Old Sinner: Albert Finney (1970)

Albert Finney's Scrooge introduces the Christmas theme right off. Before any images appear, we're treated to the peals of Christmas bells that then segue into an original song, "A Christmas Carol," as a series of title cards begins. Leslie Bricusse wrote the screenplay and the songs (and got Oscar nominations for Best Original Song and Best Original Song Score). The lyrics go:

Sing a song of gladness and cheer
For the time of Christmas is here
Look around about you and see
What a world of wonder
This world can be
Sing a Christmas carol
Sing a Christmas carol
Sing a Christmas carol
Like the children do
And the joy and beauty
Oh, the joy and beauty
That a merry Christmas can bring to you!

The title cards are wonderfully illustrated by Ronald Searle, best known to comics fans as the creator of St. Trinians School (which was re-adapted for film not too long ago). The drawings are all of standard, Victorian Christmas scenes, but Searle makes them whimsical and fun. The last one morphs into the first live-action shot of the film as a man pushes a cart down a snowy, gaslit street.

Scrooge is the first adaptation with sound not to use "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" in it's title sequence, but it quickly makes up for that by having a quintet of Cockney kids sing it in the street. The carolers are more than background music too. After getting a sweet tip from the first house we see them at, they move on to Scrooge & Marley's, whose sign reveals them to be "Private Merchant Bankers and Moneylenders."

Inside, Scrooge is hunched over his desk, counting coins. Finney's Scrooge is more like Sir Seymour Hicks' than Mark McDermott or Alastair Sim's. He's a hunched over, crab-fingered, old coot. Distracted by the singing, he gets up, mumbling about "caterwauling" and "why can't they leave a man in peace?" In another time and place, he'd be the guy sitting on his front porch, shaking his cane, and yelling at the neighbor kids to get off his lawn. He's largely powerless and completely pathetic.

I love how when he gets up to shoo off the boys, he first grabs an empty drawer from the desk and uses it to cover up his money. Maybe he expects the wind to come through the door and mess up his piles, but I suspect that he's distrustful of the only other person in the room: his clerk. That's awesome and it hints that Finney's Scrooge is a character to be laughed at more than hated or pitied.

Not having a cane, Scrooge grabs a fireplace shovel before going to the door. I notice that - breaking away from the traditional argument about the coal - he has a small fire going. I also notice that his desk is right in front of the fireplace, blocking any heat from reaching the clerk. As Siskoid pointed out when I posted about this on the separate Christmas Carol blog, this Scrooge is more selfish than miserly. That's a fair, interesting interpretation of the character and doesn't change his core flaw. If anything, it highlights it more clearly. Scrooge's main problem in the story is that he doesn't use his resources to help others. That he also traditionally doesn't use them to help himself really just confuses that point.

Scrooge runs off the carolers with swings of the shovel and a good "Humbug" muttered at their backs as they laugh and run away. Coming back inside he's still mumbling about "young ruffians" and their "Christmas nonsense." He catches his clerk smiling at this and tells him, "Beware, Cratchit. You have a dangerous sense of humor."

Before Scrooge can get back to his desk, there's another knock on the door. Thinking it's the carolers returned, he storms back to the door, screaming as he opens it. But it's not the kids.

There's no mention of Marley yet.

Old Sinner: Teen Titans (1968)

Though my original intention was to stick to more-or-less faithful adaptations of A Christmas Carol instead of spoofs or homages, this one's so ridiculously goofy that I'm adding it for kicks. It opens with the Teen Titans (still just Robin, Wonder Girl, Aqualad, and Kid Flash at this point) sitting around their clubhouse and reading. Most of them have comics about their adult partners, but Robin's enjoying A Christmas Carol, something that he gets grief for from his pals, Wonder Girl in particular. "That story's definitely ungroovy these days!" she says. "Who could believe in such uncool characters as Scrooge - or Bob Cratchit - all that old jazz?" Man, that Bob Haney could write some dialogue, eh, Daddy-o?



Robin caves to peer pressure and puts Dickens away in favor of the latest issue of Batman. Meanwhile, across town at a private junkyard (awesomely named Junk-O-Rama), proprietor Ebenezer Scrounge is arguing with his employee Bob Ratchet over the setting on the thermostat.

