What Is The Big Deal About "A Christmas Story" (1983)?!?

It did come out at holiday time, didn't it? Unlike Miracle on 34th Street, which came out in the summer - all marketing for that film kept the Christmas connection completely secret, which I find fascinating.

Drifting from the subject, I know, but I think A Christmas Story is similar to some of the classic holiday movies in that a lot of the story has nothing to do with Christmas.

 

But the movie really does revolve around Christmas. The motivating theme is Ralphie's quest for a BB gun, and that's tied to Christmas.

Sure, a lot of the subplots aren't really related to the holiday, but I think the most important ones are...

 

Apparently you've never strung lights or put up a Christmas tree.

 

LOL! O' yea right!

 

No proble

Yes, I agree. Remember, this movie was put together based on combining several short stories that Jean Shepherd had written a decade or so earlier. The main theme of the BB Gun was in a story called Duel in the Snow - Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid. The other stories mixed in include Little Orphan Annie and parts of a few other short stories. Those other stories originally had no tie to Christmas, but were woven into the screen play to make for a full-length movie set in the run-up to Christmas.

 

Yes I have - good point. Still, that's not in a movie.

 

Not only is it my favorite Christmas movie, it might be in my top 10 movies of any type. Though I've seen it a million times, it still makes me laugh every single time, like This is Spinal Tap or the Big Lebowski.

Some of my favorite parts...

Mom - "Where did you hear that word?"
Ralphie - “Now, I had heard that word at least ten times a day from my old man. He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master.”
________

Randy (crying in cabinet under sink) - "Daddy's gonna kill Ralphie!"
Mom - "No he's not"
Randy - "Yes he is too!"
________

Ralphie (blind with cane and cup) - "It...it...it was...soap...POISONING"
Parents - (begin sobbing)
Dad - "How could we do it?"
Ralphie - "Well, I'll manage to get along...somehow..."
Mom - "I'll never forgive myself"
Ralphie - "Thanks mom"
Dad - "I told you not to use Life Buoy"

 

In an Earl Wilson newspaper article of October 16, 1955, the columnist wrote about Jean Shepherd, and included some background color about his family back in Indiana. Wilson mentioned that Shep's brother -- "Randy" in real life and in "A Christmas Story" -- was a "former pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds," who had played for the Reds "in late 1947 and in spring training in 1948." Although the foregoing piece of Shepherd trivia has been referenced from time to time, the true facts have been elusive. Thanks to some Shep spies in Cooperstown, we now know the name of the actual team.

The Rockford Rox was a minor league team that originally played in Rockford, Illinois, from 1917 to 1923 in the Class B Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League. However, the Rox was resurrected in 1947 as a Class C team affiliated with the Cincinnati Reds in the six-team Central Association. Its best season as a Class C team was its first in 1947, when the Rox lost in the first round playoffs, placing third (68-57). The team went downhill from there. They finished in 5th place (56-72) in 1948, and in last place (38-91) in 1949, when the Rox disbanded because of financial difficulties.

Randy Shepherd, along with numerous other hopefuls, signed a contract with the Rockford Rox on April 5, 1948, with spring training to begin a week later. He was released from the contract within six weeks, perhaps sticking around a bit after that. Except for an index card documenting the contract with the long-defunct team, little else seems to remain regarding Randy's brief professional career.

The Rockford Rox was a troubled team. During the 1948 season, the team manager was suspended a month for spitting at an umpire. And in the team's final season, they lost locker room privileges when playing the Burlington Indians at the Indians' home field. The Rox and their manager had "jumped on" the Burlington groundskeepers for a failure to provide the Rockford team enough hot water in the dressing rooms.

But the main reason the Rox folded was probably its inability to compete for paying fans with another professional baseball team playing at a nearby stadium in the same Illinois town. The very popular and successful Rockford Peaches of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League played in Rockford from 1943 until 1954, when the league folded. The Peaches and their league were made famous to later fans by the 1992 Hollywood hit, A League of Their Own. Randy, of course, gained his own sort of cinematic notoriety a decade earlier in A Christmas Story.

 

I'm more of a National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation fan myself.

"What's that sound? You hear it? It's a funny squeaky sound."
"You couldn't hear a dump truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant."

 

It's funny how many kids throw temper tantrums in the movie.

