Aw, you should see it from out here!
December 13, 2019 10:43 AM   Subscribe

 
They scouted 20 cities, finally settling on Toronto for the interiors and Cleveland for the exteriors. It was appropriately winter, and cold, in Ohio, but there was no snow that year.

My understanding was that this was mostly true as there was also some location shooting in St. Catherines (particularly that iconic tongue stuck to a pole scene). This Maclean's article from 2013 elaborates a bit more on the Canadian connection.

Director Bob Clark also gave us another less family friendly Christmas classic with a Canadian connection, the original Black Christmas.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:09 AM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


I was never a fan of this movie, but I'm not here to yuck yer yum. I suspect a secret of its success as a sleeper classic is that it feels much older than it actually is. My first reaction was, "How have I never seen this before?" (I later learned, to my surprise, that it wasn't a Mel Brooks movie.)
posted by sjswitzer at 11:20 AM on December 13, 2019


This was a film I used to enjoy, about 15 years ago, but then TBS started showing marathons of the film and it sort of sucked the fun out of my looking forward to it every holiday. It was like gorging yourself on too much food.

That being said, there's also the last sequence which hasn't aged well. There's an ugly mocking tone in how the Asian restaurant owners are portrayed on film. The stereotypical mispronunciation, singing “Deck the Halls” refrain as “Fa ra ra ra ra” instead of “Fa la la la la.” Fuck you very much for that racist display.

It's hard for me to watch that film.

What is interesting is that there was a recent Live! version of the film that was televised and they altered that (obviously). You can watch how that scene plays out differently in this video.

Relevant Vulture article: How A Christmas Story Live! Made Its Chinese-Restaurant Scene Less Racist

You can still enjoy problematic things. But we need to be honest with ourselves and unafraid to engage critically with media. Nostalgia doesn't mean that we get to put our head in the sand.
posted by Fizz at 11:30 AM on December 13, 2019 [27 favorites]


I have a young adult nephew who has this movie memorized. I remember when it came out—and went just as quickly.
posted by SoberHighland at 11:50 AM on December 13, 2019


Yeah, the restaurant scene is bad, but nevertheless I was reminded of it when I ended up eating at a neighborhood Chinese place one year on Christmas Eve by myself because snow had delayed my trip up to Chicago and the rest of the family went to see one of the Lord of the Rings movies without me. The mental comparison jollied me up a bit and took the sting out of missing the movie.

Also, the scene with the dogs stealing the turkey was echoed in one of my in-laws' family's go-to Xmas story. The way my brother in law tells it, he came home to his mom crying and the kitchen a wreck. The basement door is open, and he went downstairs to see his father, a police officer, with his service pistol out. His father gave him a flashlight and told him to hold the beam into the far corner. He did, and caught the glare of a feral cat's eyes. BLAM. Fa la la la &c.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:01 PM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


Melinda Dillon was cast on the basis of her role as the mom in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Ha! I had never noticed that before!
posted by dnash at 1:13 PM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


I like A Christmas Story but am always a little annoyed that it's sort of eclipsed its creator. Everyone knows this movie but hardly anyone knows who Jean Shepard was.
posted by octothorpe at 2:19 PM on December 13, 2019 [6 favorites]


Raises hand...
In the 60's, we did a lot of camping in New York State, and one thing I remember fondly was listening to Jean Shepard on the radio. I don't think we could get WOR at home, so that was the only time I remember hearing him.
This movie sounds just like him telling a story on the radio. (Of course, it was him telling the story...)
posted by MtDewd at 3:04 PM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


octothorpe, I agree. "Duel in the Snow, or, Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid" (SLYT) is still pretty damn good.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:16 PM on December 13, 2019


Jean Shepherd (Wikipedia)

Jean Shepherd fansite (celebrating 15 years! ... in 2010)

Jean Shepherd: Secret People (YT, -/+ 45min)

flicklives.com

Anyone who has clicked into this post owes it to themselves to begin the impossibly huge project of excavating Jean Shepherd’s lifetime of work. It’s so vast, and very often so amusing, that you can literally just start listening at random. It’s so very strange that this film is the key to his work, but it certainly is the entree that I took.
posted by mwhybark at 3:21 PM on December 13, 2019 [8 favorites]



It was on the background (from TBS or TNT) on many Christmas Eves with family as a young kid and my father grew up in the Cleveland neighborhood where a few of the outdoor scenes were shot so the movie evokes positive memories of my childhood that will last for the rest of my life.

