I think a key aspect of the original Christmas Story-the reason it is remembered but the other films aren’t-is that it takes a younger child’s perspective, even if it’s technically the recollections of a foul-mouthed adult. Every other entry in the Parker Family Saga features Ralph as a child or an adolescent. Instead, we get Peter Billingsley reprising the role of Ralph Parker, but as an adult. The second problem is that Jean Shepherd (not just the creator but the original narrator) and MVP Darren McGavin (the “Old Man”) are both long dead, removing two of the key nostalgia-bait charms a legacy sequel could have provided. So, the first problem is that the new sequel is a retread of a film that isn’t that great to begin with. Not only is it racist, it is blatant cultural appropriation of one of the pillars of American Judaism. It ends on its worst scene too, with the Parker family eating Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant with ghoulishly caricatured proprietors. The humor is more of the “wry smile” than “laugh out loud” variety, and, to be frank, the only scene I love is the one with the grotesque mall Santa. It is a series of sketches, some of them funnier in concept than execution (the atrocious lamp, for one). The main one is that A Christmas Story, while a holiday classic (if by “classic” you mean “plays eleventy billion times during Christmas season”), is not my idea of a great movie. Frankly, I don’t know how it could have succeeded, given that it had several things working against it. This did not prevent me from hating every single moment I spent with the movie. Also like Halloween (2018), I came into A Christmas Story Christmas having only seen the celebrated original and none of the intervening (or preceding) movies. That is, it is a dreaded legacy sequel/reboot, one that wipes the slate clean and recognizes the original (“original”) entry as the one legitimate predecessor. In fact, A Christmas Story Christmas is to A Christmas Story what Halloween(2018) is to Halloween(1978). The franchise does not follow a single continuity and is as gnarled as fellow holiday franchise Halloween. A Christmas Story, at least, was the first theatrical release. They were the basis for several television movies of varying length and quality in the 1970s and 80s and sported colorful titles like The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), The Great American Fourth of July (1982), The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski (A Tale of Gothic Love) (1985), and Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss (1988). The stories in this volume were first told on Shepherd’s radio program before being written down at the behest of Shel Silverstein and published in the children’s magazine *check’s notes* Playboy. Now, real Parker Family enthusiasts know that the original Christmas Story fell smack into the middle of a run of adaptations of humorist Jean Shepherd’s semi-autobiographical (or, if you are an optimist, semi-fictional) childhood memoirs, the most famous of which is In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, the textual source for A Christmas Story. Subsequent attempts over-corrected for this error, and the most recent entries-2012’s reviled A Christmas Story 2, 2017’s forgotten A Christmas Story Live!, and the present subject-have reduced the franchise to “ A Christmas Story, but again!” The 1994 release It Runs in the Family (aka My Summer Story), features the same characters but none of the same cast and, crucially, a different American holiday. Clark himself set off this chain reaction of failure, cementing his reputation as a purveyor of failed sequels to his own movies. If you are a little more film-savvy (and you are on this website), you might be aware of the multiple attempts to profit from A Christmas Story’s success. You are probably familiar-likely over-familiar-with the crown jewel, Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (1983), cementing his reputation as a purveyor of perennial Christmas classics. The Parker Family Saga is the franchise you didn’t know existed.
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