S01E12 — A Christmas Carol
SPOILER ALERT: This episode and transcript below contains major spoilers for A Christmas Carol.
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Featuring hosts Timothy Haynes, Donna Haynes, Rebekah Edwards, and T. Josiah Haynes.
A Christmas Carol has been adapted into more films and other mediums than, perhaps, any written work in history. Our family of four reviews our thoughts on why we loved the experience of reading the original inspiration and watching several adaptations to pick a favorite.
Final Verdicts
If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, we recommend waiting to read our verdicts. (But you’re probably grown, so do what you want!)
We gave our verdicts a little differently this time; our main focus was on which of the adaptations we watched was our personal pick.
Tim: I love the book, but my favorite was A Muppet Christmas Carol
Donna: The 1951 film was better
Rebekah: The Spirited film was better
Josiah: The Muppet Christmas Carol film was better
Other Episodes You’ll Love
Full Episode Transcript
Prefer reading? Check out the full episode transcript below. It’s AI-generated from our audio, and if we’re being honest… no one sat to read the entire thing for accuracy. (After all, we were there the whole time.) 😉 We’re sorry in advance for any typos or transcription errors.
[00:01:00] Rebekah: Hey, welcome to the book is better podcast. We are a family for reviewing book to film adaptations. And on another festive episode today, we’re going to be covering a Christmas Carol. The classic by Charles Dickens that I believe I can safely say has been adapted into various mediums, including films, uh, more often than any.
Book has ever been adapted. So we’re pretty excited to talk about the various adaptations and what we found and some fun stuff about a Christmas Carol.
[00:01:31] Josiah: Shout out to Joey Hutton for suggesting we do Christmas Carol, specifically a Muppets Christmas Carol.
[00:01:37] Rebekah: I will give you the quick spoiler alert that you probably don’t need, but we’re going to be spoiling the entire plot of a Christmas Carol.
So if you have somehow missed that. One of the, uh, multiple hundreds of adaptations. I’m sorry. You are gonna get it spoiled for you today. Uh, before we begin, we’d like to introduce ourselves and give you a little fun fact to get to know us better. Um, my name is Rebekah. I am the daughter slash sister of the family.
And today’s fun fact is what is your favorite? Christmas carol. My favorite Christmas carol is I believe just called the Christmas song, but it’s the chestnuts roasting on an open fire. That is my favorite Christmas carol.
[00:02:20] Josiah: Is that a carol?
[00:02:22] Rebekah: I’m not being harsh about it.
[00:02:24] Josiah: Christmas song. You’re right.
[00:02:25] Rebekah: It’s my favorite Christmas song, which is close enough.
[00:02:28] Tim: Well, I am Tim. I am the husband and dad of this wonderful crew. And I, I have two. One is my true favorite Christmas carol, the other is, uh, an interesting Christmas song. I’m
[00:02:46] Rebekah: so
[00:02:46] Tim: ready. Um, Silent Night is my favorite Christmas carol, it makes me cry every time I sing it, all the times I sing it. And on the opposite side of the scale, A song at Christmastime that always makes me laugh is Grandma Got Run Over by Reindeer.
That’s
[00:03:03] Donna: really run the gamut there. Hey, I’m Donna. I’m the wife slash mom of our group. And I, oh, this is hard. I mean, I have an answer. But I tend to be the The Scrooge of the group, the pre ghost Scrooge. Um, I enjoy certain things about Christmas, but. In general, the Christmas season is very, um, un, uh, unenjoyable to me, mostly because all because of the commercialism that has occurred in the Western world.
And, um, so I want to find the good things here and enjoy and celebrate the good things as we talk about all this. So, uh, the song that came to mind is. Uh, a version of I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day by Casting Crowns. I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. Is that it? Mm hmm. Okay. And the, the orchestration and the, the, the arrangement is a little dark.
It still has an incredible message, but it plays to a very melodramatic, uh, uh, uh, theme. It, it, the whole piece comes across that way. And I enjoy that.
[00:04:20] Josiah: I am Josiah, the Christmas ogre, and also brother and son of the group. I am gonna have three quick ones. My true favorite Christmas carol is A Holy Night, a true classic, a beautiful one that Here’s me up every time
[00:04:38] Rebekah: we love harmonizing to that as a family.
[00:04:40] Josiah: Yes. Silent night was, is it was one of those, but I went with a holy night. Yeah. I also have like a favorite Christmas worship song. I think you guys know what it is. I figured what it’s called, but it starts with did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it. Did it. Did it. Did it. Yeah. Um, , it’s Christmas.
It’s Christmas is the title Titles song. So I like that one. And then the funny one, I, I can’t believe none of us mentioned how horrible last Christmas is.
[00:05:15] Rebekah: Oh, the song’s awful. The movie ruined my life. Life. I
[00:05:18] Josiah: didn’t see the movie. That movie ruined my life, even though had the mother of Dragons in it. The
[00:05:22] Donna: worst.
I was going to bring that up, but then I decided not to go negative, but I’m
[00:05:28] Rebekah: kind of God just said it. I believe that I saw the movie while in West Virginia, cleaning out your, uh, brother’s homes that had just the, my uncle Butch, who had just passed away, and it had been a really rough summer. Like everything was very sad and I wanted a romantic comedy for Christmas.
And I thought, Oh, that movie looks good. And so Josh and I went to see last Christmas and I have never been sadder than when I left that freaking theater. I was actually angry. I think I was angry more than sad. And so if you haven’t seen a lot, the last, or if you haven’t seen the movie last Christmas that came out in 2019, don’t see it, boycott it forever.
Well, the story we’re talking about today is actually one of the inspirations for many of the things that we now consider ubiquitous Christmas traditions. So mom, do you want to give us a quick summary of the plot of A Christmas Carol?
[00:06:20] Donna: Certainly. A Christmas Carol tells the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a stingy old man who changes his ways after being visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley, his ex partner, and the spirits of Christmas past.
Present and future. These encounters inspire Scrooge to embrace the Christmas spirit becoming generous and benevolent.
[00:06:46] Rebekah: I thought it was kind of cool just to get a bit of context before we go into all of the adaptations about how this book kind of came to be, and I’ll do a little nod. We can talk about it later.
A lot of this comes from the book, which is also adapted into film called The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I think we can talk about a little later. But if you haven’t seen that, it’s a, it’s a great watch to kind of see the context. And so one of the one, one of the things that moms mentioned a few times.
that I love is that Dickens was particularly inspired to write a Christmas carol when he visited Field Lane Ragged School, which is one of the several establishments at the time for London’s street children. And that meant a lot to him. He was inspired by, you know, Just a lot of dark things in his own past and what he was seeing.
[00:07:36] Tim: Yes. He wrote a Christmas Carol during a period following the industrial revolution when, uh, the British and perhaps people around the world, uh, the British empire was very large at the time. We’re exploring and reevaluating the Christmas traditions that they had. Um, Carol’s, uh, newer customs, such as cards, uh, I think it was the king of England at the time, though Christmas was a holiday, um, as it is now, it was a much less important holiday and a much less celebrated holiday.
Um, Easter was the religious holiday, uh, and after a Christmas carol, Christmas became more and more important. Uh, in the minds of English speaking world.