I tell you, if Haney's version of hep-talk was enough to make me rethink reading these stories (au contraire, it's so not), Nick Cardy's art would be enough to keep me around. Junk-O-Rama is a snow-covered playground of lost treasures that looks like it was designed by Tim Burton. The office, for instance, is in an old school bus with a functional smokestack sticking out of the side.

After Scrounge and Ratchet argue about the heat, they start in on whether or not Ratchet gets Christmas off the next day. Since this is happening at the same time as the Titans' earlier conversation, it means that Wonder Girl, Aqualad, and Kid Flash were making fun of Robin for reading A Christmas Carol ... ON CHRISTMAS EVE! Who's your Scrooge now, you little punks?



Back to Scrounge and Ratchet though, if we're going to analyze them in the same way we have the other versions, Scrounge looks positively wicked. He's younger than Scrooge is usually depicted and has huge, pointed eyebrows and a hairstyle that suggests devil horns. Surprisingly, he's gentler on his employee than Scrooge usually is, going so far to address Ratchet as "my good fellow."

Not that their relationship is equitable or even pleasant. When Ratchet complains, he whines like a child pleading with his parent. "Couldn't we turn up the heat a little?" "But everyone celebrates Christmas!" And like a child, he's stronger in his objections when he's thinking to himself than when he addresses his boss.

Scrounge finally relents on the whole day-off thing as long as Ratchet gets all his work done before he leaves for the night. In fact, he's eager to get Ratchet out of the office and lets him leave early. As we quickly find out, Scrounge is up to something illegal and doesn't want Ratchet to know about it. This is a major departure from Dickens, but since it's a Teen Titans comic first and a Christmas Carol adaptation second, we're going to need some criminal activity to get the heroes involved.



What's going on is that Scrounge is leasing out part of the junkyard to smugglers. It's a crazy operation in which the smugglers import duty-free junk from overseas and then use a fancy ray gun to make it brand-new so they can sell it for a hefty profit. Of course, they could save themselves some shipping costs by just turning the junk already in Scrounge's yard into new items (or better yet, patent the technology and live comfortably off the profits), but that's not brought up. Ladies and Gentlemen: Bob Haney.

Unfortunately for the crooks, Ratchet's wheelchair-bound son Tiny Tom has come to the junkyard to visit his dad (not realizing that he's gone home early) and learns about the scheme. Tom tells Ratchet, who confronts Scrounge, who - no surprise - doesn't really care as long as the smugglers keep paying him. In fact, he threatens to fire Ratchet if he goes to the police about it and decides that Ratchet does have to work Christmas Day so that Scrounge can keep an eye on him.

We learn that Ratchet's a widower with no other kids to clutter up the story. He needs his job in order to buy an electric wheelchair for Tom, so he agrees to abide by Scrounge's decision. Tom, on the other hand, knows who he can go to without involving the police: The Teen Titans!



Tom comes back with the Titans a little later and they find the smugglers still there. Before they can catch the bad guys transforming the junk though, the villains are startled by another person in the junkyard. They fight the shadowy figure, but he beats them up and sends them running for their truck. With no evidence of any wrong-doing, the Titans and Tom decide to follow the stranger instead. He leads them to Scrounge's house.

Which is where we'll stop for this post. There are no nephews or charitable solicitors in this version, so it'll be a couple of years before we come back to it. Suffice to say that the shadowy stranger is a stand-in for a Dickens character, so we'll pick up this version again once the other versions have had a chance to catch up.

Comics You Can Dance To Interview

Danny Djeljosevic and Nathaniel MacDonald at Comics Bulletin's Comics You Can Dance To podcast were nice enough to let Jason Copland and I crash their party this week.After the most awesome musical introduction ever, we talked for half-an-hour about Kill All Monsters: the history, the creative process, the influences, and balancing KAM with other projects (in my case, blogging and some other short stories I've got lined up). It was extremely fun and I'm thrilled with how it turned out. Thanks again to Danny and Nate for having us on.

I've kind of caught the podcasting bug now. I also just had a great time recording an episode with Tommy Hancock for his Genre Talk program about one of my favorite genres. I'll link to that when it's up and tell you more about it then.

