One of the all-time great Simpsons insults comes during “Hurricane Neddy,” as Flanders — normally overly polite and pious — loses his shit at the townspeople after a hurricane destroys his home, and they miserably fuck up an attempt at helping him recover. Among many great ones, he tosses this one at Lisa, saying that she’s “Springfield’s answer to a question that nobody asked!” That is almost word-for-word what we thought of when pondering the trailer for Spirited, Apple TV+’s answer to an audience’s wants that probably didn’t exist in the first place. A musical about the ghosts in A Christmas Carol starring Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell? Yeah, we’re thinking this will either be surprisingly fun or expectedly torturous. Either way, you should check out the trailer, which the streamer dropped earlier on Wednesday, and choose for yourself.
Take a look:
Here’s a synopsis:
“Each Christmas Eve, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) selects one dark soul to be reformed by a visit from three spirits. But this season, he picked the wrong Scrooge. Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds) turns the tables on his ghostly host until Present finds himself reexamining his own past, present and future. For the first time, ‘A Christmas Carol’ is told from the perspective of the ghosts in this hilarious musical twist on the classic Dickens tale.”
Spirited will try to bring some holiday cheer when it jingles all the way into select theaters on December 11 and for all Apple TV+ subscribers on December 18. Will this be a new holiday classic? Will we want to punt our leading men into the shadow realm? Only time will tell, but we do think this: there’s no way in hell any modern variation of A Christmas Carol will ever beat that one that aired on TNT (or TBS?) with Patrick Stewart back in the ’90s.