[00:08:24] Rebekah: Yeah. As I was looking through this, I was curious cause we ran into that, um, being mentioned several times. And so I looked up what like traditionally what kind of changed and after Christmas Carol, things like family gatherings were a lot more common.
Generosity became like a major theme of Christmas. Uh, Christmas feasting and like foods and the Christmas duck kind of idea came to be really popularized. People started decorating their homes for Christmas. So even a lot of the decorative traditions that we have now, like kind of saw that a Christmas carol was the turning point to when this happened.
Um, and so, um, Um, and also I believe you mentioned the cards, so giving cards and gifts, um, and then the singing of Christmas carols literally became more popularized. And I think the other one that is not necessarily something that is still as common today, but people for a long time would also begin telling ghost stories around Christmas
[00:09:17] Tim: that spoke of the supernatural nature of Christmas,
[00:09:23] Donna: along with the other things that were going on in this time period that Rebekah had mentioned before.
Dickens was very, very affected by the treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character. And this becomes the great, possibly the greatest theme of the storyline. And in that time period, The poor and the children, not just adults, but would assume the children probably tugged at him even more so to see them.
And you have to think of the time of year It is. And the weather’s cold. Yeah. And Dickens was moved by these things and I think, I think all this together brought us this, this classic that Yeah. Is, is
[00:10:13] Rebekah: not surpassed well. And watching the film adaptations, I feel like that’s so obvious when you see. It’s honestly, some of them get kind of dark at the beginning.
Like when you’re seeing like what poverty looks like and what people are going through and still trying to hold it together and celebrate.
[00:10:28] Tim: It would actually spend the rest of his life trying to help the poor. And in many ways he was very involved in social change. Yeah.
[00:10:38] Josiah: I mean, and I just directed his, I just directed Oliver on stage and almost every rehearsal where there was a big group number.
I was like, okay, The theme of this is you’re poor and you’re not treated well, so make that come across on stage. It was somehow
[00:10:58] Tim: with your eyes,
[00:10:59] Josiah: make sure they know that you’re poor, but you’re not doing well. So much of Charles Dickens was about serving the underserved as we may say more frequently today.
But let’s go over some of the characters that exist through all these different adaptations. Mm hmm. I wanted to just go through the list real quick. We have a list of, a list of the main characters here and what stave they are first mentioned in the staves in the book. Are the five parts of the original because it is
[00:11:31] Rebekah: a carol.
It is a novella, which is.
[00:11:34] Josiah: But he thought of it as a carol. And it was a Christmas carol is the musical term. Of course, you have Ebenezer Scrooge, who transforms from a cold hearted miser into a generous and warm hearted man. And of course, he first appears at the beginning of the story. Slave one. You have Jacob Marley, who was his partner.
The novel famously opens with Marley was dead, also Jacob Marley. Who is dead seven ish years, whenever he appears in the first stave, Ebenezer Scrooge, he’s a ghost bound in chains and cash boxes and introduces the idea that Scrooge will be met by the three spirits.
[00:12:16] Rebekah: He’s kind of the host of the story in a lot of ways.
[00:12:19] Josiah: A few, a few adaptations give him a little more significance than the original novel, but most of the adaptations keep him as the, he’s essentially the Herald. That these spirits are coming, the three Christmas spirits are coming. Then in the living world, you have Bob Cratchit, Ebenezer Scrooge’s employee.
Not necessarily specifically described, though, he is clothed in threadbare attire. He’s overworked and overpaid, and at the end of the story
[00:12:48] Speaker: You mean underpaid.
[00:12:49] Josiah: Yeah, at the end of the story, Ebenezer Scrooge usually gives him, uh, pay raise as well as other gifts and Bob Cratchit, of course, also appears in stave one.
Uh, Fred is Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew, not specifically described in appearance, but he’s very cheerful. He’s the son of Scrooge’s sister, whose name is Fran or Bella. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s Fran. Yes, Scrooge’s sister, Fran, had one child, Fred. Fran passed away, and In childbirth. In childbirth. And so Scrooge was asked to take care of Fred, and whether or not he’s done a good job, who knows.
So he appears in stave one. So, also in the living world, but you don’t see him until stave three in the Ghost of Christmas Present, is Tiny Tim, who does not appear in the first two staves. He does not play a mandolin, or
[00:13:44] Tim: whatever that little tiny guitar thing is. He does not play a mandolin. Different Tiny Tim.
For a different generation of people. I do love Tiny Tim.
[00:13:53] Josiah: I’m sloppy. I work on a crutch. I don’t know. That is a different Tiny Tim. Tiny Tim is a small sickly boy with a crutch. Tiny Tim’s health and fate concern Scrooge. And honestly as an author, I can see Charles Dickens writing Tiny Tim Which, to modern sensibilities, would be really tugging at your heartstrings in a kind of cliché way, but in the 1800s it was not so much a cliché to have a sick child.
Clichés had to have a
[00:14:26] Tim: beginning, so that they could be used a lot of times and become a cliché.
[00:14:31] Donna: When Scrooge is generally talking about the public before he ever sees Tiny Tim with the ghost and as they travel through the present. When he talks about the public and the poor, he is completely unconcerned.
He doesn’t care. I give my tax money to hub the public, you know, the public places.
But as soon as he sees Tim. His heart is, is affected. He’s warmed. And, and I think that’s very interesting. That’s a very interesting thing about humanity. If we keep everything in a very broad sense and say the poor. We may feel badly, but when we experience it either for, either for ourselves, or if we experience it through someone we encounter on a personal level, right?
When it becomes a very personal thing, our emotions are, are different, right? And I thought that was interesting and really important that Dickens brought it in, brought that in.
[00:15:39] Tim: That con that concept is, is truly part of, part of the whole story. The poor, as a thought, should deal with themselves. A person who is poor that I know I am moved by.
Yeah. And you know,
[00:15:55] Rebekah: that’s why the, I mean, story is a powerful medium for a reason. It’s very difficult to be taken in by someone’s plight unless there’s a someone and a face to it. I was, uh, Josiah mentioned that Scrooge raises Cratchit’s salary at the end and you were just mentioning how he was so taken by tiny Tim and his struggle.
And so I thought it was really charming in the last couple of pages, just a couple of paragraphs here I wanted to read, uh, about how Scrooge kind of. Wraps his relationship up with Cratchit in the story. Uh, Bob comes in, he’s late to work and he thinks that he’s in trouble. And Scrooge says a Merry Christmas, a Merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, then I have given you for many a year.
I’ll raise your salary and endeavor to assist your struggling family. And we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon over a Christmas bowl of smoking Bishop Bob, make up the fires and buy another coal scuttle before you dot another I Bob Cratchit. Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all and infinitely more.
And to tiny Tim who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend as good a master and as good a man as the good old city knew or any other good old city town or borough in the good old world. And I just thought that was really charming how, um, a page before that, he also decides to donate to the people who had been asking him to donate to the poor earlier, because when he was like impacted by tiny Tim’s story, he then wanted to become more involved in helping the poor on a broader scale.