That said, there's numerous (and there's certainly valid) criticisms - case in point the aforementioned restaurant scene end) of the movie.

And maybe it's just me, but the amount of licensed merchandise from the movie (pj pants, shirts, leg lamps, etc) went from zero to ubiquity (pro sports teams having leg lamp bobblehead nights, shirts at target or other department stores) in the late 00s, early 10s.
posted by fizzix at 3:47 PM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


weirdly there was a Jean Shephard book that belonged to the new jersey punk house that i lived in for a couple years in the mid/late 90s. i don't know where it came from, but everyone that came through the house would eventually end up picking it up like "what is this like tim allen or something ok boomer" or whatever we said back then

but then they'd like start to ironically read it, get sucked in, and end up howling with laughter pretty soon.

(i will update when i remember which book it was if anyone cares)

edited: i mixed up tim allen (the tool time one) with tim barry (the singer from avail)
posted by capnsue at 6:18 PM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


If anyone's interested, I told the story of my experience working on a local TV program with Jean Shepherd in a comment here a few years back.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 6:42 PM on December 13, 2019 [6 favorites]


I found a couple Jean Shepherd books on my folks shelves around '79-'80, and loved them. I'd get in trouble for howling with laughter while reading late at night. Didn't know about the radio career, definitely going to check that out.

Around the same time I was also devouring Pat McManus, who's humor always felt similar to me. I'm going to have to go back and see how they hold up.
posted by calamari kid at 7:47 PM on December 13, 2019


Ok but does anyone remember the ”sequel”? Because I do, vividly, and I don’t know why.
posted by Young Kullervo at 8:09 PM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


This was a film I used to enjoy, about 15 years ago, but then TBS started showing marathons of the film and it sort of sucked the fun out of my looking forward to it every holiday. It was like gorging yourself on too much food.

Yeah, but you're not meant to sit down and watch it, you're just meant to have it on in the background.

It's not the Christmas meal, it's the Christmas sideboard, you dip in, grab some nuts or whatever and graze.

Same with A Christmas Story, you look up from the new book you got Christmas morning, quote a few lines*, then go back to your book.

* He had yellow eyes! SO HELP ME GOD, YELLOW EYES!
posted by madajb at 9:38 PM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


Ok but does anyone remember the ”sequel”? Because I do, vividly, and I don’t know why.


I never saw that one but I happened to catch about 5 minutes of My Summer Story, apparently a sort of sequel, on some second tier over the air channel about a month ago. Didn't really hold my attention, plus I had shit to do. Might have been Charles Grodin's performance as The Old Man... he always pisses me off.

I used to have a bootleg copy of The Great American Fourth Of July and Other Disasters from 1982, that I found pretty enjoyable, starring a young Matt Dillon(!) as a teenage Ralphie.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:25 PM on December 13, 2019


I remember the first time I saw this, 1985. The movie was on in the afternoon on Cinemax (in July!.) I just caught a glimpse of snow, so I left it on and was sucked in. I'd never heard of it. Loved it, put it up again when the west coast airing started and watched all the way through. I mentioned how great it was to a friend, he said "It's from the Jean Shepherd stories, I'll lend you the book."

I swear my father must have heard him on the radio in the early 70's, he did the "hide the BB gun behind the tree" to fool my mom. I remember he even did the speech about "isn't there one more thing back there." But instead of the Red Rider I got a Crossman 500 Powermatic. My pops even set up a range in the basement, an old mattress in a cardboard box. His rule was I had to recite the safe shooters code by heart before I was allowed to shoot. I think I memorized that book in an hour. Best Christmas day present ever, and that was the year me and my brother got matching Schwinn Stingray bicycles, gold with metallic purple banana seats. And nobody got hurt that year.

