The 25 Posts of Christmas: Little Gives Us The Dickens

In 1978, my family had yet to have cable. However, my grandparents had it and with it came the holiest of these new cable channels, HBO. Before MTV, HBO was the best reason to watch TV at my Grandparent's house. Around Christmas of that year, HBO aired a special featuring the impressionist, Rich Little. At the time, Rich Little was huge. Though looked at today as tacky, back then he was a bona-fide star! The special that aired on HBO was Little's version of the Dickens classic, "A Christmas Carol". In true fashion, the cast was an ensemble made up of Little doing celebrity impressions. Scrooge was W.C. Fields, Cracthit was Paul Lynde and the Ghosts ranged from Richard Nixon to Humphrey Bogart to Peter Falk to Peter Sellers. Add Jean Stapleton, Groucho Marx, Johnny Carson, Jack Benny, John Wayne, Laurel and Hardy, James Mason, Jimmy Stewart and Truman Capote, and you have, in my humble opinion, a classic! For the next few years, HBO reran the special and it became a staple in my family's holiday viewing. Then it disappeared. I have always remembered it fondly and when I walked into that record store in Santa Monica (see earlier post) and saw the soundtrack from the album, it didn't take me long to spend my money on it. The album is pretty much the audio track from the special. Much like the story records of Star Wars and the like, this features all of the dialogue as well as the music from that HBO classic. It is a Canadian pressing and the cover states that it is the soundtrack from the 1979 CBC special. Obviously, HBO lent the special to Canadian Television a year later. Here is that album. BTW, the original special is finally on DVD. I purchased mine from Amazon and am patiently awaiting it's arrival to relive all of the glory! Here is the soundtrack album to "Rich Little's A Christmas Carol". Enjoy!

Rich Little's A Christmas Carol OST

There is a beautiful woman in my bed, and a dead man in my bath!

I've been seeing a lot of commercials for the upcoming "Pink Panther 2" film. I love Steve Martin but I have to admit, he made a grave error in accepting the role of Clouseau. There is only one Clouseau and we all know that's Peter Sellers. They've tried a couple of times to replace him with the likes of Alan Arkin, Roberto Benigni and Ted Wass and each time they failed. Not to mention that every time they tried one without Sellers, Blake Edwards was also missing! As rough and rocky as their relationship was, Sellers and Edwards made the perfect team to bring the Pink Panther films together. My favorite of the films has always been"The Pink Panther Strikes Again". It is the fourth film of the series (many web sites will tell you it's the fifth but I don't count "Inspector Clouseau" because Sellers and Edwards were not a part of it) and by far, the wackiest! There are so many classic comedy bits in this film that it outdoes pretty much every other Panther film by shear content alone! My favorite scene is the tooth pulling scene where Clouseau poses as a dentist on a house call to Inspector Dreyfuss, who has gone insane and kidnapped a professor and his daughter and is hold up in a castle.
Clouseau uses nitrous oxide to numb Dreyfus but ends up taking as many hits as his patient. Stupid humor but funny! A lot of people have said that "Strikes Again" creates continuity problems for the films that follow in the series but let's face it, we're not talking about high drama here people. It's the Pink Panther movies. I don't think Blake Edwards really had continuity issues on his mind when making them! Incidentally, both "The Pink Panther Returns" and "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" use script ideas from a proposed Pink Panther television series that never got off of the ground. Some more Strikes Again trivia: the character of Professor Fassbender is named after Peter Sellers' character in "What's New Pussycat?" and the singing voice of drag queen Ainsley Jarvis is none other than the great Julie Andrews (Blake Edwards' wife!). Speaking of singing, Tom Jones had a huge hit with the song "Come To Me" which is featured in the film. You can hear that and many other musical moments from the film (composed by the master, Henry Mancini) when you download today's sharity: the soundtrack from "The Pink Panther Strikes Again". Enjoy!

The Pink Panther Strikes Again OST