Old Sinner: Fredric March (1954)

This one's not a movie, but an episode from the '50s anthology TV series Shower of Stars. I'd never heard of that show, but according to Wikipedia it was a companion show to CBS' Climax Mystery Theater (most famous for its episode that adapted Casino Royale with Barry Nelson as an American James Bond). Climax focused on drama; Shower of Stars on musical comedy.

The Christmas Carol episode has a fantastic cast and I can't believe it's not more popular. Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) plays Scrooge, Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes, Son of Frankenstein, etc.) is Marley, and a very young Bonnie Franklin (One Day at a Time) is a young Cratchit. Also, the music is by Bernard Herrmann (The Day the Earth Stood Still, all the best Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock films).

It opens with a Victorian lamplighter igniting a gas lamp as carolers sing a Christmas song. Unfortunately - because it's quite beautiful - I can't find a YouTube clip of it, but the lyrics are:

On this darkest day of winter
Through the snowy woods we go
Gathering garland for our Christmas:
Holly, pine, and mistletoe.

We shall hang above the lintel
Mistletoe across the beam.
Holly sprigs shall brighten windows
While the steady yulefire gleams.

Here then in the silent forest-
Shapely, straight, and fair to see-
Grows the yule tree we have chosen.
This will be our Christmas tree.

As the carolers sing, they walk around a Victorian street and greet shoppers. It's a remarkable set - especially for live TV, which I assume this was - complete with a horse-drawn cart full of Christmas trees. Like I said, the song itself is lovely. It's sung by a young tenor soloist with each verse being repeated by a mixed quartet.

The carolers finish their song and move on, leaving us outside a bookstore. Inside, the bookseller shows his customer a volume and a close up of the spine reveals that it's A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The book opens while a full chorus sings the theme song again and we see the credits printed on the book's first pages.

The song ends and the customer buys the book. When he goes outside he's approached by two gentlemen with a ledger who ask him if they can "put him down for something." He enthusiastically pledges ten pounds, "a little better than last year." They all express their mutual delight, wish each other a Merry Christmas, and part.

It's obvious who these two solicitors are and - though I like how this is all set up - it raises a weird question about continuity by putting the finished story of Scrooge's adventure in the story before the events ever take place. The bookseller must have once been visited by a traveler from the future. Probably with a robot sidekick. That's what I think anyway, making this the best Christmas Carol ever.

We follow the two gentlemen to a storefront and the light flute music changes to ominous horns as we see the name on the door: "Scrooge & Marley." Clueless, the gentlemen check their ledger to make sure they have the right place and go inside.

Since Shower of Stars was only an hour long - including commercials - cutting out any introduction to Scrooge is an economical way of getting the story moving. The abrupt brass music is our first - and so far, only - clue that something's not right about this place. We'll have to wait until we go inside to learn why and find out anything about the old sinner who works here.

Old Sinner: Alastair Sim (1951)

In spite of the extreme importance that Dickens places on Marley's death right away in his story, all the film versions so far have left Marley out of the earliest scenes. Alastair Sim's is the first to introduce him this soon.

From the beginning of the film we get a sense that it’s trying to mimic the reading experience. Ominous music plays as a hand pulls a leather-bound volume of A Christmas Carol off a shelf full of other Dickens work. The hand opens the book and we see the credits go by on the pages inside. To let us know it’s a Christmas story, the music eventually changes into, you guessed it, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

After the credits, we get a close up of the first page of the story with “Stave I.” (Dickens liked to be clever with his chapters, especially in his Christmas books. A Christmas Carol has “staves,” The Chimes is broken into "quarters" of an hour, etc.) A voice then begins to read an abbreviated version of Dickens’ opening, “Old Marley was dead as a doornail…”

When the narrator gets to the part about Scrooge’s signing Marley’s death certificate, the scene shifts to the Exchange where Scrooge is getting ready to leave after conducting business. A couple of other businessmen ask if he’s going home for Christmas, to which Scrooge replies that “Christmas is a humbug.” The men laugh rather smugly, enjoying Scrooge’s misery, but also seeming to admire him for the extent to which he worships at the altar of Business. He likes money so much that he resents Christmas for keeping him from making any. The two men are like Star Wars fans who make fun of the guy who spends all of his money on expensive statues and replicas, all the while secretly envying him his collection.

