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🎄 In our Christmas Eve season finale, the Advent Calendar House is haunted by 3 spirited guests  — Sue London, Jonathan MacFarlane, and Joey O. — as we each draft our own casts of “A Christmas Carol” from a pool of characters from Christmas past.  ****  🎩 “A Christmas Carol” versions mentioned, in chronological order:  1951: Scrooge (starring Alastair Sim).  1954: Shower of Stars’ A Christmas Carol.  1962: Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.  1970: Scrooge (musical, starring Albert Finney).  1978: Rich Little’s Christmas Carol.  1979: Bugs Bunny’s Christmas Carol.  1983: Mickey’s Christmas Carol.  1984: A Christmas Carol (starring George C. Scott).  1986: The Real Ghostbusters: Xmas Marks the Spot.  1987ish: Honey Nut Cheerios Christmas Commercial (starring Bill Gavin).  1988: Scrooged (starring Bill Murray).  1992: The Muppet Christmas Carol.  1993: Animaniacs: A Christmas Plotz.  1994: A Flintstones Christmas Carol.  1997: A Christmas Carol (starring Tim Curry).  1999: A Christmas Carol (starring Patrick Stewart).  2003: A Carol Christmas (starring Tori Spelling).  2009: Disney’s A Christmas Carol (starring Jim Carrey).  2011: Batman: Noël.  ****  Find us at adventcalendar.house.  #s1 #scroogesunday

🎄 Season 3 of the Advent Calendar House kicks off with a new regular feature: Scrooge Sunday, celebrating the many adaptations of “A Christmas Carol.”  🎙 Lizzie Twachtman and Adam Pope drop in as we begin with Disney’s 1983 featurette marking the big-screen debut of Scrooge McDuck playing his namesake.  📺 You can watch “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” on Disney+.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Before Disney+, almost all of this film was hiding on Netflix at the end of “Mickey’s Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse.  Adam’s well-preserved VHS copy.  A 1974 Disneyland Records LP called “Dickens’ Christmas Carol,” Alan Young’s first recording as the voice of Scrooge.  Mickey Mouse’s very detailed, fanmade family tree.  Siskel and Ebert’s 2 Thumbs Down review.  Goofy as Marley’s ghost at Disneyland.  Mickey’s Christmas Carol animatronic window displays in the Magic Kingdom.  We identify every Disney background character at Fezziwig’s party and lament the absence of Pluto from this entire thing.  Quick shout-outs to Totally Minnie and “Disney’s DTV Romancin’” Valentine special.  Willie the Giant as the Ghost of Christmas Present carefully wandering through the tiny streets of London calls back to the ending of “Fun and Fancy Free,” Disney’s 1947 package film featuring “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” which is also on Disney+.  Your now-annual reminder that Pete has been a cat this entire time.  ****  Mickey’s Christmas Carol ©1983 Disney.  Opening Music: “Christmas Was Better in the ’80s,” by The Futureheads, ©2010 Nul Records.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.  #s3 #1980s #scroogesunday #disney

🎄 Of all the animated Christmas specials we have covered and will cover, this is the nearsighted granddaddy of them all.  🎙 Anthony Caruso and Julia Colburn from Tis the Podcast visit the Advent Calendar House for a very special Scrooge Sunday episode as we nearly-blindly fumble back to 1962 to celebrate “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol,” TV’s first ever animated Christmas special.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Jim Backus (Mister Magoo) based his portrayal of Thurston Howell III from “Gilligan’s Island” on another character he played on a radio show hosted by another famous future Scrooge, Alan Young.  Scrooge’s nephew is cut entirely to make room for a song about Broadway that sometimes also gets cut entirely.  The ghosts of Christmas Present and Past show up out of order for no clear reason, but an A.V. Club article from 2012 tried to find one.  Tiny Tim is an English-speaking Gerald McBoing-Boing.  This special invented a flavor! Razzleberry pie is now a thing that exists, made with raspberries and blackberries.  The Ghost of Christmas Past looks like Toon Link.  The last surviving member of the cast, Marie Matthews (Young Scrooge), was on a 2009 panel revisiting the special.  Is Belle’s hair supposed to look like an actual bell?  ****  “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol” © 1962 UPA Pictures, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.  #s3 #1960s #scroogesunday

