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 Ebenezer. 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.)