Outside the Exchange, one of Scrooge’s customers is waiting for him to plead for more time to pay off a debt. “Did I ask you for more time to lend you the money?” Scrooge asks. “Then why do you ask for more time to pay it back?” Scrooge demands that the man make payment by the agreed upon time or – Christmas or no Christmas – he’ll put the poor fellow into debtors’ prison.Though Scrooge is obviously a moneylender in this version, later scenes with the Ghost of Christmas Past will show that he wasn't always that way, but got his start in some kind of manufacturing. One of the things this movie does really well is show the transition from Scrooge the apprentice in Fezziwig's warehouse to Scrooge the financier, but I'm getting way ahead of myself.

For now, it's enough to know that Sim's Scrooge is cold and horrifying. He’s tall like McDermott, but even more imposing. McDermott wags his finger like a cranky old man, but Sim – while old – is vital. He has energy; every bit of it focused on increasing his fortune. He’s miserable, but he doesn’t know it. I think that’s why he’s my favorite.

The opening section of this film ends as Scrooge arrives at his office, chasing off some carolers singing “Silent Night” from in front of the building.

Old Sinner: Reginald Owen (1938)

The Reginald Owen version of A Christmas Carol sets the stage with a title card (“More Than a Century Ago…in London…on Christmas Eve.”) over the London cityscape (including Saint Paul's, of course) accompanied by a men's choir singing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." It follows this with various scenes of Victorian people enjoying their Christmas. It's one of my favorite openings.

Whereas the 1935 version is immediately gloomy, I love that this one - rather than go right to wretched, old Scrooge’s place - provides contrast first by showing people having a good time and reveling in the holiday. We see shoppers and vendors and kids sliding on ice. (Pretty much every version of A Christmas Carol has an ice-sliding scene. I think I remember Dickens’ mentioning the sport briefly in the book, but it’s kind of amazing that so many film-makers included it in their versions.)

Into this scene walks a cheerful, young gentleman who joins the children in their sliding. He’s cheered on by a lame boy who’s watching the fun from the sidelines. The boy of course is Tiny Tim and he’s there with his older brother Peter. The gentleman puts Tim on his back for a slide, but gets accidentally bowled over by Peter in the process. Rather than getting angry about it, the gentleman good-naturedly announces that his only regret is that Peter broke his sliding record.

The gentleman learns that the boys are waiting for their father, Bob Cratchit, the clerk who works for Mister Scrooge. When he says that he’s on his way to see Scrooge himself, the boys ask if he’ll deliver a message to their dad. The gentleman asks why they don’t want to see their dad and they reply that it’s not him, but Scrooge they’re afraid of. He’s “not fond of small boys.” That’s when the gentleman reveals that he knows that all too well. He’s Scrooge’s nephew Fred and he experienced the old man’s wrath first-hand as a child himself. Embarrassed and afraid, Peter and Tim flee, but Fred grins and winks after them.

Like I said, I love the uniqueness of this opening. Without meeting Scrooge at all, we get a feel for who he is and what he does to other people. Technically, it’s a lot of telling instead of showing, but it works. Even though people are talking about Scrooge rather than letting us see first-hand how he is, it’s not like we’re going to be deprived of plenty of examples of Scrooge’s meanness in the rest of the film. In fact, this version of Scrooge will turn out to be one of the nastiest.

What this opening does do is give us a nice look at Tim and Fred, two of the most important members of the supporting cast. We learn everything we need to know about them by watching them interact in this scene. And we learn everything we need to know about Scrooge by listening to them talk about him.

Still nothing about Marley though.

Old Sinner: Seymour Hicks (1935)

1935's Scrooge starring Sir Seymour Hicks opens with Dickens’ Preface to the story. Except for removing a couple of commas and spelling out Dickens' name (he signs the Preface with his initials in the book), it's exactly as Dickens wrote it. Here's the movie version:

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, Charles Dickens

December, 1843

I’m not sure why the movie opens with that other than to call Dickens to mind and maybe put the viewer in the proper mood, though it doesn't mention Christmas at all. On the other hand, the movie's already playing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" (the unofficial Christmas Carol theme song for most of the early films) over the credits and Preface anyway, so it doesn't need text to accomplish that goal. I’m thinking that the Preface is just flavor.

