SCROOGE & MARLEY (2012) – MERRY CHRISTMAS! Balladeer’s Blog’s Christmas Carol-A-Thon for 2016 comes to a close with a look at this gay-oriented adaptation of the Dickens classic. It’s also a musical, but unfortunately the songs struck me as being as blah as most of Leslie Bricusse’s output in Scrooge (1970).
Previously I’ve examined Ebbie, which is a business-woman themed version of the story, John Grin’s Christmas and Christmas is Comin’ Uptown, which are black-themed versions of the story and even See Hear Presents A Christmas Carol, a sign-language and spoken version aimed at the hearing impaired.
Scrooge & Marley is an openly and deliberately gay adaptation of the Dickens story. It often falls into the trap of using its gay narrative as a gimmick rather than a theme but that risk just goes with the territory when a creative team is locked into following a previously mapped-out storyline.
The film is set in the fairly present day and opens up at Ebenezer Scrooge’s gay nightclub called Screws. I was hoping it would be called Screwed, to be reminiscent of the porno version of A Christmas Carol titled Ebenezer Screwed. At any rate Scrooge is, as usual, a tight-fisted (as it were) hand at the grindstone and treats his employees horribly. Hell, he even fires them if they tip delivery people out of their own pockets! Continue reading
Jingle Bombs was the real title of this holiday tale which pitted superhero Luke Cage aka Hero for Hire aka Power Man against the one-off supervillain called Marley. Like a Guest Villain from the Adam West Batman show Marley uses a campy Christmas Carol motif for his nefarious plan … yet, oddly the story is kind of quaint. 
EBBIE (1995) Balladeer’s Blog’s Seventh Annual Christmas Carol-A-Thon rolls along with this 1995 telefilm starring soap opera queen Susan Lucci. The eternally-sexy Lucci plays Elizabeth “Ebbie” Scrooge, our regulation “grasping and covetous” business magnate who runs the Dobson’s department store empire. This version of A Christmas Carol is kind of cute and it tries hard. 
BR’ER RABBIT’S CHRISTMAS CAROL (1992) – Balladeer’s Blog’s Seventh Annual Christmas Carol-A-Thon continues! Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, Br’er Bear, Br’er Gator and many other characters created by Joel Chandler Harris are featured in this animated version of the Dickens tale. 
All the characters live in a town in the American South, where a charity stage production of A Christmas Carol is being performed, with the proceeds going to benefit the terribly ill Timmy Mouse. No, not “Br’er Timmy” or anything like that, just Timmy Mouse as our Tiny Tim stand-in. 
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