Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962)
This is a Christmas special that those of my generation, at least where I lived, didn't watch. It was never shown on TV, we'd never heard of it... Heck, until the 1997 live-action film with Leslie Nielson playing Mr. Magoo, most of us probably hadn't heard of the character. (And that movie didn't make many of us want to watch more Magoo either.) Apparently, the special had not been aired on the basic broadcast networks since the 1980s until last year on NBC. Even then, it is usually cut quite a bit for commercials now, including last year. However, it's apparently a much loved Christmas classic. So yesterday I watched it for the first time, and in it's full 53 minute form. And I was pleasantly surprised!
So the story is the same basic Charles Dickens story that has been told in a slew of ways many times. Here there's a wraparound story that has Mr. Magoo and some other players putting on a play of A Christmas Carol. And besides the wraparound, Mr. Magoo's eyesight problems (which is what the character is famous for) don't play too much in the story. Unlike the more popular 1980s special Mickey's Christmas Carol, there's more time to tell the story here as Dickens wrote it. Still, there a few alterations, subtractions and mash-ups to make the story shorter, as with most adaptations of the tale.
What's really great here, however, are the songs. They were written by an actual duo of Broadway song-writers, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill. These two wrote the music and lyrics to the very popular musical Funny Girl not long after they worked on this, and Jule Styne wrote the music for the famous holiday song, Let It Snow!, Let It Snow!, Let It Snow! way back in 1945. Besides the first song, which is most of the beginning part of the wraparound segment that's usually cut out, the rest of the songs are of high quality. My favorite is the song sung by the plunderers of the dead Mr. Scrooge (a part of the story that most adaptations leave out) sing as they try to sell them. It's pretty good fun as a song in what is usually the darkest part of the story!
Why such a good adaptation left the airwaves for so long is anyone's guess. It's funny, it's got good songs, it takes it's time, and it was considered a Christmas classic up until the 1980s being broadcast every Christmas season like Rudolph, Frosty, and A Charlie Brown Christmas are today. It's available to view for free on Amazon Prime's unlimited streaming right now, you can view the whole thing on Youtube, and it's out on DVD as a special feature on some Christmas discs. So give it a view if you've never seen it. It's pretty great. The only hit against it is the very cheap animation, but that's easy to look past if you grew up on Hanna-Barbera like I did.
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