Monthly Archives: December 2013

A Christmas Carol, perhaps the best-loved tale of Charles Dickens told and retold in endless fashion on the golden screen and in storybook adaptations based on the same theme throughout the years. My favorite version is the cartoon ,“Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol”, a sweet, delightful musical adaptation that premiered in 1962. That one really touched my heart as a kid, especially the scene where the young boy Scrooge is singing the haunting, “All alone in the World.” Isn’t that the story’s essential theme? Ebenezer Scrooge, left all alone as a child and building a wall of materiality all around him over the years to fill in that terrible void? Yet his material-sanction reaches a climax in old age as three spirits (plus the marvelous Ghost of Jacob Marley—I played that role in the musical version, Scrooge, as a young teen back in 1972) arrive one frigid Christmas Eve—symbolic of how his heart had frozen-over in all those years—and the subsequent visitations with all those Christmas memories circling-about in Scrooge’s sub-consciousness melting the frozen lake of his hidden tears as his humanity is revisited and regained, as symbolized by the disabled boy (metaphor for Scrooges’ hidden and broken inner-child) Tiny Tim. Tiny Tim’s life was salvaged and resurrected that new and bright Christmas morning and so was Scrooge’s forlorn and forsaken spirit. read more