Who Made Me Buy Three Leg Lamps? – A closer look at “A Christmas Story”

So, being a Christmas nut, I started thinking about this lofty space and what elusive Christmas movie is at the top of the holiday pedestal of pop culture. You can try to argue with me. You can. But you’ll be wrong. Nothing has hit the BB gun pellet out of the park with the proper A++++ rating than the fudge-filled A Christmas Story. It’s the most pop culturallyist of them all. #newword

It was December of 1983. I was 9. And my parents, seizing to capitalize on my love of films (how could you not be a young film geek growing up in the most magical time of movie cinema ever?) took me to some new Christmas movie about a boy my age. In the moment, Christmas movies weren’t a thing like they are today. You didn’t race out to see them. They were flat-out uncool at the time (the usual step 1 of an eventual pop culture super weight, actually).

So I sat there at Metrocenter in Glendale, Arizona in the back row (where my mom still has to sit), and took in a movie about a kid wanting a BB-gun for Christmas. All I remember afterwards was asking what fudge meant.

I didn’t get an answer.

I got home and returned to my Return of the Jedi action figures and leather E.T. doll, and I forgot all about some kid named Ralphie.

"I'll Be Right Here, Ralphie." - E.T. (Paraphrased)

Flash forward to the year 2020.

I know, it’s not a fun year to jump to, but it’s where we are.

I’m now a middle-aged dad raising two kids, who owns, to name a few, a small desktop leg lamp, a version of Monopoly based on the film, card games, a full size leg lamp, nightlights, Funko Pops of Ralphie, mugs, shirts, pajamas, ornaments, a cookie jar, socks, beer glasses, and the crown jewel of my A Christmas Story collection, the near-complete Department 56 Christmas village seen below.

When I started this post, I was set to talk about my favorite scenes and some random facts that you probably already know if you follow this movie. “Did you know Bob Clark makes a cameo?!” “Did you know that ‘His End Up’ on the leg crate was simply a mistake?” “Did you know that most scenes weren’t real snow?” “Did you know that his tongue stuck to the pole because they put a small hole in a tube and a vacuum at the bottom?” But now, I can’t. Well, I just sort of did. But I have to actually answer something larger here: How did I go from not caring about the film to spending at least half of one of my daughter’s college educations on leg lamps and pink bunny merch? Who is responsible for this?

Here’s my initial thought; I have no idea.

Jean Shepherd

I guess I’ll start with the obvious and that is writer, radio personality and narrator of the film itself, Jean Shepherd. It’s surprising to note that most of his on-air stories were Han Solo-ed. Simply improvised on the radio. That blows my mind. At the end of his career, he even started criticizing his own work which put a solid layer of Lifebuoy soap on so much greatness. What was crazy is, he was even kicked off the set of the film at one point for trying to direct the actors, which was interfering with the tight and fast production budgets. But one of the things he did do was read his narration right next to the camera so Peter Billingsley had something to react to. But we aren’t sure if that was his decision or not. Regardless, this is still the guy that took a bunch of stories from the radio and written shorts for Playboy and turned it into a little book called “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,” which came to be A Christmas Story. But reading the book, it’s very clear that the vision for this movie isn’t all the way there. It took something else to make this classic what it is. He is the “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out” grandfather, but not the reason I have a leg lamp tie.

Maybe it was the critics that helped elevate this film to cult status? I decided to take a look at how they respond to this ‘rude and crude’ Christmas film with kid fights, bullies, kids obsessed with getting stuff, lying, a bad mall Santa, kid torture, guns, and electric sex glowing in the window. Not all that great…

The New York Times review started off with “There are a number of small, unexpectedly funny moments in ''A Christmas Story,'' but you have to possess the stamina of a pearl diver to find them.” Odd, because all of those small, unexpectedly funny moments along with every other scenes’ pearls are made of tiny resin figures on a table in my house.

The NY Daily News ran a headline that read “‘Christmas Story’: bah, humbug!” Or this gem from Rex Reed in the New York Post, “None of them (the actors) is helped by the lame direction of Bob Clark, or the corny script written by humorist and radio personality Jean Shepherd. Hammily narrated by author Shepherd himself with such phony relish you can almost see the drool dripping from his lower lip.” So, yeah, the critics helped as about as much as the Bumpus’ hound dogs in creating the perfect Christmas meal.

