Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (TV) [1962] Jim Backus

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962) (TV)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123179/

Mr. Magoo's first appearance was in the theatrical short cartoon The Ragtime Bear (1949), scripted by Millard Kaufman. His creation was a collaborative effort; animation director John Hubley is said to have partly based the character on his uncle Harry Woodruff, and W. C. Fields was another source of inspiration. The Magoo character was originally conceived as a mean-spirited McCarthy-like reactionary whose mumbling would include as much outrageous misanthropic ranting as the animators could get away with. Kaufman had actually been blacklisted, and Magoo was a form of protest. Hubley was an ex-communist who had participated in the 1941 strike. Both he and Kaufman had participated in the blacklist front and perhaps due to the risk of coming under more scrutiny with a hit character, John Hubley, who had created Magoo, handed the series completely over to creative director, Pete Burness. Under Burness, Magoo would win two Oscars for the studio with When Magoo Flew (1955) and Magoo's Puddle Jumper (1956). Burness scrubbed Magoo of his politicized mean-ness and left only a few strange unempathic comments that made him appear senile or somewhat mad. This however was not entirely out of line with the way McCarthy came to be perceived over that same era.

A Christmas Carol (originally, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas) is a novella by English author Charles Dickens about a curmudgeon and his secular conversion and redemption after being visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve. The book was first published on 19 December 1843 with illustrations by John Leech, and quickly met with commercial success and critical acclaim. The tale has been viewed as an indictment of nineteenth century industrial capitalism and has been credited with returning the holiday to one of merriment and festivity in Britain and America after a period of sobriety and sombreness. A Christmas Carol remains popular, has never been out of print, and has been adapted to film, opera, and other media.

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol is a musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' famous short story A Christmas Carol. It was the first animated holiday special ever produced specifically for television (1962), and the only one until Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was first shown in December 1964. It later became the first episode of a TV series entitled The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, in which the Mr. Magoo character became an actor in dramatizations of various well-known stories.

Jim Backus ... Ebenezer Scrooge / Mr. Magoo (voice)
Morey Amsterdam ... Brady / James (voice)
Jack Cassidy ... Bob Cratchit (voice)
Royal Dano ... Marley's Ghost (voice)
Paul Frees ... Stage Director / Charity Man / Fezziwig / Eyepatch Man / Tall Tophat Man (voice)
Joan Gardner ... Tiny Tim / Ghost of Christmas Past (voice)
John Hart ... Billings / Stage Manager / Milkman (voice)
Jane Kean ... Belle (voice)
Marie Matthews ... Young Scrooge (voice)
Laura Olsher ... Mrs. Cratchit (voice)
Les Tremayne ... Ghost of Christmas Present (voice)



The story is the familiar Dickens tale with Mr. Magoo (voiced by Jim Backus) cast as Scrooge, and Gerald McBoing-Boing (in a rare speaking role) as Tiny Tim. The cartoon is written as a Broadway theatre play, divided into acts with an actual stage curtain. In the opening and closing, the near-sighted Mr. Magoo arrives at the theatre, takes his bows with the other actors, and accidentally demolishes the stage scenery at the end. The 19th century English characters Ebeneezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, etc., are thus not seen directly, but instead are portrayed by fictional American actors playing their parts. They generally have no British accents.


Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol was produced by the UPA animation studio in its declining days. Commissioned and sponsored by Timex, it first aired on NBC on December 18, 1962. Although the special led to the Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo television series, the studio ultimately found it could not adapt to the rigors of mass-producing cartoons for television.

The program was broadcast as a TV special many times during the Christmas season from the 1960s through the 1980s — though not always on NBC — before being released on VHS in 1994 and on DVD in 2001. The original 53-minute running time is often cut to make room for additional commercials, primarily by removing the framing device about Magoo himself.

Audiences and critics consider this program to be a holiday classic, due in part to the original songs of the Broadway team of Jule Styne (music) and Bob Merrill (lyrics), who collaborated on the musical (Funny Girl) soon after their work on the special. As recently as December 25, 2006, many listeners told the National Public Radio program Talk of the Nation that Mister Magoo was their favorite Ebenezer Scrooge.