[00:17:24] Josiah: Well, before I get to the spirits, I just wanted to mention some of the minor characters. Of course, you have Fezziwig in the past, who was Scrooge’s employer. You have Scrooge’s friend, Dick Wilkins, who also worked for Fezziwig. And you have Belle, who Scrooge was engaged to. It was his
[00:17:42] Tim: love interest, yes.
[00:17:43] Josiah: I think they were engaged, and she broke it off.
When he became more lustful for money than loving towards her
[00:17:52] Tim: because he had continued to put off their wedding until he could make more money and make more money and make more money. We didn’t know that
[00:17:59] Rebekah: she, it was kind of a, in a lot of the adaptations, they either cut the sister or the love interest.
Not all of them. Some of them have both of them
[00:18:08] Josiah: cut both. And I’m so sad. Sorry. Earlier I said, friend, it’s fan, fan is the sister. And about Belle and the friend Dick Wilkins in a product, in a play production that I’ve seen of Christmas. Carol Dick Wilkins was the one that ended up marrying Bell. Oh, and I, I didn’t realize that that was an invention of the playwright, because I don’t think that’s, it’s not in the novella.
Yeah. I don’t think it’s in any of the major adaptations that we saw.
[00:18:36] Tim: I think one, I think one of the ghosts. Christmas present, I think, um, takes, takes him to see her and her family, but I don’t know that they mentioned who he is, who the father, husband is, and all the children gathered around to show him kind of what he had missed.
I’m not sure that the name is mentioned, but it might, it might be, or that may have been just, uh, just the author.
[00:19:04] Josiah: I think it was just the author of the play who made Dick Wilkins live on, cause in the novel Dick Wilkins, I think Scrooge says to Christmas Present, Oh, Dick, as if to say he died young or something, or it could be friendship lost, but.
It doesn’t imply, Oh, my friend married my lover. It doesn’t imply that. But then you have the three ghosts, ghosts of Christmas past, who’s often a combination of a child and an old man or an old woman with white hair and a light that shines from its head. It’s often portrayed very ethereally, kind of angelically, sometimes cherub, innocent, like a cherub, but also Otherworldly and strange.
[00:19:52] Rebekah: I feel like somehow that is the character that in more adaptations than not, I found the portrayal like visually to be disturbing a little, like you would think it’s the future one, but it felt like creepy a lot of the ways that they, you know, designed the character of Christmas past.
[00:20:11] Josiah: And then the ghost of Christmas present, who is a big jolly giant in a green robe surrounded by a feast.
Showing Scrooge the present day Christmas celebrations. I did happen to portray the ghost of Christmas present in twenty nineteen. So he’s probably the best character in the whole story.
[00:20:30] Donna: Obviously.
[00:20:30] Josiah: Now, the the last ghost is the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Christmas future. They’re a silent, shrouded figure resembling the Grim Reaper, and they show Scrooge a dismal future, including
[00:20:48] Rebekah: And the ghost of Christmas had to come points and is silent. He doesn’t speak. He just kind of gestures. So dad, you had decided on some of the more notable adaptations that we were going to go over. Can, so can you tell us a little bit about how you decided, because there’s so many, I really
[00:21:04] Tim: wanted us to do this.
So I, I said about. Looking for lists, and I found a list that I had a tendency to to agree with. I saw where it was going. Um, it’s a top. It’s a top 24 list from Collider online, and it’s by David Trumbore. And as I looked at the list, some of the The very top versions, uh, 1951 he has as the number one version starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge and the number two was the 1938 version starring Reginald Owen.
Disagree. Pardon? Oh, you disagree with it. Well, he considers those the top two. Uh, and then as I went down the list, actually as you go up the list, he has it in reverse order. Um, the Muppet Christmas Carol is, uh, his number eight. I would probably put that higher. So those are actually the three. That we watched, um, pretty much all of them.
And then we also, uh, we also watched a little bit of a, of a few others, a few minutes here and there of this one or that one. Found lots of different kinds of adaptations. And I’ll put a link
[00:22:17] Rebekah: to that in the episode description as well.
[00:22:19] Tim: I was trying to look for the ones that were The most faithful to the original story, because in a lot of the adaptations, like we said before, they drop the sister or they or they drop the love interest, or they may drop both of them.
Um, in some of the adaptations. Um, Marley is a lot larger part than in the book. Um, and sometimes the ghosts don’t, don’t fulfill all of the things that they were talking about before. Don’t talk about all the things that they do in the book. Um, we also, uh, spent a little bit of time watching probably about 20 to 30 minutes of Rob.
2009. So, uh, A Christmas Carol by Robert Zemeckis, the one. With Jim Carrey. Yes, with Jim Carrey, computer animated. Um, and as we were going through, I did have the family watch a few minutes. Of several. Oh my goodness.
[00:23:19] Josiah: I feel like
[00:23:20] Donna: several is not a big enough number.
[00:23:22] Josiah: We watched four and two halves of Christmas Carol adaptations in the course of about 12 hours.
Can’t believe we did that. As research. And then that was two days ago. And then yesterday we watched like a few minutes of two other adaptations. Dad was like, Oh, look, look this up on YouTube. And I was like, Oh, we should probably look at this one. So suddenly dad says to me, he says, Look up the Stingiest Man Alive on YouTube.
And I’m like, OK, I’ll do that as the day after we’re watching all the adaptations, it’s another Christmas carol adaptations, an animated musical, and we watch two musical numbers from the anime. I cannot watch more than five minutes of another Christmas carol. We got a
[00:24:06] Rebekah: little I think we got to a point where it was like a lot.
[00:24:09] Josiah: And it was it was fine. It’s fine. I you know, I love. It’s research, and it’s also watching with my family, so it’s wonderful, but there’s other things that we can do for research and enjoying family together.
[00:24:20] Rebekah: It was funny. I, I enjoyed going through all of them, but I think by the time we got to the end, I was like, okay, I’m, uh, yeah, I’m done.
I don’t, I don’t know. It was interesting. I think one of the most interesting things we did find when we were watching though, was the 1901. The original, I believe it was the first survive, or it says it’s the earliest surviving in our notes. I think it was the first film version of A Christmas Carol. So the information we saw from a few years ago said that there were only about four minutes of surviving footage.
It’s unclear why, but we were actually able to find a YouTube video that said that it was. Um, as six and a half minutes, like it was six and a half minutes long, which is about the length of the full thing. And so it had no sound, which I assume it was a silent film anyway. Yeah.
[00:25:08] Josiah: Silent. It would’ve been silent sounds were silent through like 1927.
1928, which would
[00:25:12] Tim: been accompanied by an by an organ or piano. Yeah. So we didn’t, we didn’t have
[00:25:17] Rebekah: any, obviously they didn’t overlay that, but it was actually really interesting to watch, um, just what they did with it. They even had some special effects that they had kind of used a black.
[00:25:28] Josiah: Pretty impressive for 1901.
Yeah, they had special effects with how that was the one where Jacob Marley is the only ghost. He shows him past, present, and future, and I was wondering, because the opening of the movie was like two minutes until Jacob Marley shows up. I was like, how do they tell the whole story in six minutes? And then I was like, Oh, because Jacob Marley is the only ghost.
And he shows him all of these flashbacks in his bedroom.
