Welcome to Fantasy Friday everyone. It’s time to Blog for a Beer. (Click here for the rules.)
This week we talked about the many and various adaptations of A Christmas Carol in television and movies and a little about episodes that use the It’s A Wonderful Life premise. Around this time of year you’re bound to see one or both of these stories redone alongside the many other holiday specials and A Christmas Story marathons.
We’d like to know: what are your favorite Christmas Carol or Wonderful Life episodes or movies? Which shows did it best? And which shows did it so badly that it made you curse the ghost of Frank Capra and the day Dickens needed money so badly he wrote the novella to begin with?
My favorite is the Christmas Carol episode of The Real Ghostbusters and my least favorite is the movie starring vanessa Williams. I have nothing against VW, but the whole concept was grating to me by then. Besides, Cicley Tyson was a better female Scrooge. I’ve never been particularly fond of Wonderful Life pastiches.
How about you? Give us your strong and informed opnion on the subject and you could win $10.
Well, none come to mind, but this got me thinking about how twice a year the lines between mundane entertainment and fantasy blur, disbelief is suspended, and (on Christmas) angels, elves, and flying animals become implicitly accepted (and everything else on Hallowe’en). That, to me, is the true magic of the holiday season.
My loathing of holiday uplift being what it is, I will instead point out that brief and exciting moment when, in the middle-80s, Moonlighting did a Christmas episode (a caper involving a pregnant woman named Mary, because everything’s funnier the second time), and even managed to bring a camel in on the joke.
Okay, it was a pack of Camel cigarettes. (Okay, it was the 80s, when people other than serial killers were allowed to smoke on TV.)
Okay. It was hilarious when I was 10.
The WKRP Christmas Carol, in which the characters complained about the trope, Johnny Fever was the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, and in the horrifying future only Herb was left with a job as otherwise the entire station had become automated.
Ooh, and it’s online:
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2008/09/wkrp-episode-bah-humbug.html
I know my least favorite easily: It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0329737/
At one point, because Kermit “wasn’t there” to save the Muppet Theater it was made into a Rave club. We get to see Scooter in leather fetish gear dancing in a cage. I nearly swore off the Muppets for good. Somewhere I hope Jim Henson is haunting someone.
My favorite adaptation is Scrooged — Bill Murray doing A Christmas Carol is hilarious and even genuinely scary at times, as it should be. Also Carol Kane shows up to whack people around. Predictable, perhaps, but worth a watch every time.
the Very Merry Muppet Christmas was the most depressing muppet-related thing I have ever seen.
I…I kind of love Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol. There’s all this lovely heartstring-tugging music and it’s just really nicely-done.
My eighth grade English teacher had us read “A Christmas Carol” and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” in class. At the time I hated both of them! I think now I can appreciate ACC a little bit, but I still think IAWL is pretty hokey. My major beef with that movie was the angel kept showing him what it would have been like if he had never been born. If he had jumped, all of those things in the past still would have turned out OK. I’m just sayin ;0)
Anyway. I really enjoyed the Xena ep “Solstice Carol,” mostly because it premiered that same year when I was in eighth grade and I thought it was a wonderful counterpoint to ACC. I also really enjoyed the Muppet’s take on ACC. Michael Caine is a fantastic actor and having Rizzo/Gonza narrate was a great choice. I enjoy the Bob Marley joke too, now that I am old enough to understand the reference :0) I also agree with Jasmine @5 that Scrooged is amazing, and Carol Kane really makes the movie.
I would love to see an ACC adaptation that focuses more on what’s going on in Scrooge’s mind as the night unfolds. It seems to me that he’s spent so many years as a hardcore realist and tightwad, that going on all of these magical mystery tours with Ghosts Past, Present, and Future should really have tweaked him out more than it did. I would think that revisiting all of his unhappiest memories would put him into some kind of PTSD tailspin. Pretty much I would like to see a version where the ghosts are more ghastly, the effect upon his mental state is more dramatic, and his path to redemption is a little tougher than buying a Christmas turkey. Ya know, really drain the piece of any uplifting feelings and give it some grit :0)
And on a random side note, I am about to journey to a far off land with no internet (aka my folks house) for the week, so here’s an early Happy (*insert holiday of your choice*) to everyone!
Millennium did two Christmas episodes, “Midnight of the Century” in Season 2 and “Omerta” in Season 3, although neither of them is directly based on the premises you mention. (Blackadder did one of those, though.) The former is elegiac and touching, with an angelic theme and a fun nod to the three wise men and links between the past and the future of Frank Black’s family. The latter is… disturbing. Yet funny. It’s full of cute touches and little miracles, but, oh, is it disturbing when those things are combined with that particular show. The usual ominous Millennium act-break drum-beats are replaced with BELLS JINGLING and it freaks me out just to think about it.
I hate It’s a Wonderful Life, so anything that makes fun of it is fine by me.
My favourite adaptation has to be The Muppet Christmas Carol. I watched it in school when I was 13 and loved it, and the teacher leant me her personal copy of A Christmas Carol to read because the library didn’t have one. I like the version with Patrick Stewart too, and Scrooged.
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol! A wonderful, resounding televisual Bah humbug.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM_ZWiG5jE4
Prior to the birth of my son, I’d have said “Die Hard” or “Love, Actually”. But the past two Christmases I’ve watched “Polar Express” more times than I’ve likely seen any other movie short of “Pan’s Labyrinth”, the film I did my M.A. thesis on. Having seen “Polar Express” as many times as I have, I’ve had lots of opportunity to like it, then love it, then dislike parts, and have come to realize that it’s an incredibly uneven film. There are moments when it works amazingly well as a modern classic, playing with concepts of faith, belief, and the magic of Christmas which Michael Gordon referenced in his comment. And then there are moments when it drops into the abyss of pop-culture references,all of which come off as grossly anachronistic, the worst being Steven Tyler of Aerosmith’s brief CGI cameo. Despite the shortcomings though, the journey from the young doubting Thomas’s home to the North Pole aboard the train contains some of my favorite Christmas movie moments. Whenever my son is watching it and I’m nearby, I stop what I’m doing to watch the film’s eponymous steam train escape from a rapidly fracturing frozen lake, pausing for a moment to be 8 years old again, to imagine how great it would be to have had an adventure film like “Polar Express” to watch on the Night Before Christmas. Merry Christmas, and Happy Darkest Day of the Year to those in the northern hemisphere.
And I should roundly apologize for having misread the point of this Fantasy Friday! My post had NOTHING to do with Christmas Carol or It’s A Wonderful Life…although “Polar Express” is an adaptation of the children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg.
As for adaptations of Christmas Carol, I’m fond of “Scrooged” with Bill Murray as well. “The bitch hit me with a toaster” is one of my favorite lines of all time. My least favorite might be Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol…
Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol are probably my favorite adaptations of that. Although, Patrick Stewart’s version is pretty good as well.
Not an adaptation of either of those, but Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas is a great version of Gift of the Magi. Probably my favorite Christmas movie.
dont forget scrooged, an irreverent take off on the christmas carol. i also like futuramas christmas episodes, where santa is an insane robot that judges everyone naughty and tries to kill them for it