Trivia / A VHS Christmas Carol

• Acting for Two: Most of the lower-billed cast play multiple roles as part of the ensemble. It's especially notable in the Christmas Future sequence, where the Respectable Businessmen immediately change clothes to become the Street Punks who rob Scrooge's house, but are basically the same callous assholes in both bits.
• Blooper: Along with intentional '80s style analogue artifacts (snow and white lines) to make it look like a VHS tape, the livestreamed performances also had actual digital artifacts and glitches due to the technical difficulties of putting the show together, like the Looters in "The Final Ghost" suddenly turning sideways and pixelated.
• Creator Couple: After Lauren Lopez and Joey Richter finally publicly announced they were together (after having dated for at least eight years) with their engagement in 2020, this is the first time they've actually played a couple onstage in a Starkid show, as Bob and Emily Cratchit, and the first time they've sung an overtly romantic duet.
  • As a subversion of this, Starkid's other famous Creator Couple, Brian Holden and Meredith Stepien ("Breredith") is also in this show, but play two characters who have absolutely no connection, Tiny Tim and Jacob Marley — although they do reappear later on in the Future sequence as the debtor couple celebrating Scrooge's death.
  • Kim Whalen and Curt Mega were understudies for the 2021 live show, and appear in the version staged at the Starkid Holiday Jangle Ball Tour in 2022.
• Dawson Casting: An extreme Played for Laughs variant, obviously, but Brian Holden plays ten-year-old Tiny Tim. (This feels like Starkid deliberately subverting expectations that this would be another case of Lauren Lopez playing a little boy like the old days. Ali Gordon as Turkey Boy is more in this vein.)
  • A mixture of Dawson Casting and Underage Casting — Brian Rosenthal plays "Young Scrooge" and Dylan Saunders plays present-day Scrooge, even though they're around the same age in Real Life (in their 30s). Young Scrooge ranges in age from his boyhood to Brian's real age of his early 30s when Belle leaves him, while present-day Scrooge is clearly meant to be an old man at least in his 60s, but thanks to this show having relatively No Budget this is only vaguely suggested with their costumes and acting.
• Dyeing for Your Art: As he often does, Joey Richter grew out his hair and mustache to give Bob Cratchit an appropriate look as an aging '70s New-Age Retro Hippie. Conversely, Brian Holden had to shave his mustache to play Tiny Tim (although you can still see it on him in the earlier-recorded bit with him as the male Debtor).
• Filmed Stage Production: The 2022 Youtube release was a recording of the 2021 live show performed in Los Angeles.
• Irony as She Is Cast: The cast has made some jokes on social media about how much of the cast of this show is Jewish — especially Dylan Saunders, who plays Scrooge (as well as Brian Rosenthal, who plays Young Scrooge) — and don't actually celebrate Christmas as opposed to Chanukah.
• No Budget: As with all the shows Starkid organized over the Internet during the COVID-19 Pandemic this show was done on a shoestring budget with a great deal of largesse from the actors providing their own costumes, makeup, and tech. The primary reason for the failure to produce this show as a live performance was the team's modem not being able to handle the load, according to Word of God.
• The Other Marty: Due to actor availability, the 2021 live show replaced Britney Coleman with Janaya Mahealani Jones as Belle and Ali Gordon with Lauren Lopez for Fan Scrooge/Charity Collector and AJ Holmes for half of the couple happy with Scrooge's death.
• Those Two Actors: Fans of Dylan Saunders' chemistry with Meredith Stepien in Starship and Twisted now get to see a different side of that chemistry with the duet between Scrooge and Marley's Ghost in "Three Spirits".
• Troubled Production: This was originally intended as a series of live shows done over conference call with Green Screen, as a way to prove real live theatre (as opposed to Zoom script readings where everyone's in a tiny window at their computer) could still be done in the era of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Sadly, it didn't work out due to numerous technical issues, and as a result the Friday night performance had to be canceled and the rest of the performances pre-recorded (though each time slot was a new and different recording).
  • Meredith Stepien later released a video detailing just how troubled this production was — the team already found out that the live Green Screen performances wouldn't work after the tech rehearsal the night before the planned opening night on Dec. 11, and had to scramble and work through the night in order to create recorded versions of the songs to play instead, with only Dylan Saunders as Scrooge and Clark Baxtresser as the Narrator performing live, only for that to fail to work because director Corey Lubowich's Internet connection gave out, forcing the performance to be canceled entirely (and forcing the next three livestreamed performances to just be a single prerecorded video).