 

Some facts you probably don't know about Jean Shepherd (aka "Ralphie") and the gang in A Christmas Story:

1. The Old Man abandoned the family shortly after Ralphie and Randy joined the U.S. Army during WWII, taking up with a much younger woman and becoming a jewelry salesman on Florida's Gold Coast, where he died at the age of 54.

2. Delbert Bumpus -- the neighbor who owned the "Bumpus hounds" in the movie -- actually kept a beagle or two confined in a kennel in Hammond, Indiana. Contrary to Shepherd's description, Delbert was a well-liked and successful student, who won a Bronze Star Medal for valor in Normandy after landing a tank on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He would suffer from PTSD for what he experienced in the French countryside during the war. Sergeant Bumpus went though most of his adult life deeply troubled by the hurtful treatment of him and his family in Shepherd's Playboy stories and in A Christmas Story.

3. Paul L."Schwartz" -- who issued the "triple-dog dare" to Flick -- enlisted during the war as an aviation cadet, being commissioned as a navigator. He died on March 19, 1944, in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Italy when his B-17 was struck by another plane in a tight formation heading for a bombing run to Klagenfurt Air Depot in the Austrian Alps to destroy a Messerschmitt factory. His body was never recovered.

4. "Flick" (Jack N. Flickinger) -- whose tongue was stuck to the flagpole in the movie -- served in an anti-aircraft unit in North Africa, returning after the war to Hammond, where he ran "Flick's Tavern" with his wife Opal for many years. Flick passed away in 1994.

5. Shepherd (aka "Ralphie") was born in Chicago in 1921 -- he often lied about his age -- and moved to East Chicago, Indiana, when he was about 6. After a brief time there, where he attended William Mckinley Elementary School, he moved to Hammond, where he graduated from Hammond High in 1939. He was unemployed for at least a year after graduation, joining the Army in July 1942 and being discharged in December 1944. Unlike many of his friends, he never left the States during the war. His first radio job was with local station WJOB, where he met his first of four wives.

6. As many know, Shepherd appears in a cameo role near the end of A Christmas Story. He is the bearded gent who tells Ralphie to get at the end of the line to see Santa. Lesser known is that the woman next to Shep in line was his longtime collaborator and fourth wife, Leigh Brown. She died of cancer in 1998, a year before Shep, on Sanibel Island in Florida.

 

THIS.

 

Hi Colonel! Thanks for this info. I really enjoy the investigative reporting you do and post over at ShepTalk. Keep up the good work!

 

By the way, a "clinker" in a coal furnace is a build up of noncombustible coal resins that form a big hard lump in the furnace. Bituminous makes more clinkers than antrhacite.

 

Thanks, Dewey02. It's nice to have the positive feedback.

 

Jean Shepherd. That's why.

 

I love the narrator's comment while the old man is fighting a klinker in the furnace:
"In the heat of battle my father wove a tapestry of obscenity that as far as we know is still hanging somewhere out over Lake Michigan!"

 

While I love the casting in this movie, does anyone else think that the Mom's frizzy perm hairstyle is out of character for the 1940's. It seems more fitted to the 1970's. Anybody else ever notice that?

 

thanks for explaining that, I always wondered why he kept yelling "it's a clinker"!!!

 

You're probably right. Maybe that was the hair Dillon had and they decided it wasn't "period inappropriate" enough to put her in a wig.

And I guess they were right, as Dillon's hair doesn't seem to have hurt the movie's popularity!

 

People often bring that up, but they had frizzy hair like that back in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, the perm goes back the the late 19th century:

http://rorycas.tumblr.com/post/53189095278/thevintagethimble-1930s-hairstyles-a

 

Yes, they did. But all of the photos at the link you posted LOOK like they were from the 30's and 40's because of t he style.
Dillon's hair style looks like it is from the 70's.

 

18 fun facts about the movie
http://www.wimp.com/christmasfacts/

 

I've been asked the same question about Vertigo, Chinatown and The Big Lebowski, i don't bother trying to explain anymore.

 

Christmas in July! Sorry, just saw this thread. Last Feb we went to A Christmas Story House. It was pretty cool visiting the home and museum. I have a few videos on Vimeo



https://vimeo.com/117379899

https://vimeo.com/117379894

From what I was told while at the house there is no surviving footage of the Flash Gordon scene. However the costumes and photo from the take are in the museum.