After the Preface we get a scene of snow-covered London as a sad, Salvation Army-style band plays “The First Noel.” You can tell it’s London by the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral in the skyline. That’s the landmark that most of these movies use in their opening shots. So there’s your setting: London at Christmas time and things are fairly gloomy.

We don’t learn about Marley just yet in this version either. Instead, like in 1910, we go straight into Scrooge’s office where the clerk is patting himself and trying to warm his hands over a single candle. When he finally decides to try and sneak some coal, Scrooge fusses at him and forbids it, making vague threats about firing the poor clerk. The clerk humbly puts on a scarf instead.

We don't learn the clerk's name yet, but we do find out that he's got a half-dozen kids to support: three boys and three girls.

Hicks’ Scrooge is hunched over at his desk when we meet him. Instead of imposing, he’s a small, pathetic-looking character with untidy hair. He’s only threatening because he controls the wallet. It’s not really fair to compare him to McDermott’s Scrooge, whom we’ve seen so little of so far, but Hicks doesn’t just look mean for its own sake. He’s convincingly miserable and I fully believe that he wants to share that misery with everyone around him.

It's interesting that though the literary Scrooge conjures up images like Hicks, the most memorable movie performances (Alastair Sim and Greorge C Scott, for example) portray Scrooge not as small and pathetic, but the way Mark McDermott did in 1910: a tall, powerful man. Not right away though. Our next Scrooge - 1938's Reginald Owen - will also be of the hunched variety.

Guys With Flame-Throwers Hate Cephalopods

[Pulp Covers]

Old Sinner: Mark McDermott (1910)

I love silent films for a few reasons, but one of them is that there’s such economy to the way the stories have to be told. For that reason, adaptations also tend to be really faithful to their source material. They don’t add a lot of extra stuff.

The first-ever adaptation of Christmas Carol opens with the intertitle: “The day before Christmas. Scrooge, a hard fisted miser, receives an appeal from the Charity Relief Committee.” The CRC doesn’t figure into this post, so we’ll leave it alone until later. In this version, all you really need to know about Scrooge is that he’s “a hard fisted miser.” After the intertitle, we see Scrooge enter his office and yell at his as-yet-unnamed clerk, adding to the unpleasant image.

Mark McDermott is a tall man and his Scrooge is an imposing character. That’s really all we can tell about him at this point. His height and posture doesn't mesh well with the image I form from Dickens' description of the "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner," but I realize that Dickens is talking about character traits, not physical ones. The picture in my head is influenced as much by Gollum as anything Dickens wrote, but it's still difficult to look at McDermott and come up with "wrenching" and "grasping" as adjectives. I notice that the intertitle changes Dickens' "tight-fisted" to "hard fisted;" a more appropriate description for McDermott's presence.

Anyone familiar with the story can speculate that he’s fussing about coal-use, but it’s not clear yet in this film. All the movie lets us know is that he’s a “miser” and that he’s cranky. There's nothing in the visuals yet to suggest Christmas; just the intertitle letting us know what day it is. We also get nothing about Scrooge's business or Marley. Because of the film's short length, it's going to have to be economical about how it shares that information, wrapping it into other character interactions.

Wonder Woman: Power through submission; peace through war

I'm not done thinking about this by a long shot, but I have some thoughts that I need to get down before I lose them. When I first realized that understanding bondage could be the key to unlocking the Warrior of Peace paradox in Wonder Woman, I knew that I was limited in my ability to figure it out on my own. I was thinking about domination and submission from a limited, traditional viewpoint in which the dominating person always holds power over the submissive person. It wasn't until Sarah from Geek Beaks pointed it out to me that I even considered the power of the submitter over the dominator.

Short of my actually interviewing someone who practices BDSM (something I've considered, but haven't done any work towards yet), she recommended that I read Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series, which I'm going to do. In the meantime though, I've done some pre-work in thinking about ways that a submissive person holds power. That's what I want to capture before I move on to Carey's novels, Charles Moulton's Wonder Woman comics, or even more of Noah Berlatsky's posts.