[00:25:55] Tim: I think the title of it is either Scrooge or Marley’s Ghost. Yeah. So it is.
[00:26:00] Josiah: Yeah. Well, in 1908, the next recorded. Christmas Carol movie adaptation is a film with Thomas Ricketts as Scrooge and it is lost. I’ll talk more about that later. Yeah. But I also wanted to mention that this is the only Scrooge, because we, we don’t know how, we don’t know the age of 1901’s Scrooge actor.
Right. This is the only recorded Scrooge who was born before the Civil War. And I thought there would be more because Scrooge is old. So I thought old actors would play him. Right. And I was I was so excited to talk about how old these people were. But I have a fun fact later about how young the Scrooges were in the first era of Christmas Carol adaptations.
But also we let’s skip ahead to 1928. It was the first hockey adaptation. However, it is lost. Another lost one. Dad and I watched Doctor Who when I was younger, we watched the new series, we watched some of the older stuff. Who and I was, I’m so sad. It’s from the sixties. So many full episodes of Dr. Who are just lost forever, which don’t have it.
Oh, yes.
[00:27:06] Tim: There’s a whole large segment of TV time where they weren’t recording anything, or they didn’t keep those recordings, or they recorded over. Yeah, because they didn’t intend
[00:27:17] Josiah: on re airing them, and they didn’t, they didn’t know that VHSs and DVDs would be a huge thing, so they just were like, eh, we’re not gonna re-air this.
So we’ll destroy it. So I keep up with lost media on YouTube. It’s a very fun YouTube genre.
[00:27:33] Tim: I guess it’s a little controversial whether the 1935 was the first talkie or the 1928. Cause both of them say
[00:27:40] Josiah: the first talkie. I think I wrote that because it’s the, the 1935 is the first talkie that is, that survives to this day.
[00:27:47] Tim: Okay. And that may be it. That’s, that’s number three on the list that I was reading. So he really likes the 1935 version. The 1938 version, um, is one of the ones that we watched. That’s his number two, and the 51 version is his number one.
[00:28:03] Josiah: I disagree with 1938. The 51 I thought was a very good classic.
Christmas Carol.
[00:28:09] Tim: That’s the one you got a lot more of George, his nephew. Right. There was a lot more story with him. Oh, Fred. Oh, my Harry Potter fan. Fred and George, sorry, I was getting those mixed up. That’s hilarious. He’s that. Yeah, that’s the one where Fred has a larger, larger role, uh, and it’s fun to watch.
[00:28:28] Josiah: 1938 one, I felt like there were so many unnecessary changes. It didn’t seem to save money for me, and they certainly didn’t serve the plot and the themes, in my opinion. Yeah. There were just so
[00:28:43] Tim: many changes. It didn’t seem to be very faithful to the original material, and that’s, that’s something as we’ve gone through the different ones and watched clips of this and clips of that, where we found some of them are very faithful to the original, and some of them really take a lot of liberty.
[00:28:59] Rebekah: Yeah.
[00:28:59] Josiah: Um, this old 1938 film, I did want to mention that not only are the Cratchits, the actors actually married in real life, well they were, they’re dead now, and their daughter played, I think Martha, or one of the Cratchit kids, and it was like the only film where all three of them starred in a movie all together, all three of them, but the couple, Emily and Bob Cratchit’s actors did star in other movies together later, which I thought was cute.
But also the actor who played Tiny Tim is still alive today. As of this recording, he’s 96. Wow. Tiny Tim from 1938. That is really
[00:29:36] Tim: cool. Is something.
[00:29:38] Rebekah: There were also a lot of like, uh, animated adaptations. And I mean, there’s various types of adaptations of this across the, across the board. We found, I think that the, the longest list we could find was that there were a hundred film specifically adaptations, and it was not exhaustive.
And so I think the, the number of adaptations exceeds a hundred, and that’s not including all of the other. Variations
[00:30:04] Tim: and there was more than 12 animated versions. I think we found.
[00:30:08] Rebekah: Yeah, I think I found it I think it was a list of 12 or 13 at the least Um, it looks like if we our list is accurate. The first animated adaptation was in 1971 and it was a hand drawn adaptation Uh, starring Alistair Sim, who, right, who had been in the 1951 version, uh, just called Scrooge.
And that was, that was rated number four on the list you found as well. So it was also pretty highly, at least in that particular person’s opinion, pretty highly acclaimed. There are a
[00:30:36] Tim: couple of odd ones. Um, Ms. Scrooge starred Cicely Tyson in 1977, um, and there’s a Flintstones Christmas carol and a Mickey’s Christmas carol and a Bugs Bunny Christmas carol.
There’s a musical from 2004 starring Kelsey Grammer as Scrooge, uh, we haven’t watched that one.
[00:31:00] Rebekah: Mom, you noticed that there were a lot of musicals originally.
[00:31:03] Donna: Yeah. And I also see on the list we have, there is a Christmas Carol in 1999 starring Patrick Stewart. I’m surprised I haven’t seen that. I love Patrick Stewart.
We saw one clip of it yesterday. You did. Okay. And I remember seeing his face, but we didn’t, we didn’t watch the whole, uh, the whole movie, but I’m not surprised to see how many, How many famous actors played Scrooge? And I think we see that a lot across, you know, some of the last three or four Star Wars films.
You had a lot of stars that wanted to be, there will be stormtroopers will be something. Yeah, I just want to be part of the IP. And I think it’s, it’s, this is a similar situation where I want to have this in my film repertoire. I want to play this character. And so I thought, I think that’s pretty cool to see some of the stars that have done Scrooge’s character.
I also wanted to mention, just as a funny aside, in the Muppet Christmas Carol, I was so excited to see that Marley was played by the, uh, heckler, the two heckler as heckler. Yes.
[00:32:10] Speaker 2: Mar Marley’s were dead. Mar
[00:32:12] Donna: an arrangement or a, uh, an adaptation of the film where there were brother Marley’s that, uh, that came back to Marley
[00:32:19] Josiah: and Marley.
[00:32:20] Donna: Yes, it was fantastic. I thought that was pretty awesome. Honestly, a Mup Christmas
[00:32:23] Rebekah: Carol was like. It was amazing. So faithful. It was fun to watch, but also
[00:32:28] Tim: so faithful. It is one of my very favorite, um, Muppet movies as well as of the adaptations of Christmas Carol. And I’ve watched the movie many times before I ever actually read the book.
So I was really excited when we watched it that it is so faithful to the book. It’s puppets and live actors. But it’s so faithful to the original work and yet it’s funny and it’s still Muppets and all of those kinds
[00:33:01] Josiah: of things. I wanted to mention that in the mid 90s, we had our first two female portrayals, Scrooge.
We had a TV movie. With Susan Lucci playing the first Ebeneezer
[00:33:16] Tim: Scrooge as Soap Opera fame?
[00:33:17] Josiah: Yes, as Elizabeth Ebbe Scrooge. She’s the owner of a huge department store and the movie is called Ebbe or Miracle at Christmas Ebbe’s Story. And so it was a TV movie, you know, maybe not the highest quality, but we also have Ms.
Scrooge in 1997, a TV movie starring Cicely Tyson as Ebonita Scrooge.
