All products featured on Wired are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Few literary classics have gone as viral as Charles Dickens' immortal novella A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
See also:
Movies: Jim Carrey Revives Christmas Carol as 3-D Spectacle
The latest iteration, opening Friday, is Disney's 3-D movie starring Jim Carrey as a freaky-faced Scrooge. Directed by performance-capture wiz Robert Zemeckis, this Christmas Carol's stocking is simply overstuffed with digital gifts.
But among the hundreds of previous versions of Dickens' classic, there exist several remakes — some quite strange, including one that features the captain of a certain starship — that reward repeat viewing.
Here's a short list of the creepiest, coolest versions of A Christmas Carol (with a couple of cheats for those drunk early on eggnog).
In 1988, Star Trek and Shakespeare vet Patrick Stewart executed a one-man stage performance of A Christmas Carol that was so popularly received that it made its way onto CD. In 1999, Stewart's performance was expanded into a full-bore film version, this time with a full supporting cast and the first use of CGI in A Christmas Carol on record.
Stewart was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award, and even chatted the story up for an audiobook. Warp nine narrative replication, engaged. To fully enjoy the sci-fi/Christmas merge, check out the clip above, which features an ad for Stewart's stage performance at the end of a commercial for Star Trek: The Next Generation toys from Playmates.
Released as Scrooge abroad, this holiday rerun is probably the most widely respected version of Dickens' classic. This version of A Christmas Carol is short on FX and long on acting, especially during Scrooge's awkwardly giddy transformation, in which the buttoned-down English tightwad scares the living hell out of the help.
In Scrooged, a comedy master plays an asshole television executive at the height of the "greed is good" 1980s. Come for the satanic Santa commercial, stay for Murray's horrific mullet. Bonus points for the insidious wallpaper in Murray's office that reads, "Cross: (n) A thing they nail people to."
Speaking of satanic Santas, cinema's Prince of Darkness narrates Dickens' uplifting holiday classic straight up in this television special. Which is, ironically enough, exactly how your cognitive dissonance will be served after watching it. Four years later, Vincent Price would be piling up corpses in another classic remake, Andre De Toth's House of Wax.
This poetic convergence of mood and tone delivered through often surreal hand-drawn animation is nearly impossible to find in the flesh. Used VHS tapes of Richard Williams' remake are going for around $90 on Amazon. Good thing the internet exists to keep this sadly unknown perennial classic from the Canadian innovator alive.
Williams' equally moving and strange 1982 holiday cartoon Ziggy's Gift can be had on DVD, however, which is a start. Don't miss either one, if you can help it.
A bit of trivia: Williams' decades-old dream project, The Thief and the Cobbler, eventually got made, but only after he lost the rights to it. The bad guy in the film? Vincent Price.
This Christmas Carol reboot is probably the creepiest, most effective version of the holiday classic yet made. Two decades later, the analog FX remain haunting, and the fascinating George C. Scott is almost as buried in character as he was in the immortal Dr. Strangelove. Watching Scrooge beg for mercy over his own grave is probably not something the kids are going to want to see while they're munching on candy canes, but it'll sure teach them a lesson or two.
Rowan Atkinson was of Britain's greatest talents long before he got painted into Mr. Bean's annoying closet. His historical sitcom Blackadder, co-written with Richard Curtis, was equally hilarious and cerebral, hop-scotching through time and period with skill. But the Blackadder holiday special was as sweet and weird as Christmas punch spiked with Monty Python wit. Memorable line: "This high infant mortality rate is a real devil when it comes to staging quality children's theater."
With apologies to Mr. Dickens, It's a Wonderful Life is the greatest Christmas movie ever made. You can probably add up the rest of the Christmas Carol adaptations not on this list, which is a great many, and they wouldn't approximate the greatness of Frank Capra's sprawling, always topical tale of greed, good deeds and great lines.
Plus, they're practically the same film anyway. We're not saying It's a Wonderful Life, which is based on Philip Van Doren Stern's short "The Greatest Gift," is a Dickens rip-off, even though both stories share extensive similarities. We're just saying great minds think alike. Speaking of great minds ...
Los Angeles' legendary funky punks Fishbone crafted an optimistic sonic homage to Capra's classic that is as riveting as some entire film versions of A Christmas Carol. The video is a blast as well, mashing It's a Wonderful Life's memorable scenes into a reel juiced with pure energy.
See Also:
