'Merry Christmas, Uncle!'

A couple of years ago, I started a second blog to take an in-depth look at everyone's favorite Christmas/ghost story, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with the goal of paying attention to the way Scrooge's story has been interpreted and adapted to other media over the years.

Last year though, I changed my mind about making it a separate blog and brought it back here. The way it works is that I’ve broken the story down into scenes (or sometimes parts of scenes) in order to look at their translation to 19 different films, TV shows, and comics:

• A Christmas Carol (1910) starring Marc McDermott
• Scrooge (1935) starring Seymour Hicks
• A Christmas Carol (1938) starring Reginald Owen
• Scrooge (1951) starring Alastair Sim
• "A Christmas Carol" episode of Shower of Stars (1954) starring Fredric March
• Teen Titans #13 (DC; 1968)
• Scrooge (1970) starring Albert Finney
• A Christmas Carol cartoon (1971) starring Alastair Sim
• The Stingiest Man in Town (1978) starring Walter Matthau
• Classics Illustrated #53 (1978)
• Marvel Classics Comics #36 (Marvel; 1978)
• Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) starring Scrooge McDuck
• A Christmas Carol (1984) starring George C. Scott
• The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) starring Michael Caine
• A Christmas Carol (1999) starring Patrick Stewart
• A Christmas Carol: The Graphic Novel (Classical Comics; 2008)
• A Christmas Carol (2009) starring Jim Carrey
• A Christmas Carol (Campfire; 2010)
• "A Christmas Carol" in Graphic Classics, Vol. 19: Christmas Classics (Eureka; 2010)

Obviously this isn’t an exhaustive list. I started with my favorites, added some that people have recommended to me over the years, and then threw in some others that just caught my curiosity. We can talk about the ones I left out, but I will say that Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol isn’t here because I hate it with a passion. It’s neither a good Christmas Carol nor a good Mister Magoo cartoon. There’s also no Scrooged or An American Christmas Carol or Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. When I first started this, I tried to stick to more-or-less faithful adaptations, but even though I've since added Teen Titans to the list, I'd rather that be a fun exception and not have to figure out where I'm going to draw the line.

This is going to take years. Every December I'll talk about one scene; starting with Dickens' version, then looking at the adaptations of that scene in the days leading up to Christmas. Last year, we let Dickens introduce the miserable old sinner and his poor clerk. This year - starting Monday - we'll meet Scrooge's nephew.

Whales hate cephalopods

By Mattias Adolfsson.

Happy Thanksgiving, United States!

Don't be a turkey.

(If you get that: God bless you. You're old.)

Back from Disney World (with pictures)

We had a great time in Disney World and I've got pictures loaded on Flickr if you're interested in seeing them. There's some commentary there too, so it'll be just like coming over to my house and being forced to sit through a slide show.

Otherwise, we're knee deep in Thanksgiving preparations, so content here is going to continue to be light this week. Sigh. If you're in the U.S., hope you have a great Thanksgiving with friends and/or family.

Here are a few Disney photos, but there's tons more in the link.

Gone plunderin'

Taking the week off because I'm in Disney World hanging out with pirates and eating Dole Whips.

No loud parties while I'm gone!

James Bond LOVES cephalopods

Well, the Roger Moore one does anyway. The one in the novel Doctor No has a completely different opinion.

LXB | When House jumped the shark

Having taken a deep breath after Halloween, I can now get back to League of Extraordinary Bloggers topics; something I'm excited to do. This week's assignment:

At what point did a pop culture series “jump the shark” and lose your interest?

I'll talk about House in a minute, but first I want to clarify something about shark-jumping. I had an epiphany about this a year ago when DC rolled out the New 52. I wrote an article about it for Robot 6 called "DC Comics and the Shattered Illusion." The premise was that "serialized fiction – whether in comics, TV, or even the movies – presents an illusion that it knows what it’s doing. That there’s a master plan being followed and if you’ll just stick with the story, all will be revealed and eventually concluded in an emotionally satisfying way that makes complete sense. This is of course crap." It's crap for superhero comics, it's crap for Star Wars, and it's crap for every J.J. Abrams show ever. 98% of the time, the creators have no idea how the series will end when they start it. They just introduce a great premise and hope for the best.

