Within "A Flintstones' Christmas Carol" from 1994 is the Bedrock Community Players' version of "A Christmas Carol," as written by Charles Brickens.
The format is reminiscent of "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol" (1962) in that we see that the characters are putting on a stage presentation and there are framing scenes that feature the "actors" in their usual personae.
They even throw in a couple of shots of the audience looking at the stage.
The biggest difference, besides that the Flintstones' play is not a musical is that we have more established characters here and the framing story is much longer and they cut away in between acts of the play for more story.
And of course, Quincy Magoo is a Broadway star and Fred Flintstone only hopes to make it to Broadrock!
"Magoo" seems more like it really is a stage show, certainly with some cartoonish effects that couldn't be pulled off in a live show, but I think the Flintstones take that to even more of an extreme. The special effects and big sets are at odds with the relatively small stage we see, especially if you consider it's a community theater production. It mostly seems like they're in a movie version of the story, even though we see a lot of backstage action.
For example, when Betty is helping Mr. Slate with his Marbley's Ghost makeup, she has a sack of flour land on him to make him a ghostly white. But when he appears on the stage, he's transparent and can pass through things.
But, again, we didn't come here for realism!
The running time of this special is a generous 69 minutes so there's plenty of time to present the whole show and a separate storyline of how Fred deals with his perceived stardom.
I don't want to spoil the framing story if you haven't seen this special, but some spoilers will come out as I discuss the elements of the Bedrock Community Players production!
So, how faithful was "Charles Brickens" to the source material?
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| "None of this is in my script!" |
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