A piece of holiday television history is coming back to broadcast. Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Disney’s 1983 retelling of the Charles Dickens story, airs on ABC on Wednesday, November 25, at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, 7 p.m. Central, under The Wonderful World of Disney banner. The network last aired the special in 2003.
The half-hour featurette casts Disney’s biggest stars in Dickens’ roles. Scrooge McDuck, a character named for Dickens’ miser when he was created in the comics, plays Ebenezer Scrooge, with Mickey Mouse as his clerk, Bob Cratchit, and Minnie Mouse as Mrs. Cratchit. Donald Duck plays Scrooge’s cheerful nephew, Fred, Goofy appears as the ghost of Jacob Marley, Jiminy Cricket is the Ghost of Christmas Past, Willie the Giant is the Ghost of Christmas Present, and Pete looms over the final act as the Ghost of Christmas Future.
Directed by Burny Mattinson, the special was Mickey’s first new theatrical cartoon in thirty years when it opened in December 1983, paired with a re-release of The Rescuers, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. It then became a fixture of the holiday season on television, airing on NBC through the 1980s and CBS through the 1990s before arriving at ABC in 2000 and again in 2003.
In the years since, the special has mostly lived on cable, where it ran for a decade in the 25 Days of Christmas on the channel now known as Freeform, and on streaming, where it sits on Disney+ year-round. The ABC airing opens the network’s holiday run in prime time, with Mary Poppins following on Thanksgiving night and The Sound of Music on November 29.