That realization helped me define what I mean when I use the term Jump the Shark. Instead of a vague realization that I've simply lost interest in a series, the Jump the Shark moment has become the point at which the illusion is shattered and I realize the creators have no idea where the story is going. According to Wikipedia, that was more or less the original usage of the term: "The point in a television program's history when the program had outlived its freshness and viewers had begun to feel that the show's writers were out of new ideas." One of the reasons I think Jump the Shark moments are hard to define though is because I don't believe that they're always followed by a complete lack of quality. House is an example of that.

For me, the show's Jump the Shark moment came about halfway through Season Seven with the episode "Bombshells." Three major things happen in it, but they're all connected. First, Cuddy finds blood in her urine and learns that she might have cancer. Second, at the end of the episode she breaks up with House because his reaction to her potential illness causes her to realize that he's not capable of having a real relationship. I was never a Huddy 'shipper, so I was cool with that, but I had a hard time with House's reaction to the breakup: He goes back on Vicodin.

After getting used to - and even liking - the idea that Gregory House was an unchangeable character for the first five years, the Season Five finale floored me by not only having him regret his drug addiction for the first time, but also check himself into a psychiatric hospital. To my complete shock, the show was moving forward and House was developing as a character.

He stayed on that course for all of Season Six and the first half of Season Seven. He was still an ass, but he was trying to be a better person. The show went from being a fun, mystery-of-the-week with a loveably loathable character to becoming an Actual Story. With "Bombshells" though, the writers seemed to have taken that development as far as they were comfortable. If House improved any more, he was in danger of losing his defining edge. So they pulled him back.

It's not that the show sucked after that. There were still some great, compelling episodes in the last season-and-a-half, but I was never able to take it as seriously again. Any further growth in House's character felt fake and cheap, because it was now just about getting him back to where he was in early Season Seven. I'd lost so much interest in the main character that I stuck with the show out of habit and curiosity, not because it was amazing TV anymore. Ultimately, I like where House ended up at the end of the series and I'm glad I stuck with it, but I had to fight some serious apathy there for a while.

Adventureblog slow-down (and Kill All Monsters! news)

Kickstarter

Now that we're out of October and Halloween, I need to slow things down around here a little. Life's been extremely hectic for the last six weeks or so (not just because of Countdown to Halloween) and my writing has suffered for it. I've got to figure out a way to cut some corners. For at least the month of November, I'm gonna cut back to three posts a week here.

In December, my plan is to continue the Christmas Carol series I started last year, so I'll probably need to ramp up temporarily then, but my hope is to cut back in general on the amount of time blogging requires from me. I have other writing commitments that I need to fulfill and slowing down here will help me do that.

One of the things I've got to dig into is work some more on Kickstarter. If you follow the Kill All Monsters! Facebook page, you know that Jason and I are planning a Kickstarter campaign. What we didn't mention there is that the campaign would fund the printing of the first volume of the complete Kill All Monsters! graphic novel. We've got the first half (over 120 pages of story) totally done, so rather than make people wait for the whole thing, we're going to print up what we have as we continue working on the second half.

But first we've got to fund it, and before we do that, I've got to finish getting it set up. I've been talking to some friends who've run successful Kickstarter campaigns (and will be talking to more), so I think I've got a good understanding of what we need to do. Now I have to actually get in and do it. Finalize rewards, make a video, all that stuff. If you'd like to suggest rewards for backer levels, we're collecting those on the Facebook page or you can mention them in the comments here.

So that's what's going on with me. What's going on with you?

Remember, remember...

[Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Peter the Brazen hates cephalopods

[Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

The Spectre judges cephalopods

And the sea monster seems pretty terrified about it.