In 1959 Searle and his first wife Kaye Webb planned an animated version of Dicken's classic ' A Christmas Carol'. Of course this was long before Richard Williams' award-winning version from 1971 and Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap version in 2009 and even predates UPA's 'Mr Magoo's Christmas Carol' in 1962.
They teamed up with American animation director Dave Hilberman who Ronald had worked with in 1957 on "Energetically Yours' - a 13 minute long film celebrating Standard Oil's centenary.
A script was commissioned by British playwright Christopher Fry (Ronald had done the jacket illustration for Fry's 1951 publication of his verse play 'A Sleep of Prisoners').
I bought a copy of the script at auction several years ago and it is illustrated with Searle sketches. The story was made more 'animation-friendly' with the addition of a humorous mouse.
I dug out Kaye Webb's correspondence on the production from her archive in the UK. She was effectively producing the film and lined up Alec Guinness to play Scrooge (he would later portray Jacob Marley in the 1970 live-action film by Ronald Name which featured a title sequence designed by Searle).
Julie Andrews was pegged to play Belle with John Gielgud as as Christmas Past, Stanley Hollow as Christmas Present, Peter Finch as Scrooge's nephew and John as Bob Cratchit. Webb wrote to Charles Laughton asking him to play Fezziwig.
It was never made but the drawings were later published in a new edition of the novel (read more on that here) and Searle's canny agent, John Locke' sold them to LIFE magazine which published a lavish spread in the December 19th, 1960 edition. Can you imagine Searle's version in animation?! I've assembled the surviving artwork here along with sketches from the script of the project.
See more about the unfinished production here: