Diana Lee

This cartoon version of A Christmas Carol hails from the production house of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass--the team that brought you just about every other Christmas special you saw as a kid (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Reinvented as a 49-minute musical ghost story, it stars the voice of Walter Matthau as the bedeviled Scrooge and Tom Bosley as the Jiminy Cricket-type narrator, B. Humbug, Esq.

Fictionalized account of how Clement C. Moore came to write "A Visit from St. Nicholas." His young daughter, stricken with pneumonia, asks for a Santa Claus story for Christmas. No such story had been written, so Moore writes his famous poem, set to Ken Darby's music and sung by The Norman Luboff Choir.