Christmas Classics

The Stingiest Man in Town (1x19)

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This cartoon version of A Christmas Carol hails from the production house of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass--the team that brought you just about every other Christmas special you saw as a kid (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Reinvented as a 49-minute musical ghost story, Stingiest stars the voice of Walter Matthau as the bedeviled Scrooge and Tom Bosley as the Jiminy Cricket-type narrator, B. Humbug, Esq. The 1978 animation is serviceable and the songs are sometimes catchy and clever (a reformed Scrooge tunefully ponders "Man's happiness should be my profit / His suffering my loss"). But since the cartoonists downplayed the scariness of the ghosts and the cute songs just slow the action, the cartoon's intended youthful audience may be end up feeling a bit restless.