Elayne Riggs' Journal (for Leah)

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Silly Sites o' the Day

I've been filling our DVR with various live-action versions of A Christmas Carol preparatory to burning them onto DVDs. (Next year I'll probably start seeking out the cartoon versions.) After this year's crop I'll have the ones starring Seymour Hicks, Reginald Owen, George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart, as well as the musical made a few years ago with Kelsey Grammar. I can't believe the Alistair Sim version, probably the most famous one of the black and white era, hasn't been aired in our area at all (at least that I've seen) in the last couple years.

The eventual jewel in my collection will probably be the Ross Kemp one, which we refer to in the Riggs Residence as "the Scruffy Boy Christmas Carol," even though it's not exactly a straight retelling of the original story. It deviates about as much as the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged, which I've never felt particularly compelled to include in my collection; in fact, Murray seems to be a driving influence on the writers of the Ross one, which is actually more a combination of Scrooged and Groundhog Day. I remember taping it, so it might be on one of our few remaining VHS tapes, so it'll probably show up somewhere next month when we start to get rid of anything tapey-wapey (wibbly wobbly timey-wimey) as our apartment streamlining continues.

But I digress. The viral video parody this holiday season isn't Dickens (I guess most people recognize the current crop of radical reactionaries in power is far beyond redemption) but Capra. Here's It's A Horrible Life, from Current TV (via Diane):



And here's the link to It's A Blunderful Life, via Scott Clevenger, one of my favorite movie critics. Hey Scott, what's your favorite version of A Christmas Carol?

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