I’m not proud to admit that I just searched several different websites in order to calculate what the “two shillings and a ha’penny” Bob Cratchitt supposedly gets paid a day works out to in 2016 dollars. It probably—these computations are complicated and prone to error—works out to about $135 a day, or about $16 an hour for an eight-hour day. Which is considerably more than most of my friends earn but still under the poverty line, even given that Bob’s family has considerably fewer children in this version than in most others, including the original 1843 story. At that, it’s well over what he’s paid in the original story, which Wikipedia works out to being about $94 a week—for a sixty-hour week!

Despite the title, it is in fact Uncle Scrooge McDuck (Alan Young, one of 2016’s victims) who plays Ebenezer Scrooge in this, because who else from Disney would you cast? We hit all the beats, and of course the only difference is that the various characters are played by various Disney characters. Cratchitt is Mickey Mouse (Wayne Allwine for the first time) accompanied by a silent Minnie as Mrs. Cratchitt; Nephew Fred is Nephew Donald (Clarence Nash for the last time), with Cyril the Horse as his faithful steed. Belle is Daisy Duck (Patricia Parris). Collecting for charity are Moley (Will Ryan) and Ratty (Hal Smith). And, of course, the three ghosts are Jiminy Cricket (Eddy Carroll), Willie the Giant (Will Ryan), and Pete (also Will Ryan).

Apparently, Siskel and Ebert gave this two thumbs down. I find Gene’s objection odd—despite its having Mickey in the title, he didn’t feel there was enough Mickey in it. But how do you increase the Mickey in a half-hour cartoon about a different character? Roger thought there wasn’t any ironic spin on it, but I have never felt one was needed. I grant you that there have been so many versions of the story that someone recently put together a supercut version blending some four hundred tellings into a comprehensible version of the story, but do we really expect ironic detachment from an ’80s Mickey Mouse cartoon?

I mean, this is what it is. It’s a half-hour long, roughly, and it tells a story we’ve all heard before. Actually, my one and only attempt to read the book was at approximately the time of this short’s theatrical release—in a double feature with The Rescuers—which I did actually see. It’s a perfectly serviceable telling of the story. Perhaps it misses something of the eeriness of the made-for-TV Patrick Stewart version. Perhaps it isn’t as technically proficient as the full-length Muppet version. I’m sure you can compare it to any number of other versions and see that it comes up short. But I don’t think it’s actually bad, and it is in my regular Christmas rotation.

Really, the best part of the cartoon is the cameos. The only major cast member of Mr. Toad not to have at least a cameos is Winky. There are even weasel gravediggers, filling in attitude for the missing “people who stole Scrooge’s stuff” in letting us know how little anyone cares about his death. Many of the minor characters from Robin Hood populate London. The entire Duck family gets at least a cameo, at least the entire Duck family as it existed in 1983. Essentially anyone who had a recurring role in the Mickey Mouse shorts of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s is at least in the background somewhere. So you can at least play “spot the character,” even if nothing else about the movie is working you.

I don’t think my attachment to this is purely sentimental, though I now notice it came out at a painful time in my childhood. It was released in December 1983—the first Christmas season after the death of my father, which is probably at least part of why Mom took us to see it. She was helping us make a very difficult adjustment, and even going to the theatre with a three-year-old, something I have decided I don’t need to do, was better than spending the two hours sitting at home with us instead. On the other hand, I don’t remember that as being part of our experience, and indeed I thought this actually came out two or three years later until I started writing.

To be honest, I’d probably like it less if it focused more on Mickey. By 1983, Mickey was kind of boring. He’s so wholesome! Scrooge is one of the Disney characters who expresses baser human emotions, in this case greed. Mickey doesn’t have needs on the same level as Scrooge or Donald. Goofy is dumb but earnest, which I guess is something. But Mickey is mostly just earnest. He’s a fine enough Bob Cratchitt in a version that leaves Cratchitt the cipher most do. He doesn’t even get the line about the ducks, which has been cut, possibly for time.