My Favorite "Christmas Carol" Adaptation

No director-of-the-month post this time, kids. Instead, to celebrate the holiday season, I thought I'd write up a post for my favorite version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." The story has been adapted to film countless times, but my favorite is not one of the more well-regarded ones. In fact, it got very mixed reviews and Siskel and Ebert famously panned it. And yet, it was the first version of the "Christmas Carol" story that I knew, and I still find it impossible to evaluate with much objectivity because I love the darn thing so much. I'm talking about the 1983 Disney short, "Mickey's Christmas Carol," which arrived in theaters paired with a rerelease of "The Rescuers," and subsequently aired as a television special on various networks for many years.

"Mickey's Christmas Carol" holds an important place in Disney animation history. The studio was in the middle of a bumpy transition to the modern era, and trying to recapture some of the glory of its past. At the time of release, Mickey Mouse had been absent from the big screen for thirty years, and "Christmas Carol" often feels like a tribute to golden age of Disney shorts. It features all the classic characters like Goofy, as a ghostly, bumbling Marley, Mickey and Minnie heading the adorable Cratchit household, and Daisy Duck in the most substantial role she ever had, as Scrooge's lost love Isabelle. And for the real Disney geeks, there are dozens of more obscure characters in smaller parts and filling in the backgrounds, including Jiminy Cricket, Willie the Giant, Mr. Toad, Mole and Ratty, and a gaggle of animal extras from "Robin Hood." I always get emotional when Donald Duck shows up though, as this was the final appearance of Clarence Nash in the role, who had been the voice behind the duck since 1934.

The real star of the show was Scrooge McDuck, though, who had originated in Carl Barks' comics, and had only made a few minor appearances in the shorts and on television. Voiced by Alan Young, this was always my favorite version of Ebenezer Scrooge. Though I've come to appreciate the work of Alastair Sim and Albert Finney, Scrooge was not Scrooge without a beak and tail feathers. I love the way he gets all giddy while counting his money, his reactions to the arrivals of the different Ghosts, and the final, loony change of heart on Christmas morning. The story's fantasy sequences never worked better, as there are things that you can do with a cartoon duck that simply can't be done with a human being, even if it's a CGI Jim Carrey. And surely no version of Scrooge ever got better dialogue or funnier gags. Scrooge McDuck would go on to appear in "Duck Tales" a few years later, but there's no doubt it was "Christmas Carol" that made him a headliner.

The biggest criticism of Disney's take on Dickens was that it truncated the story and added so many distracting set pieces, the narrative became practically incoherent. Compare "Mickey's Christmas Carol" to "The Muppet Christmas Carol" feature, which was actually very faithful to the original Dickens in spite of the added song numbers and puppet frogs. However, as a very small child I do remember getting all the main points of the "Christmas Carol" from the Mickey version, particularly Scrooge's redemption. My first encounters with the live action versions were much more confusing, and their ghosts were a little too intense for me. Mickey's Christmas Carol" had scary parts, particularly Pete showing up in the cemetery as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, but on the whole it was much easier for a six-year-old to take. And when I was old enough to appreciate the grown-up versions, I was surprised at how little Disney had left out.

"Mickey's Christmas Carol" was the only Christmas special I looked forward to every year. Oh, Rudolph and Frosty and the Grinch were all very well, but there was something about "Christmas Carol" that was just a little more special. Maybe it was the feature quality animation, the charming score, or just the presentation. The opening credits sequence with those gorgeous character sketches on yellowed paper always stuck with me. And examining those credits reveals several members of the Disney Renaissance generation getting their feet wet, including Glen Keane, Mark Henn, Mark Dindal, Randy Cartwright, Don Hahn, Eric Larson, and John Lasseter. Sadly "Mickey's Christmas Carol" has quietly departed from network television, and only shows up now and then in edited form on ABC Family.

However, Disney did release a letterboxed version of the short with one of the Mickey Mouse shorts collections a few years ago. I saw it recently, and I'm happy to report that it's still as lovely and as funny and as sweet as it ever was. And I still enjoy it as much as I did when I was six. That's my idea of a classic.
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