[00:33:38] Rebekah: That one was also a TV movie?
[00:33:39] Josiah: It was also a TV movie. You had two female Scrooges. On TV movies in the mid nineties.
[00:33:46] Rebekah: Have we had a female Scrooge in a theatrical release? I am looking. It looks like 2020s might be the only option, but that’s not theatrical.
That was YouTube. Interesting. So ultimately it looks like. It’s kind of not worked to adapt it and change maybe the gender of the character, at least so far.
[00:34:07] Josiah: Yeah, I mean, I think you, I think you could easily do it. I think that
[00:34:11] Rebekah: I think that her name would be Karen.
[00:34:14] Tim: Oh no. Oh no, it’s Karen’s Christmas Carol.
It is. It, it’s kind of amazing to me that Uh, recently, since 2018, there’s been at least one, if not two adaptations every single year. Um, two in 18, I see 2, 9 3 in 19, uh, three in 2020. Uh, one in, uh, 22. Uh, the one in 22 is spirited, which is actually one of the ones in 22 is spirited, which is an adaptation that really kind of.
Goes in a different direction
[00:34:53] Donna: on the subject of spirited. I’m sure I saw it last year. I’m sure. Cause TJ says we watched it and I believe him, but sometimes if something doesn’t initially grab me, I don’t, I don’t remember. I just kind of put it out of my head and I do other things. So this year we were like, okay, I want to make sure I see it.
I like Ryan Reynolds. I like Will Ferrell. So we watched it. And I think we, initially we watched it, I don’t know, some, it had been very long ago, just in the last week or so. Yeah, we’ve watched it just
[00:35:25] Tim: recently.
[00:35:26] Donna: Before we watched it, probably three weeks ago, as I’ve started in this journey of, of Instagram reels.
I came across this awesome reel of Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell. I heard it and I was like, Rebekah, oh my gosh, they’re singing this little ditty and Ryan Reynolds comes out and I’m hoping you’ve seen it. And I just want to say, in the
[00:35:49] Rebekah: timeline of this, you didn’t know that they were in that movie together when you and I were talking about it.
Correct. We didn’t. Yeah, anyway, continue. She didn’t know why they were there. This is my favorite part.
[00:35:59] Donna: And I, I saw it and I was like. Oh, we could recreate this for one of our episodes. We could do this. And so I wrote these lyrics and it’s the lyrics. It’s what you heard at the beginning of this episode.
We get along. I’m like, Rebekah, I sent it to her. You’ve got to see this. Have you already seen it? And she said, Oh yeah, she goes, I bet that’s why they were doing spirited together because they’re totally dressed in. The costumes and everything. I said, I think that would be perfect for Christmas Carol episode.
And I said, what are you talking about? And she goes, spirited the movie. Haven’t you seen it? And TJ, we’re in our chat. TJ’s like, yes, we watched it last year. And I, like I said, I didn’t really remember it. And I said, uh, is it like a, uh, Yeah, it’s a take on a Christmas carol, and I went and then I realized when I went back and watched the stupid reel again, I didn’t even catch that they were in period costumes.
I paid no attention to that at all because I don’t observe anything. And so I hope you enjoyed our little opening ditty because, um, I was so inspired by it and so, uh, we worked it out and I, I think it turned out well.
[00:37:14] Rebekah: So I really liked that as kind of time goes on and you’ve got a lot of adaptations that already exist and a lot of them that are faithful and all of that.
I feel like we’ve gotten a little more creative with some of these. So obviously a Muppet Christmas Carol. Yeah. It’s differentiator is that it’s Muppets and it really worked. Um, Scrooged is the 1988 version of this story featuring Bill Murray. Scrooged is a modern to, you know, 1988, um, Uh, adaptation of the, the story where Bill Murray is like a crotchety old businessman, but he’s, you know, living in 1988.
And so it actually did pretty poorly, I believe at the box office. Mom will be able to tell us more about that later, but I thought that was kind of fun, like taking it into the modern day. Um, you’ve also got, uh, spirited, which we mentioned that came out last year in 2022.
[00:38:05] Josiah: Spoiler alert for spirited the movie.
[00:38:08] Rebekah: That one is probably the most different of the ones on our list because it is not the original story. It is a story about the ghost of Christmas present who is Will Ferrell. He is actually Ebenezer Scrooge. Ebenezer Scrooge in that version died three and a half weeks After he was, you know, transformed by this whole experience and, uh, worked as a ghost in the department that puts on these like redeeming, uh, episodes.
So they send the three ghosts every year, they, they pick a, a person that can be redeemed or whatever. And so. The plot of Spirit is actually, you don’t even find out that he’s Scrooge, that Will Ferrell is Scrooge to look further in, but Will Ferrell finds Ryan Reynolds, whose character is deemed unredeemable in the movie.
So when Ryan Reynolds appears, he is an unredeemable character. And Will Ferrell’s character as the former Ebenezer, He’s afraid of retiring, which would allow him to live out the rest of his life on earth because he’s afraid that he was the only other unredeemable that they’d gone through this process with.
And he was afraid that he wasn’t actually redeemed that he was still kind of a, a bad person. And I think it’s interesting cause it goes to something we mentioned when we were talking about songbirds and snakes, where you kind of want to give the bad guy character a story arc or an excuse. Or whatever, because in spirited Will Ferrell genuinely, like he says that as Ebenezer screwed, he died a few weeks later.
Right. Wow. And, um, it’s a, it’s actually a pretty fun movie. Uh, they do a musical number called Good Afternoon. That cracks me up and gets in my head, . Um, and it’s a, it’s a pretty good adaptation. Again, becoming different is really the only way at this point, in my opinion, that you can make a Christmas carol in a way people wanna see it.
And so one of the things we watched the other day when dad was walking us through them was like. 15 minutes of a newer version. I think it was on prime Amazon prime video, uh, where these two sisters and their grandmother are telling the story. And so it kind of is them in the modern day or was it in the past?
[00:40:17] Tim: They’re, they, they appear to be in Victorian time, but they’re telling this story as if the grandmother Heard it as a child.
[00:40:25] Josiah: Yeah. That was an interesting one. If we had more time, if this hadn’t been the seventh adaptation that we were looking at, because it was weird. And I mean, I like weird stuff.
[00:40:35] Rebekah: And it was weird in that as the characters were being acted out, you kind of are taken into this ethereal kind of oddly lit area and it’s actually modern dance throughout the whole thing.
And so the Scrooge character and. All of them are kind of doing these dance numbers throughout. It’s kind of eerie. Like it wasn’t, it wasn’t like a happy go lucky. It was this eerie dance. And so I think it’s interesting how they’ve continued to come up with ways to change the story. And I’ll mention now, uh, dad, I think you’re the only one of us that has read it, but.
The Man Who Invented Christmas, like I said, has been adapted into its own movie. I originally had thought we could cover The Man Who Invented Christmas, and we probably will at some point, because it was a really interesting story about how Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, why he was inspired, his struggles around it.
There were a lot of like, kind of different things going on during that time. Um, and so I think again, the story itself has kind of grown to something larger than just the story.
[00:41:37] Josiah: Also the 2009 Robert Zemeckis Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey in digital capture computer animation. I want to talk a little more about that because I think that that is the, I think that is the most modern example of a straight Christmas carol adaptation that tried to be very true to the original novella.
