The story known as A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has been told and retold so many times that most of us know it by heart. The wealthy but mean miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future and scared so badly that he changes his ways and becomes generous and joyful just in time for Christmas. It's so familiar to us that it's always ripe for parody, because jokes and twists can be added without the audience ever losing the basic thread of the story.
The latest parody is the new movie Spirited, a musical comedy starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, now playing in theaters and streaming on Apple TV +. There were certainly plenty of comedies centered around Scrooge preceding it that you might want to look up and watch as we enter the Christmas season. Cracked introduces us to more than a dozen Scrooge parodies, divided into the categories of movies, television, animation, and a special category just for Saturday Night Live sketches, because there have been so many of them. Not all of these have videos attached, but enough do to keep you busy laughing at Scrooge on a holiday weekend.