The saying goes that forgiveness takes power from the person who's wronged you. Revenge takes resources, so when I set out to avenge a wrong against myself, I may feel like I'm taking control, but I'm actually letting someone else manipulate me. That's the closest I can get to understanding the power-through-submission paradox. Forgiveness feels like submission, but it's actually seizing power from the person who's wronged me. The most peace I've ever been able to achieve in my life is when I've been able to fully submit to the idea that I'm not the most important person in the room. And that peace is powerful, because no one can touch it. If it comes from a place of submission in the first place, no amount of domination is going to be able to take it away.

I don't know if this is what's going on in BDSM submissiveness or not, so I'm curious to learn more, but it gives me a place to start as I begin reading Moulton's comics. I'll be interested in seeing Wonder Woman's reactions to being tied up and dominated. If she resists, then I've got to rethink this. But the miscellaneous scans I remember seeing of these situations all show Wonder Woman as calmly accepting of her forced submissiveness. If that's her normal reaction, then I may be onto something. By allowing herself to be tied up, Wonder Woman gains power. How she gets free should also be interesting to see and think about.

Another question though is whether or not the power-through-submission paradox has any bearing on the peace-through-violence one. I need to do some research here too, but I think maybe it does. My wife helped me think a lot of this through, so credit where it's due, but there seems to be something to the idea that the people who are best at war are those least excited to go there. If that's true, does loving peace make you a better warrior?

Lots to think about.

Old Sinner: Dickens

Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson

The first time I did this, I just summarized the opening paragraphs. This time, I'm borrowing Siskoid's strategy and presenting Dickens' original text in italics while I interrupt occasionally to make comments. Mostly I'll be figuring out what I want to look out for in the adaptations.

STAVE I: Marley's Ghost

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

According to my copy of The Annotated Christmas Carol, the "'Change" is the Royal Exchange, London's financial center. Scrooge's exact occupation is a source of some confusion between adaptations (is he in real estate? a loan shark? some sort of manufacturer or distributor?). Apparently, the April 1924 issue of The Dickensian declared Scrooge to be a "financier." In other words: a moneylender. That's the approach that most of the adaptations take, but we'll keep an eye on it as we go.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

One of the movies (Albert Finney's Scrooge, maybe?) actually substitutes the term "dead as a coffin-nail." I thought they were trying to be clever until I remembered that Dickens already made that joke.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

Dickens makes it really, really clear that Marley is dead. One of the things I love about him is that he's hilarious, thinking of about eighty different ways to drive home the point that Marley should not be up and walking around, all of them clever and funny.

We'll also want to pay attention to Scrooge's attitude about Marley's death and their relationship when Marley was alive. That's another point on which adaptations sometimes differ.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot - say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance - literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

I especially love this bit about Hamlet (hi, Siskoid!). Dickens apparently edited out a longer digression in which he goes off about Hamlet and what a weakling he was. He originally wrote:

Perhaps you think that Hamlet’s intellects were strong. I doubt it. If you could have such a son tomorrow, depend on it, you would find him a poser. He would be a most impracticable fellow to deal with; and however credible he might be to the family, after his decease, he would prove a special incumbrance in his lifetime, trust me.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.

I imagine that the mention of the warehouse is why some folks think he must have been involved in producing some kind of goods. Unfortunately, The Annotated Christmas Carol is no help there.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

The first mention of Christmas. In the next section (Coming 2012!), Dickens explicitly states that his story takes place at Christmastime, but one of the things I want to watch out for in adaptations is how they announce that setting before we ever meet Scrooge. Dickens can spend paragraphs talking about Dead Marley and Miserable Scrooge before starting the story, but other media don't have that luxury.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.

"Nuts" deserves some explanation, though it never comes up in the adaptations. Today, we say "nuts" as an exclamation of distaste. In Dickens' day, it meant something agreeable.

So, there are a few things we'll look out for in the adaptations' opening scenes.

• How do they drive home Marley's existential state?
• What does Scrooge do for a living?
• How does Scrooge feel about Marley's death?
• How is Christmas introduced as a character (because Dickens certainly treats it like one)?
• How do the adaptations communicate Scrooge's personality?