And I think that similar to Polar Express, the animation was. And I think it was a little better than Polar Express, maybe, but it was still a little disturbing in a few different ways. The Ghost of Christmas Past was one of the, it was the most disturbing Christmas past we’d ever seen. And I think that it’s interesting.
I don’t mean to step on other people’s toes, but I think later we’ll talk about how it’s the highest grossing adaptation of all of them. Can
[00:42:32] Rebekah: I just say, I did not realize that Robert Zemeckis had directed both of those. So I was reading this list and I was like, did you guys accidentally say that from the other episode?
Cause we just released a polar express last week and I really. Was amazed that after Polar Express and the, honestly, the controversial feedback that Zemeckis got on the uncanny valley of the animation. And
[00:42:56] Josiah: Beowulf, Beowulf was in between Polar Express and Christmas Carol. It was another. Semi live action digital capture one that was weird that Zemeckis directed.
[00:43:05] Rebekah: Do we think that he just was determined it was going to like he wanted it to work?
[00:43:10] Josiah: I think he wanted to be the pioneer of digi capture.
[00:43:13] Rebekah: Wow. Yeah.
[00:43:14] Josiah: So there were three, correct? Marshall’s mom’s was what undid his Imageworks studio. Did he do that as well? Yeah. At least produced it. I think he directed it though.
[00:43:25] Donna: Grab some, some box office or more recent films. And I, I, I wasn’t going to try to get everyone that was up in, in Tim’s list. You didn’t
[00:43:35] Rebekah: want to grab the box office numbers for over a hundred films. What’s wrong with you? Are you lazy?
[00:43:41] Tim: Interestingly
[00:43:41] Donna: enough, there were two. Surely the listeners would like to listen
[00:43:43] Tim: to all of that list.
[00:43:45] Donna: There were a couple of, a couple of them that I had pulled out. That, that I thought looked like they didn’t do as well, they weren’t as well received or whatever. Yeah. I couldn’t find box office numbers on them. So, you know, it would have been, probably been a little bit of a, of a futile search to get really, really solid numbers.
But, I did find the 51, 1951 version, 1938 version, they don’t have box office numbers for those. And I guess Probably
[00:44:14] Josiah: long enough ago that they just lost records.
[00:44:17] Donna: Yeah. Uh, it, it, it was, I think the 1951 version, I found one website that said it made 24. And And! And! I’m sure that’s wrong. Yeah. They can’t be right.
Right. I’m sure that’s wrong. But a couple of things I did, did note as for the book release date, uh, I think we have mentioned it came out in 1843. It was, uh, actually released. To the public on December 19th, 1843. I didn’t realize it was quite that close.
[00:44:47] Tim: He was, he was closer than he wanted to be, but he had problems.
[00:44:52] Donna: Yes. And by the end of 1844, so a year later, 13 editions have been released. The first edition, there were a lot of things that went on in the PR in producing the book and publishing the book. In the first edition, Dickens was Very, very particular about the way it was bound and about the pages and the way everything looked.
He ended up really not making a lot of money from it, um, from, from his, his initial release. So I think that had
[00:45:26] Tim: been successful, it would have
[00:45:27] Josiah: bankrupted him. So, and, and despite that he did not care, he spent a lot of money. On publishing something that was not cheap, spent extra money on correct binding and the type of paper and the gilded edge
[00:45:43] Tim: of the pages.
Yes. Crazy.
[00:45:44] Donna: And, and so to his credit. He was willing to put himself out there for something he, he believed in him. And maybe what we talked about before related regarding the ways it touched him, it touched his heart and it pulled at him to, to see even in the mid 1800s, how Christmas. was there and, and this season that should have brought joy and we talk about it as if it’s the most joyful time.
But just like today, the poor exist, the, the, there’s poverty, there’s selfishness, there are, are other bad characteristics in the world that we have to deal with. Um, in, in this season that for all intents and purposes is supposed to be. universally joyful. And, and, you know, if we look at, if you just look at the marketing of Christmas, um, it, it should just be happy for everyone, but we know that’s not true.
So he put himself out there and, and invested this money to do something and it did pay off, but you’re right at the beginning, it was not great for him. I
[00:46:53] Josiah: think it’s interesting that Charles Dickens was one of the first worldwide celebrities. Yes. The spread and reach of the British empire at that time allowed him.
To get his novels to a wide audience. So from when he started publishing in 1837, 1838, he was already a super famous name and, and to think that one of our first worldwide celebrities was so close to bankruptcy, they hadn’t figured out how to make a good living off of it yet. I guess. Well, he
[00:47:25] Tim: eventually would, would come to make more money from his projects, but up to that point, Um, the publishers usually got the lion’s share of the money, not the writer.
And so that’s why he self published it and made, he was so picky about all of the parts of it. He wanted it to be something that families could put in a special place in the living room, uh, and keep and pull down all every Christmas to read again. Super sweet. And
[00:47:55] Rebekah: I had actually bought a. Like we, I’ve talked about this before.
I purchased physical copies of all the books and I bought a copy on Amazon. There’s multiple types. This is not like a, this is not a sales pitch. Um, but there are several vendors that now offer a Christmas Carol in this really beautiful red bound edition with the gold gilded, um, titling and things on the front.
And the, Version I have was also illustrated by Arthur Rackham in the, I believe it was around world war one. There’s a little bit about it in the beginning of the book, but it’s got these really cool full page and a smaller illustrations throughout. And I think again, those kinds of things just speak to the fact that Dickens wasn’t just trying to tell a story.
He was trying to create an experience.
[00:48:40] Tim: Definitely.
[00:48:40] Rebekah: And that’s, I mean, it comes true because his. experience that he created has literally changed Christmas in a lot of ways.
[00:48:48] Donna: TJ mentioned that the Christmas carol that Zemeckis was in, Robert Zemeckis was involved with was the highest grossing one that I can find at 325 million.
Um, there have been some others, I’ll go in kind of year order from most current year That I have, that I found back, um, in 2022, there’s a Christmas Carol that was produced and distributed in South Korea. I could find no pictures about it. I could find no data on it, except that the movie made in South Korea, it was not a worldwide release, 171, 000.
[00:49:30] Josiah: Oh, goodness.
[00:49:31] Donna: So I thought that was interesting. Um, in 2020, A Christmas Carol, worldwide gross, 153, 000.
[00:49:40] Josiah: Wonder why.
[00:49:41] Donna: Um, that’s the one that you were saying that just.
[00:49:44] Josiah: Oh, it was the weird one?
[00:49:46] Donna: Um, is that right? Isn’t that the one? Let me look up in.
[00:49:50] Josiah: I was thinking because no one wanted to go to the theater in 2020.
[00:49:53] Donna: It featured Paul Tom. No, that’s not right. 2020. It featured Jefferson Mays as Scrooge. That’s true. 2020 was in the in. We were steeped in the midst of Cobra, Cobra. Oh, Lord. Of COVID. Conspiracy
[00:50:07] Josiah: theory alert. We’re
[00:50:09] Donna: in Cobra. Back in 2001. There was an animated version with a worldwide gross of 266, 000. Again,
[00:50:19] Tim: that’s
[00:50:20] Donna: hard to believe in after the year 2000, a movie making less than half a million dollars or even, you know, um, a Muppet Christmas Carol came out in 1992.
