Ebenezer Scrooge puppet

Ebenezer Scrooge puppet
Character information
Gender	Male
Primary wardrobe	Pajamas
Home	The Polar Express
Allies	Scrooge's friends
Enemies	Hero Boy, Hero Girl, Know-It-All
Likes	Toys for Christmas
Dislikes	Children believing in Santa
Background information
Performed by	Tom Hanks (film) Jim Hanks (video game)
Appeared in	The Film

"You are just like me, my friend. A Scrooge! Ebenezer Scrooge!"
— The Ebenezer Scrooge puppet scaring Hero Boy.

The Ebenezer Scrooge puppet is a non-sentient character in the film and the main antagonist of The Polar Express: The Video Game.

Role in the film

While Hero Boy is in the abandoned toy car, the Hobo hides on the roof and uses the Scrooge puppet to scare Hero Boy by calling him a doubter. Hero Boy, unaware that it is just a puppet, runs away to the next passenger car.

Other appearances

The Polar Express: The Video Game

In The Polar Express: The Video Game, the Scrooge puppet appears as a sentient character with a larger role. He hates children and thinks Christmas is more about toys than Santa Claus and kindness. He plots to keep the children onboard from reaching the North Pole and believing in Santa by stealing their tickets and hiding them across the train, hoping this will get them thrown off by the Conductor.

Scrooge is first seen disgustedly spying on the children while they look out the window at Herpolsheimer's. He goes ahead with his plan and even gets some Jack-in-the-Boxes and puppets to assist him in keeping the tickets from the children. Scrooge appears leading the puppets in a food fight against the Hero Boy, then later fights the boy himself to keep him from applying the emergency brake for Billy. Hero Boy eventually retrieves all the tickets, after which Scrooge steals Hero Girl's ticket and sticks it to an air vent, which results in her being put in charge of driving the train. Hero Boy finds the ticket and, with the help of the Hobo, gets to the locomotive by skiing down the mountain.

While back onboard the passenger cars, Hero Boy and Hero Girl encounter Scrooge one more time. He has become very large and gained an opening in his chest that shows his heart. Hero Boy tries talking sense into him, but he does not listen, so Hero Boy, with encouragement from the other children, defeats him by throwing snowballs at his heart. He eventually falls to the ground and disappears.

Behind the scenes

The Scrooge puppet does not appear in the book. He was inspired by a puppet director Robert Zemeckis found while looking through his childhood toys. Early concept art by Vladimir Todorow portrayed the puppet with a cloth nightshirt that lacked stripes. This was changed to a solid wooden body to save on costs of animating the nightshirt. His original design is used in the video game.

Unlike most of the human characters, the Scrooge puppet was done through key-frame animation as opposed to motion-capture. Smokey and Steamer, the animals, and other toys in the abandoned toy car were also animated this way.

International languages

Language	Name	Voice actor(s)
Finnish	Ebenezer Scrooge	Markus Bäckman
French	La marionnette de Scrooge	Jean-Philippe Puymartin
German	Ebenezer Scrooge	Arne Elsholtz
Portuguese	(unknown)	Paulo Oom
Spanish	Marioneta de Ebenezer Scrooge	Jesse Conde (Latin America) Jordi Brau (Spain)

Trivia

• The design of the Scrooge puppet served as the inspiration for the design for Ebenezer Scrooge in the 2009 adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which was also directed by Robert Zemeckis.
• The puppet is holding a candle in the movie, which he is never seen with in the video game.
• The credits for the film list Tom Hanks for playing the Scrooge puppet, even though his voice is really the Hobo's and he was never animated through motion-capture.

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