The studio took a gamble on this, so maybe it was the studio that deserves the credit to getting this film to where it is in modern day consciousness. Well, let’s kill that idea quickly.  Even the studio didn’t believe in the film. It was only booked for 4 weeks and was out of nearly all 900 screens it debuted on by Christmas. The film was just an appeasement. More on that in a second… So while we can thank the studio for giving us this gem, we can’t give them their major award here.

Ah, there it is. The VHS Tape and the Good Old 4-Head VCR....

So it has to be the invention of watching movies from home, right? After all, it wasn’t until 1986 with the start of the original streaming device, a VHS machine, that it started to find its fishnet lit legs for the first time. But not at first. It was DVD sales that really started to accelerate the wide-spread love for the film in 1997. That was also the year that TNT began airing the film 24 hours straight on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This was long after the movie was acquired by Ted Turner in 1986, meaning it just laid there for over a decade. It was its only defense. (Rim shot, please!). So unless I want to give the award to 1997, we'll move on...

The cast of this film is something special. All of them. Melinda Dillon as the mom is perfection, and I think overlooked for the overall success of the film. Darren McGavin is literally every dad at Christmas, ever. Randy is the space cadet sibling and is perfectly executed by Ian Petrella. Tedde Moore must have a had a blast with so many dream sequences. Zack Ward as Scut Farkus is every kid’s memory of a bully. And Peter Billingsley would have been nominated for an Academy Award if that performance happened today. Brilliant! Casting note: The kid with goggles in the department store? It’s a dude. You know you wonder every time you watch this. So if you made it this far, there’s at least one thing you can take away and tuck in that back pocket. But here’s what I can’t say; if any of them had been played by someone else I’m not sure it would change the outcome of today. I love them, they are perfect, but it’s not the cast causing $200 eBay auctions for The Old Man Funko Pops.

So here we are, no winner yet to be found. Where is that true catalyst that brought A Christmas Story from a 4-week forgotten run in theaters in 1983 to running 24-hours a day each year? To me, the answer became clearer the further I dove into this. It had to be director, Bob Clark.

Bob Clark on the set of "A Christmas Story."

He heard Shepherd’s work on a Miami radio show 12 years before he made A Christmas Story, where Jean was telling the tale of a boy named Flick, his tongue, and a frozen flagpole. This was the moment when he was certain that he would bring this story to life on film someday. He leveraged the success of his first hit film, Porky’s (yes, that Porky’s) to make this before committing to the Porky’s sequel and he never looked back. He also gave up his director’s fee and put in over $150,000 of his own money to fund it. He worked tirelessly to bring all of the elements mentioned so far into the glorious Christmas package that is A Christmas Story. When I hit this point in my search, I thought with certainty that I had my winner. But I couldn’t settle with Bob being the reason I dressed up as Ralphie in a bunny costume two Halloweens ago. So where else to go?

Yes, folks. This was no gift from my aunt. I did this willingly.

I guess we could explore it being Martin Malivoire and David Neil Trifunovich for creating fake snow? Or maybe it was Gregory A. Valore, the driver of the uncredited Transportation Department on the film as the reason why A Christmas Story wine glasses sit on my shelf?

Nope.

So I sat here for days muttering "fudge" under my breath. Was there actually an answer, or should I have just recounted my favorite film moments after all? I had to know why I own three leg lamps.

Then it hit me as hard as a Scut Farkus snowball to the eye socket.

My parents.

It’s my parents, and your parents, who are to blame for its pop culture placement and why you may or may not own A Christmas Story wine glass set like me. I don’t care when you were born, what era, what part of the country you grew up in.  If your house celebrated Christmas, then you had parents that were trying to make it great, and that means you experienced every last scene in this movie in real life over your childhood each December. Every stinking second of this film, the good, the bad and everything in-between, is simply your story.

So while we can thank every last person I mentioned and more who helped make what is my favorite film of all time, you need to actually thank your own family for cementing A Christmas Story at the very, tippy top of the pop culture Christmas tree. It’s our yearly moment to reminisce about our own versions of pranging ducks on the wing and getting off spectacular hip shots. It’s a time we can never get back, but a time that is the most treasured for us all as we age. And that’s something I can easily watch for 24 hours straight at least once a year for the rest of my life.