The Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol has been adapted in many different ways. In 1988, it was made into a comedy! The characters were brought into the modern world, and the plot centered around Bill Murray. However, his character’s name wasn’t Ebenezer Scrooge, but Frank Cross, a TV executive overseeing a live Christmas Eve presentation of A Christmas Carol. Despite all the changes, we still see a greedy, cynical man visited by three ghosts who lead him to understand the spirit of Christmas. There’s a lot of behind the scenes trivia you might not know about what went into making Scrooged.
1. THE FILM MARKED BILL MURRAY’S RETURN TO THE BIG SCREEN.
Though it’s easy to remember the 1980s as a decade packed with Bill Murray comedies, Scrooged marked a reemergence of sorts of the in-demand comedian. Though he had a brief cameo in Frank Oz’s 1986 remake of Little Shop of Horrors (playing a pain-seeking patient of Orin Scrivello, Steve Martin’s demented dentist character), Scrooged was Murray’s first major role following a self-imposed, four-year exile from Hollywood.
6. THE MOVIE WAS AN SNL REUNION OF SORTS.
The script for Scrooged was written by Mitch Glazer and Michael O'Donoghue, whom Murray had worked with in the early days of Saturday Night Live.
7. EVEN PAUL SHAFFER WAS THERE.
Before he rose to fame as David Letterman’s musical director, Paul Shaffer was a member of the SNL house band from 1975 to 1980 and appeared in a number of sketches, most notably as the piano player to Murray’s Nick the Lounge Singer character. He makes a cameo in Scrooged as a street musician, where he plays alongside fellow musical legends Miles Davis, David Sanborn, and Larry Carlton.
That’s just a taste of the 22 Fun Facts About Scrooged you’ll find at mental_floss.