The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Merry Christmas, Mickey
Looking back on a landmark holiday special
It’s a Christmas tradition in many households to watch at least one screen adaptation of the beloved Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol” before the holiday season is up. What better recipe for wholesome holiday entertainment, then, than a Dickens crossover with the Disney universe?
Disney’s 1983 animated holiday special “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” combines the enduring charm of Dickens’ story with familiar characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. The cartoon has been a popular item on the average family’s holiday must-watch list ever since. This year marks the 35th anniversary of “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” as well as the 90th anniversary of Mickey Mouse himself, who first debuted as “Steamboat Willie” in 1928. There’s no more felicitous time than now to get into the spirit and tune in to this animated classic as it airs throughout the Christmas season.
Nominated for a 1983 Academy Award for Best Animated Short, “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” paints a trademark Disney flair over many aspects of the original tale. In the process of storyboarding the film, animators strategically decided on which Disney personas would best suit the characters of the story, giving rise to such memorable Christmas characters as Scrooge McDuck in the role of Dickens’ original crotchety Ebenezer, and an unconventionally Goofy version of Bob Marley’s ghost.
What eventually became “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” was originally a Disneyland record and read-along book set produced by the Walt Disney Players in the early 1970s. A team of Disney animators, led by director Burny Mattinson, later set out to adapt the record to the screen. This was a landmark project, as it was the first time Mickey Mouse, the character who represented the genesis of the Disney empire, had appeared in any of the company’s films in the previous 30 years.
In a docu-short on the creation of “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” Mattinson explains that in the process of revitalizing Disney’s most quintessential character, the production team set to work to find parts for other familiar faces from the Disney vault. This included the casting of Toad, from 1949’s “The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad,” as Fezziwig during the Christmas dance scene in which the Ghost of Christmas Past (Jimminy Cricket) shows Scrooge his youth.
The film was also a landmark project in the sense that it was the birthplace of some long-standing beloved Disney voice acting careers. Wayne Allwine, for example, got the part of Mickey, which he then kept, continuing to provide Mickey’s voice from 1977 until 2009. Likewise, it was the result of “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” that Alan Young came to be the longtime voice of Scrooge McDuck, which he provided right up until his death in 2016.
The success of “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” brought on a renewed cultural endearment to Mickey Mouse. Disney seized on this fandom in the ‘90s, when it produced the 1999 holiday special “Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas,” which is comprised of three shorts: “Donald Duck Stuck on Christmas,” “A Very Goofy Christmas” and “Mickey and Minnie’s The Gift of the Magi.” While perhaps not as iconic as the 1983 film, this special also became a popular holiday classic in its own right, and its creation is a testament to the Disney legacy that “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” helped to revive.
An honorable but playful take on the original story of “A Christmas Carol,” “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” never gets old as an annual holiday viewing tradition. Celebrate the 35th anniversary of this cartoon classic by checking your local listings to see when it airs this Christmas season.
“Mickey’s Christmas Carol”