It had a worldwide gross of 33 million, which I thought was great.
[00:50:37] Josiah: I wish it
[00:50:39] Donna: were much, we all agree it was much better than that number. What was its budget? Um, I didn’t, I didn’t go back. Yeah, let him Google that real quick because I feel like that helps.
[00:50:50] Josiah: Well, the budget was only 12 million, so it made more than double its money back, and I’m sure it made more on, on DVD and streaming.
Which is good to know. It really deserved it.
[00:51:00] Tim: So I helped.
[00:51:02] Donna: Another thing about that, uh, that particular Christmas Carol, that was their first big effort after Jim Henson’s death. And so to me being, knowing Tim’s been such a fan of the Muppets over the years, we were really glad that it, it did well. It was, it was good quality and it kept Jim’s dream alive.
Um, and, and kept things going for the, for the. For that company, that franchise, the book rating on Goodreads is a 4. 07 out of five, which I think is cool. It is a, it’s a good read. I’m not to be cheesy there. I mean it to come out that way, but it is an engaging story. It’s not a long story to listen to an audio book or to read the physical copy.
Um, but it is, it is written well and it’s engaging. And then the lowest rating. On Rotten Tomatoes. On Rotten Tomatoes that we found was, um, 13%. And it was an adaptation that started Nick Cage, which I believe was in 2000, but
[00:52:10] Josiah: old couple of nephew. Hmm.
[00:52:12] Donna: Um, and the highest, and I personally love Nick Cage. I mean, sorry, he got 13%, but I think he’s amazing.
And then the 1938 version has a hundred percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it’s definitely had. The full gambit for the, for the critics
[00:52:30] Rebekah: for sure. And I know a lot of like older movies don’t have particularly accurate ratings, but this one actually does have quite a few critic reviews on it. The 38 version that got a hundred percent in it, you know, could be a hundred percent because it’s a classic and that’s possible, but there are, I think when we looked it up on rotten tomatoes, they had a total of 80 adaptations in their list and almost none of them had any ratings.
And so the 13 percent Nick Cage version and up to, you know, the 100 percent for the 38, I think out of 80, there were probably 12 or 13 that had some sort of rating. And most of them were like between 50 something and 80 something.
[00:53:08] Josiah: Yeah. The theater that I do a lot of work at in the Nashville area. Where we did Christmas Carol in 2022 and 2019 and probably like 2014, maybe before that or something, something like that.
But, uh, we use different adaptations a lot of the time. And we have a couple of people at the theater involved with the theater who have done. who have published adaptations. And I should, I should add some music and publish one myself, actually. But only six weeks after the novel’s, the novella’s initial publication, Christmas Carol was adapted to the London stage.
Edward Sterling. It was then transferred to New York’s Park Theater, Charles Stick.
[00:53:52] Tim: That’s wild. Charles Dickens went to see that one in London and he was in favor of that? He was, he was all part of that.
[00:53:59] Donna: And what year?
[00:54:00] Tim: But because the year 44 was published, so in January, February. Oh, okay, gotcha. After it was published.
Um, but because of the lack of international copyright laws, it was published in the United States as well, and plays were written. in the United States, but he didn’t get any anything from that. He actually, he actually sued at one point and was one of the largest lawsuits of that type that actually began to change copyright law.
That’s a toughie.
[00:54:30] Donna: One of the things that Rebekah talked about brought to mind, actually, I thought I’ve had before when I was younger, I kind of, I had the assumption or I’d made the assumption that a Christmas Carol was a Christian tale, but as we’ve read it and watch it and watch different iterations of it, it’s not, it’s not a specifically Christian tale.
It’s not a specifically secular tale either. It’s because of the theme of Christianity. in, in caring, caring for the poor and being benevolent to those who are, you know, unrepresented or overlooked in society, um, is, is an important part of the Christian faith. But there is a lot of discussion, or there has been a lot of discussion among academics as to whether it’s a secular or a Christian allegory.
I think it’s, I think it was very smart of Dickens To do it the way he did because he could have, he could have written it from a fully Christian perspective, but he didn’t make it in such a way that anyone from any faith or anywhere would read it and say, Oh, well. You’re bringing this into, you’re bringing this into the story.
Using
[00:55:43] Josiah: Christian principles, making them more universal.
[00:55:46] Donna: Exactly. Making it a universal need or universal thing that all, all peoples can look at and embrace.
[00:55:54] Josiah: I’m going to move to my obsessive reductionist statistics based mind and point out something. Very silly, that doesn’t matter, that I clung on to because I’m obsessed with meaningless data.
From like 1910 to 1960, almost all of the Scrooges were born between 1880 and 1900. That’s a 50 year period of movies. Pulling from only a 20 year period of births of the actors playing a Scrooge. And I think that that’s mainly because we had much younger people in the early silent film era playing older people just with heavy makeup.
And then we moved into the 50s and 60s, but they were still born, you know, before 1900, for the most part. And then from 1970 to the present, the more traditional Scrooges who weren’t like purposeful subversions of expectations, the more traditional Scrooges were almost exclusively born between 1930 and 1950.
That is
[00:57:00] Rebekah: actually kind of wild.
[00:57:01] Josiah: Another 50 year period where basically everyone who played a traditional Scrooge in a major project only pulled from a 20 year period of births. Um, I think it’s, it’s crazy. I mean, one of the, one of the earliest ones in this era is when Henry Winkler, who I believe was in his thirties, played Scrooge, might’ve been a TV movie, but he had white hair and I guess he was coming off of.
Happy Days fame. I don’t know why on earth he would have done this movie. I need to research it more.
[00:57:31] Tim: Every actor wants to get away from his most famous and endearing role because he feels pigeonholed by it. And I think that’s probably why he would have taken on that kind of project. And especially let his hair go, go white.
I mean, he’s, he’s been gray for a long time, but he had black hair. During happy days, which was probably died for a lot of it.
[00:57:53] Donna: A few things that I had picked out to share. One, the, the, the actual formal title of the novella is a Christmas Carol in prose. Being a ghost story of Christmas. I found interesting and I wondered if he chose to shorten it.
In
[00:58:12] Tim: that general period of time, most works, published works had long titles that explained them. Um, it wasn’t too far from this. Uh, when Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, but that was not the full title. It’s a half a page of, of additional title. Um, we just shorten it. And I think that’s our tendency in modern times to shorten things.
[00:58:42] Donna: But to think about him being true to himself. Uh, as far as the way his publications were put out, the way they looked and all those things, we, we assume he was a very particular man. Um, it’s interesting to note he had 12 children and, um, in the world of novelist, just like it would be today. You can write a book, you could consider it the best of the best, a high quality story, just the way you wanted it to come out.
But if the public chooses not to buy your merchandise or your books or your writings or your films or whatever they are, you don’t make money off of them. And so I think it’s interesting that The 1800s are no different than modern day. In that respect,
[00:59:30] Tim: that’s one of the problems he had with, with publishers.
