THE WORST WE CAN FIND - Christmas Advent Calendar: Day 13 - A Christmas Carol

 

Over the hump and into the final dozen in The Worst We Can Find Christmas Advent Calendar. Today it’s another RiffTrax excursion into the season with their take on A Christmas Carol!

A Christmas Carol (December 1969)

Program: RiffTrax

Air-Date: December 2018

 

A horrible VHS cover from a release in 1993 and the artwork for the RiffTrax streaming version.

Plot: Imagine if the aliens from the Star Trek episode “Spectre of the Gun” decided to scare Captain Basil Rathbone with their production of A Christmas Carol within 25 minutes and you’ve got the plot. Fredric March narrates and tries like heck to make it interesting.  

Favorite Riff:

Scrooge:  Spirit? Tell me if Tiny Tim will live.
Ghost of Christmas Past: (pause) I see an empty chair in the chimney corner.
Mike as Scrooge:  Oh, so he not only lives, he walks?!
Bill as Christmas Present:  No!!
Mike:  It’s a Christmas Miracle!
Bill:  Not what I meant!
Mike:  Fantastic news!
Bill:  No, please. Why do I bother?

Thoughts:  Anthology series were all the rage in the 1950s on television, before slowly fading out as a common theme in the 1960s. Typically, such shows were set up with a famous actor who needed a quick cash grab to narrate, and in some cases occasionally act in the stories being presented (such as Boris Karloff once in a while popping up as a character in the series Thriller, which he also hosted). This explains the news in early 1959 that Fredric March was to host a new series called Tales from Dickens for the ABC production company (not the ABC network in the U.S., but the Associated British Corporation in the U.K. that would become best known for the television series The Avengers).

The series would last 13 episodes and be incredibly condensed retelling of famous Charles Dickens stories. The same holds true with the Christmas Carol episode, which plays like a K-Tel “Top Twenty Hits of the ‘70s” version of the story: all the hooks are there, but there’s no lyrical transition between them to feel like a full story is being told. The main problem with most re-tellings of A Christmas Carol is that it’s a novella that is usually fleshed out with far too much extra baggage to fill out the length of a movie (one reason it can so easily be turned into a musical; in this case, the television time-slot is so short that there’s no chance for emotional depths to the story or characters as there is simply no time for such things. When Jacob Marley appears, Scrooge acts like the butler had walked in on him; Scrooge’s sister was a warm, wonderful person because we’re told so; the party at Scrooge’s employer is so rushed it looks like the “Summer Once Again” episode of The Goes Wrong Show, and so on.

The makeup for Scrooge isn’t helpful either. What’s the point of having a famous actor like Basil Rathbone in your show if you’re going to cover him up in so much makeup that he’s not only unrecognizable, but can barely move his face to emote? (The RiffTrax guys are right to make fun of it.) And the minimal stage settings, while obviously done to get such a small production moving along, makes the show look very cheap.

Looking at it and knowing it was just one in a series of episodes for a series, it is easy to see why it only last 13 episodes before ending. So, let me check my notes here … oh, yes, bah, humbug!

 

The Riffing:  As mentioned previously in the blog, some of the best work done by the riffers either with RiffTrax or MST3K or The Mads has been when doing shorts. This episode of the series is only 25 minutes long and that’s enough time for Mike, Bill, and Kevin to snap out riffs and never have the energy sag. We also get one Golden Corral gag, several attempts at miscues in the story by the trio (ex. “What day is today?” during the Christmas Future segment), attempts to rewrite the story to make it happier, and a handful of inappropriate sex jokes – everything you would want in a RiffTrax show.

For those curious, the episode is currently streaming for free on YouTube, although it can also be found online at the RiffTrax app and Tubi. It may not be the best short version of A Christmas Carol (if you’re serious about seeing a good short version of the story, check out Richard Williams’ 1971 animated version, featuring Alastair Sim), but the RiffTrax guys make it a fun time, which is what it is all about.