Mainlining Christmas

The Wizard of Oz is one of two movies that hold a somewhat unique place in Christmas media. It is not, by any real quantifiable measure, a Christmas  movie, but for somewhat complicated reasons it is heavily associated with the holidays. We've held off on reviewing it here for a long time, but finally decided there should be some sort of a review on this site, given how significant this is to both holiday tradition and to film history in general. Before going on, I feel should probably remind everyone that the writer of the book this is based on, L. Frank Baum,  was quite literally a proponent of genocide . He was a racist, an awful human being, and any discussion of his legacy should include that note. Fortunately, the 1939 movie isn't limited to Baum's legacy. In a sense, the story of the movie is secondary to the craftmanship that went into making an imaginary world real. The source of that world is fairly trivial: they could have selected any fairytale or kid's book

Spirited is one of the best movies based on A Christmas Carol ever made. I want to get that out of the way upfront, before we even get to what it is or what it's about. This is a fantastic musical adventure/comedy you should absolutely watch, and there's no reason to temper the experience with spoilers. So, if you're subscribed to Apple TV+, now's the time to stop reading and start watching. And if you're not subscribed, now's the time to remember they offer free one-week trials you can cancel before paying a cent. Okay, I'm assuming anyone still reading has already watched Spirited, so let's move on to the spoiler portion, beginning with something that's not really a spoiler at all. This isn't an adaptation of A Christmas Carol - it's a sequel. Also, weirdly, it starts with a virtually identical premise to a Hallmark movie released this year, Ghosts of Christmas Always . Both films are primarily centered on the ghosts, with Christmas Present

Love Finds Andy Hardy is the fourth installment in a series of sixteen movies  about a family living in a generic, fictional America town. The titular character is played by Mickey Rooney in all sixteen of the films, and he has by far the most significant role in the film. Apparently, earlier installments were more focused on the family as a whole, but by now the series had turned into a vehicle for Rooney, who was at the time one of Hollywood's biggest draws. If you're wondering why time basically swallowed up a film series that lasted into double-digits, the answer - at least in my opinion - is that this thing is about as boring as movies come. That's unfair, of course. I'm watching this more than eighty years after its release, and - as I'll cover in a moment - it likely influenced countless pieces of media I'm familiar with. Tropes and jokes are boring after you've seen them a thousand times, but they were all original once. And, as far as I can tell, th

You probably noticed that we've been watching a lot of versions of A Christmas Carol. As we went, I started noticing how many musical versions there are. As a lifelong musical theater fan, I'm a sucker for a good musical. Because these are all adaptations of the same story, many use songs in similar places for similar purposes. I find it interesting how these songs can make very different choices, so let's take a few minutes today to explore that together.  I don't remember enough music theory to get too bogged down in whether these songs are necessarily "good" by any specific musical metrics. I'm interested in only a few things:  Does the song support the story, expand the character(s), or enhance the tone? Is it enjoyable to listen to: lyrics understandable and not annoying, tune catchy, performed well?  How do the songs which fulfill the same purpose in the narrative compare across adaptations? Here are the versions of A Christmas Carol I'll be visi

This is a bit unusual for us, in that the media in question is a record, rather than a special. There are, of course, countless audio recordings of A Christmas Carol - as a rule of thumb, we don't bother tracking those down, as they're rarely well-known or influential enough to justify a review. This one is a little more interesting. Despite its unassuming title, this adaptation, courtesy of Disney Records, was the source material later adapted into the 1983 animated film, Mickey's Christmas Carol , which in turn led to the creation of DuckTales. Like the movie, the album features Disney characters playing the cast of Dickens's story. The lead role, of course, is Scrooge, featuring Alan Young as Scrooge for the first time. Young co-wrote the album and would of course reprise that role in the '83 film, as well as Scrooge McDuck on DuckTales (the McDuck surname gets a brief callout on the album when Ebenezer Scrooge lists a couple debtors). Quite a bit of the story an

Not to be confused with the overrated 1983 movie of the same name , this 30-minute Hanna-Barbera special from 1972 tells the story of a dog and mouse attempting to deliver a boy's letter to Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Like most Hanna-Barbera specials from this era, this has been mostly forgotten, which feels right to me. That's not to say it's particularly bad; it's just not particularly anything . It's relatively early, as far as Christmas specials go, so I assume it was a welcome deviation from the ones already in rotation. But fifty years later, it's not quite old enough to be "one of the first," so it's hard to overlook its shortcomings and aspects that aged poorly. The one aspect I did find interesting was the voice cast. This features two voice actors from Disney's Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Paul Winchell and Hal Smith), and the father's voice is instantly recognizable as Dr. Benton Quest (Don Messick). The whole cast is co

We watched and reviewed this eleven years ago , but I'm revisiting it as part of my ongoing attempt to watch as many versions of A Christmas Carol as humanly possible. It'd be worth reevaluating this, anyway, since the context surrounding it has changed dramatically. This is a remake of a 1956 version starring Basil Rathbone broadcast live that was believed lost for decades before showing up in 2011. Technically, it was available when we ran our original review, but it wouldn't have been easy to find, nor were we anywhere near as thorough back then. Obviously things have changed. I actually just finished watching the 1956 version a few days before putting this on (in case it wasn't clear, these reviews aren't entirely being posted in the order I watched them in). Let's dig into how this special relates to its predecessor, adaptations of A Christmas Carol, and Christmas specials in general. First, I want to acknowledge Lindsay and I have very different background

Casper is the title character, but this half-hour special features Yogi, Boo Boo, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Augie Doggie, and Doggie Daddy, in addition to Hairy Scary. For those of you lucky enough to not know what any of that means, Hairy is a ghost who's friends with Casper (sort of), and the others are anthropomorphic Hanna-Barbera characters. The special opens with Casper and Hairy's house scheduled for demolition. It's Christmas Eve, so Casper wants to decorate. Hairy, not sharing his friend's interest in the holidays, wants to go looking for a new house to haunt. Casper isn't sure whether Santa Claus will come to a house as worn down as theirs, but he writes a letter and leaves it in a stocking, just in case. As this is going on, the Hanna-Barbera gang are lost on the way to a lodge where they're planning to spend the holidays. If you want to impose continuity on this mess, you could interpret that as the Jellystone Lodge from the

We did a few adaptations of A Christmas Carol back when we started this blog, but we lost interest pretty fast. It wasn't so much that we were bored watching them (if that were enough, there's a host of genres we'd have dropped a decade ago), it's that we felt like we'd said everything we could possibly say on the subject. To put it another way, I figured if I'd seen one of these, I'd pretty much seen them all. I now realize I was wrong. Hilariously wrong. In more ways than I can count. Granted, if I'd tried watching through one after another back then, I'd have basically been wasting my time. The variations wouldn't have interested me back then, and I was too new to all this to perceive how different versions reflect their times or what they meant to holiday media in general. Even so, I should have watched this one ages ago. I have no excuse save ignorance for waiting this long. It's not so much that this is good or bad; it's that it'