Next year though...

Buddy of mine did get shot in the eye during a BB gun war. He wasn't in pain just scared of what his mom would do. It sort of looked cool, this little copper BB stuck right in the white of his eye. We ended up going to this neighborhood doctor who ran his practice in his basement. He saw us right away, had my friend hold a little tray, bend over, and the doc smacked him on the back of his head. We all heard the BB go "tink" on the tray. He told the four of us there was no charge, but we had to cut his lawn all summer. We agreed... and he ratted us out to our moms anyway.
posted by Marky at 11:37 PM on December 13, 2019 [13 favorites]


A few years back, I felt I needed to get a BB gun in order to deal with various varmints in my yard, and I got a Red Rider, I think solely because of this movie.
This despite the time (4th grade?) when I almost get a BB in the eye. It was a ricochet that hit my eyebrow ridge, which was enough to make me more safety conscious.
posted by MtDewd at 8:46 AM on December 14, 2019


This was the only Christmas movie that my parents would go out of their way to watch once a year, either catching it if it was airing, or renting it. So we all loved it as well, but because the comedy was so dark (for the time - dark comedy was one thing, but semi-dark comedy about Christmas = sacrilege! , at least in the fairly-conservative Christian community where we lived), it was more of a guilty pleasure, especially since we're Jewish, so liking it always felt a bit subversive.

So it was really strange to me when TV networks started playing it regularly, and a total mind-blower when it went to 24-hour marathon on TBS . I genuinely thought no one loved it but us.
posted by Mchelly at 4:10 PM on December 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


They needed to fill the air time that used to be filled by "It's A Wonderful Life" when that fell out of copyright for a while.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:06 PM on December 14, 2019


I can't find Patrick Willems YouTube piece about Christmas Story becoming ubiquitous despite it not being a good movie. (TL,DR: Ted Turner bought the MGM pre-86 catalog, and TBS decided to marathon it, which brought it back into the cultural awareness.)
I think he misses a couple of points, though,
a) That's more or less the exact mechanism "It's a Wonderful Life" became a "Christmas Movie" in the late 70s/ early 80s. It was out of copyright, so it was cheap to run, and people either learned about it, or remembered it. It became important to people again after it was used as cheap time filler.
b) The intended irony/distancing in the promotional materials and in the narration. The narrator is indulging in nostalgia for the desires of youth, and yes, it is blatantly mercantile/mercenary, but the narrator wishes for that level of belief that "If this one thing happens, everything will be all right."
c) The "one more present" scene is the point of the movie. Ralphie's spent the whole movie failing to communicate with the adults around him (yes, it is a petty greedy desire he's trying to communicate) and sometimes being punished for aping their behavior ("FUDGE"), but in the end, his father shows him that he was listening, a little, and that as distant/estranging as adulthood may seem, his father was a kid, too, and remembers some of what it was like.

Granted, I am biased because of the situation where I first saw the movie: in a second-run theater with my Dad, not too far from its original release. I was thirteen-ish, Dad was thirty-nine-ish. Neither of us would have had a Christmas exactly like that when we were Ralphie's age, but we both had enough close experiences in our respective childhoods that we could see, "yeah, pretty much could have happened like that."

The kicker was the furnace scene though - just from the narration - because while Ralphie talked about his father's mastery of profanity in repair situations, and the cloud of profanity hanging over Lake Michigan, I was breathless with laughter thinking about my Dad doing exactly that, while Dad was breathless with laughter thinking about HIS Dad doing exactly that. ANd he didn't even have to tell me that's what he was thinking. It was the first of very few times my Dad and I were on the exact same page, mentally.

And when TBS started showing it often (just before the marathon) I was glad to see it again. I was in my late twenties by that point, and the movie was fond nostalgia for me.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 6:45 PM on December 14, 2019 [7 favorites]


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