🎄 It’s another Scrooge Sunday in the Advent Calendar House as we’re swept through a rip in the space-time continuum back to 1986 for a Christmas Carol-themed episode of “The Real Ghostbusters.”🎙 Tommy Coombs and Chad Young join the adventure after our heroes accidentally save Scrooge from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Hey, grown-ups! Remember getting lost while driving when we didn’t all have maps of the entire planet in our pockets?  Scrooge pays the Ghostbusters a mint-condition shilling from 1837, so we looked up its actual value.  You can actually buy Christmas Carol View Master reels from the 1950s online.  Rick and Morty talking about Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music comes up and goes… somewhere.  Egon entering the ghost containment unit looks like the warp tunnel on Space Mountain.  The other ghosts in the containment unit are callbacks to previous episodes, including Sandman, who bears a passing resemblance to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.  Santa should not laugh like Megatron.  ****  📼 Commercials:  The Real Ghostbusters Firehouse Playset, Tombstone Tackle, and X-Cop (1986)  Tis the Podcast.  ****  “The Real Ghostbusters” and “Xmas Marks the Spot” © 1986 Columbia Pictures Television.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.  #s4 #1980s #scroogesunday #dic

🎄 On another Scrooge Sunday edition of the Advent Calendar House, we fly back in time to 1978 to revisit Rankin/Bass’s turn at “A Christmas Carol.”  🎙️ Michael DiGiovanni and Michael May return to talk “The Stingiest Man in Town,” an animated remake of a made-for-TV musical, featuring the voices of Walter Matthau as Scrooge and Tom Bosley as our narrator, a literal talking Humbug.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  This is specifically an adaptation of a 1956 production on “The Alcoa Hour” starring Basil Rathbone as Scrooge.  The original special on Sleigh Bell Cinema.  Michael May’s Christmas Carol Project.  Sonny Melendrez (Bob Cratchit) in “You and Me, Kid.”  This has my all-time favorite, super creepy version of Marley’s face appearing on Scrooge’s door knocker.  This special gets older Belle completely wrong.  Tiny Tim has skinny robot legs.  Debbie Clinger (Martha Cratchit) of the Clinger Sisters, a.k.a. Superchick from the “Krofft Supershow” host band Kaptain Kool and the Kongs.  Rankin/Bass should have made a south seas-themed special called Christmas Island. (Hi from the future! We ended up exploring this idea on After Lunch.)  Scrooge’s grave morphing into a giant devil face is a reminder in hindsight that this special was animated in Japan by Topcraft, the predecessor to Studio Ghibli.  ****  📼 Commercials:  Glad Trash Bags Commercial starring Tom Bosley (1981)  Christmas Creeps.  ****  “The Stingiest Man in Town” © 1978 Rankin/Bass Productions.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.  #s4 #1970s #rankinbass #scroogesunday

🎄 Filmation’s space western gets a dickens of a backstory.  🎙 Joey O. and Sammy Hain saddle up for a Scrooge Sunday edition of the Advent Calendar House looking back at a 1987 Christmas episode of “BraveStarr.”  📺 You can watch “Tex’s Terrible Night” on YouTube.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  The Fisher-Price Western Town I used as a backdrop for the much larger Bravestarr action figure.  Joey’s interview with Pat Fraley (Marshal BraveStarr).  This episode uses flashback scenes from the movie “BraveStarr: The Legend,” which explains why the animation quality isn’t consistent.  Young Tex Hex looks like a purple Faker from “He-Man.”  Stampede, the show’s even bigger bad, grants Tex Hex the power of transformation, because Filmation really wanted to teach kids that things that transform are evil.  The “present-day” husband of Tex’s former love, Ursula, looks like Fred Ward.  The time BraveStarr found a kid dead of a drug overdose.  ****  📼 Commercial:  Marshal BraveStarr, Tex Hex, and Neutralaser Toy Commercial (1986)  Christmas Time in the City.  ****  “BraveStarr” and “Tex’s Terrible Night” ©1987 Filmation Associates.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.  #s5 #1980s #scroogesunday #filmation