What would Ebenezer Scrooge, one of fiction’s most enduring characters, say?”Bah Humbug!” or “There’s an app for that!”Chuck Fischer, who last year turned A Christmas Carol into a pop-up book, has gone digital this season with an app based on Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella that changed the way the holiday is celebrated.
Nearly all of Dickens’ works, including David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist, are available as free e-books. And this month, the Museum of London released an app offering a tour of 1862 Dickensian London.
Fisher’s app of A Christmas Carol ($8.99, designed for the Apple iPad and iPhone) features interactive illustrations, sound effects and voice-overs, including Tiny Tim’s immortal benediction, “God Bless Us, Every One.”
Fisher, an writer, artist and designer who’s done six pop-up books, says pop-ups and apps share many similarities, “but being able to work with sound, touch and the brilliance of what a back-lit screen does for my artwork provided a new set of challenges for me.”
It’s “an experience that I feel is much more theatrical than working with printed paper.”
A Christmas Carol, which Dickens wrote in a mere six weeks, has inspired more than 250 stage, film and TV adaptations.
It also was the subject of Les Standiford’s 2008 book, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits.
Fischer writes that A Christmas Carol “has everything an audience could want: a loathsome and nasty protagonist who is transformed, an innocent child who survives ominous odds, hauntingly eerie ghosts, and an uplifting ending for the ages.”
The bicentennial of Dickens’ birth will be marked in February, and has already triggered several new biographies, including Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life.
[USATODAY]
