If you got to watch the Gumby Adventure "Scrooge Loose," I'm sure you'll agree that it's wacky!
If you haven't yet, please do watch it as there are some mild SPOILERS ahead, since this is not an actual adaptation of "A Christmas Carol," you don't know what Scrooge is going to do!
If you're not overly familiar with Gumby, one of his things was that he would walk into books and interact with the characters inside.
His theme song explains it...
Since Gumby goes into books, it's only natural that a character might come out of one.
And in this case, it's old Ebenezer Scrooge, who is clearly from the beginning of the book, as he's not on the least reformed and is actually evil!
He seems to be channeling the Grinch, the Dr. Seuss character whose "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" was published in 1957, a couple of years before.
Scrooge traditionally hates Christmas, but he doesn't usually do too much about it, whereas the Grinch is very proactive! In this case, however, Scrooge goes right to the source to take on Santa Claus himself!
I think it's interesting that Gumby and Pokey are pretending to be Sherlock Homes and Dr. Watson here, as it's kind of a Victorian mashup with Scrooge involved.
And what a crazy ending! What happened next? We'll never know!
So, some good fun making interesting use of the Scrooge charcter.
Of note is that Gumby was created by Art Clokey, who later used a similar stop-motion animation technique for his "Davey & Goliath" series. D & G never got into Dickens material, but their "Christmas Lost and Found" episode is a classic.
Oh, and Gumby first gained popular recognition when his cartoons were shown on "The Howdy Doody Show." It always comes back to Howdy Doody!
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