuts after all the cutting and resplicing this thing required!

So it was Fields as Scrooge, Paul Lynde as Bob Crachit, Truman Capote as Tiny Tim, Johnny Carson as Scrooge's nephew Fred, Groucho Marx as Fezziwig and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau as the Ghost of Christmas future. Sadly, memory fails me on the rest of the cast, but I'm sure Jimmy Stewart and Richard Nixon were somewhere in the mix.

Yes, I remember that now, and I just looked it up. Edith Bunker was Bob Cratchit's wife and the three ghosts were Bogart, Peter Falk as Columbo, and Sellers as Clouseau. Nixon was cast as Jacob Marley and instead of chains, he was burdened down by tapes, which was still a more-or-less topical reference in 1978. I recall the whole show as a joke that didn't sustain for the hour. Anyway, thanks to everyone who wrote and I'm going to take the rest of Christmas Eve off from weblogging. Have a nice holiday, everyone!

• Posted at 8:46 PM · LINK

Bah!

There have now been over 72,500 adaptations of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, with most of the film and television versions getting rerun during a holiday viewing season that extends from just before Columbus Day 'til well after the Winter Solstice. The other night on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno and Billy Bob Thornton were agreeing that the best was the one with Alastair Sim as Scrooge, followed closely by George C. Scott in the TV Movie. Wrong both times. As should be clear to anyone who doesn't have razzleberry dressing for brains, the best (and oddly, one of the most faithful) was the one that starred the myopic Quincy Magoo. Watched it again the other day and, boy, it holds up, cheapo animation and all. The only better interpretation I can imagine is one that never happened and, sadly, never will.

Years ago, a lady named Carlotta Monti told me that her boy friend had longed to play Ebeneezer. His name was W.C. Fields and she said it was a pet project of his, though I've never seen it mentioned in any books about him. The way Ms. Monti told it, he had this idea not long after playing Micawber in the film version of David Copperfield. Unfortunately, by the time he got around to acting on it, the 1938 film of A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen was already in the works, and the studio (Universal, I guess) told him, "We can't have two versions out so close to one another. Let's wait a while." So they did but alas, by the time sufficient years had passed, Fields's health wasn't sound enough for them to star him in a movie. So he didn't get to do it and we didn't get to see it, and his lady friend thought this was a major shame. "He would have been wonderful," she told me. Then she added, "Of course, he did want to change the ending..."

It really is the perfect Christmas story. Years ago, there was a vice-president at one of the networks who couldn't imagine a holiday show based on anything else. He kept calling me in to discuss ideas for animated Xmas specials based on pre-existing properties and no matter what I pitched, he'd shake his head and say, "What if [name of grouchiest character in the series] was like Scrooge, and three ghosts visited him on Christmas Eve?" This happened over and over until I made the mistake of saying I thought the idea had been overdone, whereupon he began calling on other, less sacrilegious writers.

It was probably just as well. Before he gave up on me, we did develop a couple of Christmas Carol knock-offs that never got produced, and I kept running into another problem. Someone had taught this exec that the lead in a story always had to be "likable." So when I pitched out a story where the Scrooge doppelganger was acting miserly and mean, he would stop me and ask, "Why do we care about this person? I wouldn't watch someone like that." I'd patiently explain that the story was about a rotten man who turns good; ergo, we had to establish his rottenness at the beginning. "I understand that," the man said. "But couldn't we let people know that deep down, he isn't really a bad guy?" No wonder those scripts never went anywhere.

Anyway, I just wanted to suggest that maybe we've had quite enough versions of A Christmas Carol. We've seen it with Magoo. We've seen it with Flintstones. The Six Million Dollar Man did it with Ray Walston as Scrooge. The Jetsons did it with Mr. Spacely as Scrooge. The Muppets did it with Michael Caine as Scrooge. WKRP in Cincinnati did it with Mr. Carlson as Scrooge. Disney even did it with Uncle Scrooge as Scrooge. We've seen every possible version short of A Christmas Carol as performed by guinea pigs.

Oh, wait. That's been done, too. (Thanks to Rephah Berg for the link.)

• Posted at 5:45 PM · LINK

Deer Friends

You see a lot of silly animations on the Internet but occasionally one really impresses you. Last year on my other site, I recommended you take the time to visit this Christmas cartoon, and it's still one of the cleverest things I've seen. Try clicking the deers off and on in different patterns.

And this year, they have the sequel! Go have a look.

These are offered up by a web company called ICQ but I have no idea who actually devised and created these wonderful little animations. I searched the 'net to find that info and couldn't locate that information. I captured the Shockwave files to disk and dismantled them, figuring that the artistan(s) might have secreted a signature within. If they did, I couldn't find it. So I dunno who should get the credit but hey, if you're out there, nice job!

• Posted at 1:05 PM · LINK

Too Little, Too Late

Governor George Pataki of New York has granted a posthumous pardon to Lenny Bruce for saying naughty words on stage. Here's the news report.

• Posted at 1:24 AM · LINK