He had some, some difficulty with some publishers, which is why he published this one with a deal. He used a publisher, but he was primary publisher and he used them as a printer because like for advertising, they. When you would advertise for the new book coming out, you would put it in one of the daily or weekly magazines or newspapers of the era.
And if you didn’t get into those things, you didn’t have any way to push your product, your book, One of the problems that Dickens had with publishers, he had, he had required more of a part of a portion of the profits or one of his works and the publishers chose not to advertisement in the, in the magazine.
As a way to get back at him, you’ll get more profit, but you won’t sell, you won’t sell as many books. And he had a real problem with that, but they responded very well to all of his Christmas novels. Uh, and a Christmas Carol is a huge, was a huge success in his lifetime. And it was not only published those 13 times in just one year’s time.
It’s been republished and republished and republished.
[01:00:49] Rebekah: It’s the reason we say Merry Christmas. Wow. It is, isn’t
[01:00:52] Tim: it?
[01:00:53] Josiah: When I was reading, when we were watching one of the Christmas Carols, I was reading IMDb Trivia, and one of them, I don’t know why it was on this specific version, but what humbug literally means is it’s an accusation that you are being false.
It’s not like Scrooge saying, Oh, that’s nonsense. It’s more like he’s saying. You don’t really feel Mary and I’m just calling you out on it. You’re faking it. Oh, and I’m calling you out on your, on your crud. Interesting. Should we shouldn’t say crap. No, it was family friendly.
[01:01:26] Rebekah: I think that we have a lot of gratitude for the way that this story has impacted our view on the generosity and kindness or of Christmas and what the spirit of Christmas really is.
And, um, whether again, you see that as a spiritual. Thing or just a simply moral one. I’m really grateful for it. So as we wrap this up, in that case, what would you say, obviously it’s a little different doing a final verdict in this case, but what would you say is your final verdict? Did you enjoy the journey of reading the book more or of watching an adaptation or various adaptations?
And then with that, what is your favorite adaptation of a Christmas Carol?
[01:02:08] Josiah: Well, Josiah thinks that. Listening to the book really puts into context the adaptations. As someone, and I assume all of us are in the same boat, we have seen a lot of adaptations before we read the book, so reading the novella actually puts a lot of those adaptations into a new context.
I thought the novella was a very interesting read for multiple reasons. Doing things that in modern times would be cliche if it was published today, but it was clearly the establishment of a lot of these tropes. Back then, it was a classic, it was relatively simple, but also simply genius in some ways, and it just resonated with the people in such a special way.
It’s obviously an icon. But I will say the Muppets Christmas Carol. It’s just so good. It’s probably my favorite. I did. I did enjoy the the 1951 Scrooge with Alistair Sim. I think as far as classic traditional Christmas Carols go, that was the best one. But but a Muppets Christmas Carol is so beautiful and faithful and reverential while being referential.
I’ll give the top marks to Muppets Christmas Carol.
[01:03:28] Donna: I enjoyed reading the book, listening to the book. Um, it was a shorter read than I’ve done recently, other than Polar Express. So it wasn’t. Uh, as long and, and drawn out and that’s okay. It’s still packed in an incredible story, a powerful story. I think that being so many different adaptations in this situation kind of took me back to preferring the book and preferring the original.
I noticed with several of the things we watched. Into the second option that we chose to watch and the third and the fourth, I saw that they were using exact lines straight from the book. And that’s, that speaks so well to Dickens genius as a novelist that he would write something that could not just last over a decades of time, but over centuries as well as our language changes and our vernacular changes.
You can still use his sentences to describe. And, and fully understand what he’s talking about. So I thought that was pretty cool. And then, so in this case, I’m going to say I enjoyed reading the book as far as a movie that we watched that I liked the best, um, more modern ones are all right. I did, of course I love the Muppets, but I, I didn’t want to just take that from everybody either.
But I’m going to say I would, I would go back and watch. the 51 again. Um, if I just had to pick one right off the top of my head.
[01:05:04] Rebekah: I personally had a little bit of trouble with the read through. And honestly, I think it was because for me, this is not an audio book. Like I, I. Struggled to focus when I was trying to listen.
And I found that when I sat down to read the physical book, it was actually a little easier. I get really caught up in old English phrasing when I’m like listening to it. It’s a lot harder for me to follow along. And I don’t, I mean, I don’t like things in that style. Anyway, this was literally written then.
So, you know, it’s obviously worthwhile. I would say in general, my experience with the movie was more positive. Movies was more positive just because it, I didn’t have to take myself out of it to make sure I knew what was actually being said. Uh, that being said, the movies that I’ve liked the most that have impacted me about a Christmas Carol or the ones that aren’t an exact faithful adaptation in the first place.
So I think when it comes to the actual story, I really did enjoy. Reading the book, like all of those, you know, caveats, I, I still enjoyed the story of it. Um, I did like a Muppets as well, but my favorite was really spirited. I, I love musicals. So that was fun. I thought it was catchy. I loved the modernization and I love that it wasn’t the same story, which I think, you know, when we’re talking about adaptations, it’s like, that’s a complicated answer.
I liked that it wasn’t the same story. I also. Really liked watching the man who invented Christmas and like learning about him writing it that for me was even more engaging than the story of Christmas Carol. I think a Christmas Carol has just been done so many times that it’s a little harder to connect with because it doesn’t feel novel.
But
[01:06:43] Tim: I can agree with that as I preach the same general story every single December. And Easter as well. So I can understand that, but I also think about what Dickens did. He wanted to make a Christmas Carol, a book that people would listen, would read with their family every year, despite the fact that he made more Christmas novels, he really wanted them to.
Make it a tradition every year. They would read this as a family and some of the things that he received some of the reviews, not reviews, but the letters he received from readers said, you know, we’ve this has been a tradition in our family now for the last whatever number of years. Um, and we just appreciate you doing this and, and all.
So my final verdict, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the book. Like I said, I had, I had I had not read the book before seeing a number of different adaptations. I mean, everybody pretty much knows the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Three Ghosts and you know, and I’ve seen lots of adaptations of it, but it was really good to read the book to get all of the original.
Um, and I suppose for me, I’m a little different than, than Rebekah in that. I really like the movies and the adaptations that stick to the novel, that stick to the original material. But my very favorite is the Muppet Christmas Carol, and I was in charge of deciding what we were going to watch. And so, um, I wanted to watch that one because I think it has the feeling.
That the story has there’s a lot of a feeling and emotion in that version, and I think that that adaptation is my favorite adaptation. So I love the book and the Muppet Christmas Carol is my favorite adaptation.
[01:08:43] Rebekah: Thanks for joining us as we continue this festive season. If you would leave us a five star rating or review, it would be the best Christmas gift you could get us.
If you’ve got questions about anything we’ve said, ideas for future episodes, or just any feedback, email us bookisbetterpod at gmail. com. Our last Christmas episode, Die Hard, drops a week from today on the 29th. And until then, Merry Christmas.
[01:09:12] Tim: I just wanted to say that, um, I really appreciate us doing a Christmas carol. It’s, it’s a favorite story of mine and, and the Muppet Christmas carol is very nostalgic for me. Uh, and I love sharing things like that with my family. So thank you.