While I will stipulate that the story of Christ’s birth is perhaps the Greatest Story Ever Told, I maintain that Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Four Staves is one of the greatest stories ever written. A driven narrative, full of mood and atmosphere, it’s the ultimate redemptive story of humankind’s ability to change. It is no wonder more adaptations exist than one could easily number.
While The Muppet Christmas Carol has finally taken its place among more modern Christmas classics, it was the Walt Disney company’s featurette Mickey’s Christmas Carol that provided me my first telling of the tale. By the early 1980s, the core band of Walt Disney animated characters were on the decline. While Mickey Mouse has always been the grand ambassador of the company, Mickey shorts were less and less common and had not received any Academy Award-nominations since shortly after World War II.
Released with the re-issue of The Rescuers, one of many meager offerings from the animation department in the 1970s, 1983’s Mickey’s Christmas Carol won back a lot of cred in the animation world, being nominated for an Oscar and impressing by compressing Dicken’s great tale in a half-hour short that is funny, moving, and replete with charm one expects at the holidays.
Of course, Donald Duck’s uncle—Scrooge McDuck—takes center stage. The character, naturally, had been named for Dicken’s protagonist and once considered a one-off character, he became surprisingly popular as an extension of the Duck clan, including Huey, Dewey, and Louie, with who he would reunite in DuckTales.
While this casting is a given, across the board the characters are given the right Disney counterpart. Mickey is Bob Cratchit, Goofy is hilarious in his role as Marley’s ghost, Donald (rightly) is Fred. As the central Mickey cast gets, excuse the phrase, goofier (Clarabelle the Cow, anyone?), most of the other characters are rounded out by cast members from pictures like Pinocchio, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and Robin Hood.
Jiminy Cricket is the Ghost of Christmas Past, Willie the Giant (from the “Mickey and the Beanstalk” segment of Fun and Fancy Free) is the Ghost of Christmas Present, and (in a surprise turn) Peg-Leg (or Bad Pete) plays the Ghost of Christmas Future. While it works, I’m sure it would have been better to have had just a grim reaper figure, but it is obviously made for young children. Mr. Toad plays Fezzywig. Heck, even Clarabelle is dancing with Horace Horsecollar at the Fezzywig party!
The Mickey Universe of Disney is a wholesome panoply and the plot of A Christmas Carol we know as well as the freckles on our arms, and yet the presentation is beautifully drawn, moving, and manages to tell basically the whole story in the length of time of a network sitcom. A lot of this is helped by the joyous musical score (by Irwin Kostal) and the assured hands of the late director Burny Mattinson. While not one of the original “Old Men” from Disney’s animation department, Mattinson had been involved with everything from Lady and the Tramp to the more recent Wish, which is dedicated to his memory. This would also be one of the last times Clarence Nash voiced Donald Duck.
Mickey’s Christmas Carol was a rare bright spot in the gloomy days of Disney (early to mid-1980s) when the future of the animation department was in doubt. In a way, it’s a perfect combination of story and character and the Muppets did well to copy this basic premise when they tried their own hand at the tale in the early-90s, although with perhaps even better results, given the talents of actor Michael Caine and songwriter Paul Williams.
While the short film was critically acclaimed in its day, I would still call it underrated. Mickey shorts continued to be released infrequently (Christmas Carol was the first to be released in thirty years) and somehow, he still has resonance to kids today despite being overshadowed by the characters in the feature-length animated pictures.
Mickey kind of gets lost in the shuffle as most of his great media dates from before the fifties (when he was a little sneakier). Still, these characters keep getting reused in inventive ways—in shorts, television shows, and video games. There are dozens of shorts (and Disney Christmas specials), but I still don’t feel this Christmas Carol gets its due. The Christmas Future sequence, for a kid, is truly frightening (as it should be). It is a moral tale written, I think, to shape people’s hearts and change people’s minds. This makes it, in a way, a perfect vehicle for the house of Mouse.
You can currently watch the featurette on Disney+.
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