A Christmas Carol never fails to get to me emotionally. What’s not to like about a mean old man who, overnight, finds his heart and becomes the nicest boss in the world? There are hundreds of films and television adaptations of the Charles Dickens novella out there, going back as far as 1908—when Charles Ogle played Scrooge in Thomas Edison’s one-reeler—and everyone has his or her favorite version, be it the classic ’51 British film with Alastair Sim or the ’92 Muppets movie with Michael Caine.

My favorite of all Christmas Carols is the one I watched with my parents and sister on our new 21-inch color TV when I was a kid—the animated Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, which premiered on NBC on December 18, 1962, and was rebroadcast annually for the next several holiday seasons. It offered a clever, colorful (those reds! those blues! hot pink!) and amazingly faithful version of the story that our teacher had read to us in school minus a few of the characters (Scrooge’s sister Fan and nephew Fred), but it contained ever so much more: a play within a play—the myopic Quincy Magoo appearing as Scrooge in a hit New York play—with a real Broadway score by Jule Styne (whose name I knew from our original cast recording of Gypsy) and Bob Merrill. In those pre-VCR days, Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol was right up there with my other two favorite once-a-year telecasts: Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol was produced on a shoestring budget—$250,000 (or $1,771,523.18 in today’s dollars), according to Darrell Van Citters, an animator who has just published the book Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol: The Making of the First Animated Christmas Special. (This book, a must-read for anyone who grew up watching Magoo, is a treasure trove of fascinating anecdotes from actors and members of the creative team—plus lots of previously unseen color artwork.)
 
The cost of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol wouldn’t even pay the crafts service bill to feed all the hundreds (or is it thousands?) of people who worked on Disney’s new A Christmas Carol, which opened in theaters earlier this month. The film cost about $175 million to make—not including marketing costs—and though I was never good at math, by my calculation that appears to be 100 times the “today’s dollars cost” of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.
 
How does this newest extravaganza stack up against Magoo? Well… For all the advance build-up, the 3-D, performance-capture film—written and directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jim Carrey—is big and loud and, by unequal turns, terrifying and touching. It’s lushly cast—Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit, Jacob Marley, and Tiny Tim; Colin Firth as Fred; Bob Hoskins as Fezziwig and Old Joe—and Carrey for the most part rises to the occasion as Scrooge (and all the Ghosts), except in one unfortunate scene when he’s called upon to use a high-pitched Alvin the Chipmunk voice.
 
For my taste there are way too many dizzying flying scenes (Scrooge and Ghosts), mad chase sequences (carriages careening through the streets of London, French Connection–style), and bizarre, superfluous special effects. Still, I have to confess that I love wearing 3-D glasses, and for some reason Tiny Tim’s (Ryan Ochoa) plight and inner goodness seemed even more heartbreaking than usual in “mocap.” More importantly, my teenage son—who always wants loads of color and special effects—pronounced the film “excellent” and said he’d like to read the Dickens book. Last night we watched Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Though he said he missed the chase scenes from the Carrey film, he thought the Styne–Merrill songs were “cool.” Maybe it will be a good holiday season after all…

 

On Tuesday, December 1 at 6:00 pm the Paley Center in New York will screen a newly acquired HD print of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, followed by a panel discussion with Darrell Van Citters, the author of the book Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol: The Making of the First Animated Christmas Special; Marie Matthews, who played the voice of Young Scrooge; and Judy Levitow, daughter of Magoo’s director Abe Levitow. The moderator will be Jack Doulin, casting director of New York Theatre Workshop.
 
Marie Matthews will close the evening by singing “Alone in the World,” the song that she introduced in Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, accompanied by Mark York at the piano. Afterward, Darrell Van Citters and Ms. Matthews will be in the Paley Center lobby signing copies of Mr. Van Citters’s new book.
 
As a special bonus, all audience members will receive a complimentary DVD of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.