FX’s Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol
REPOST: This isn’t so much a review as it is a public service announcement.
A reader asked me my opinion of FX’s new “edgy” version of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. I said I’d give it a look.
I did.
Then I washed my eyes out with bleach.
FX’s version of A Christmas Carol is hideous, hollow and Woke. I can’t do a proper review of it because I didn’t watch it all the way to the end. I threw in the towel when I figured out that Mrs. Cratchit was prostituting herself in Victorian back alleys to buy Tiny Tim medicine.
My hackles were raised in the opening credits when I saw that harbinger doom, “made in cooperation with the BBC.” I will grant that the BBC used to make some excellent stuff but that nameplate has long since been turned into pelt to be paraded around in by Woketards demanding respect.
It does follow the outline of Dicken’s novel and a few of the memorable lines are used but the whole of the work is completely corrupted. The Christianity has been completely removed from what was a very Christian story of redemption. Scrooge at the end is sorry that he’s been a jerk but he explicitly states, “I refuse redemption. I refuse to change.”
I have a four-star rating system. Up until now, The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend has been the lowest rating I had. But FX’s Atheist Christmas Carol gets the new classification, The Dark Herald Says, Avoid Like the Fucking Plague.
NEXT
To break the monotony negative reviews. Here is something I did like.
Veggie Tales was originally started by Phil Vischer in the 1990s using a primitive version of Renderman. He played around with the program until he was satisfied that he had created something great. He proudly showed it to his wife, who told him every mother in America would kill him if made a show with singing, dancing candy bars. He saw her point, went back to work and created a singing, dancing cucumber. He asked his friend Mike to provide the voice and Larry was alive.
They struggled initially but then got lucky. The college kids who worked at Christian bookstores started playing them on the store’s VCR instead of Davie and Goliath. Parents got curious and Big Idea was suddenly going very far, very fast.
Around 2000 disaster struck. In a nutshell, Big Idea’s sales had been tripling each year until they had hit around 40 million in gross revenue. Phil expanded drastically to meet the perceived demand and sadly, Big Idea’s sales went flat. They weren’t losing business but they weren’t making enough money to cover their increased expenses.
Phil Vischer like many a passionate entrepreneur doubled down and expanded when he should have made cutbacks. He produced the fairly expensive Jonah, and it flopped. The last nail in the coffin was a bullshit lawsuit by a former distributor.
Big Idea went bankrupt and the Veggies were bought up by a family friendly entertainment company. Things looked up for about ten years but then that company was bought up by Dreamworks. The Convergence was held to a minimum but when the straight to DVD market collapsed the end was in sight.
The execution was briefly held in the abeyance by a Netflix contract. However, Netflix’s corporate strategy is different from network TV’s. For Netflix, a series is only there to generate NEW subscribers. Consequently, the typical run for a Netflix series is only two years. And after two years, Veggies in the House was canceled. Although it wasn’t missed by fans of the DVD series. They just couldn’t make the magic happen in mass production.
The Veggies looked like they were done for good this time and then a miracle happened…okay not much of a miracle. Dreamworks sold off what looked like a dead property to people who actually cared about its mission.
If you would like some entertainment that more explicitly focuses on the reason for the season then watch the first new real Veggie Tales in years.
Cataline Recommends with Confidence.
UPDATE: Correction; DreamWorks sold the property to NBCUniversal, who licensed it to TBN.
SECOND UPDATE: Currently, the only place you can watch the New Veggie Tales is a streaming service called Yippee.tv. I’m currently branch swinging on to it. And I’ll give you my opinion later.
