Here’s what we know from the movie:
[ul]
[li]The Old Man had a thing for entering newspaper contests. This leads me to assume that trivia contests were somewhat commonplace in the ~1930’s - ~1940’s.[/li][li]Some guy down in Terre Haute won a bowling alley. This leads me to assume that some of these prizes awarded in these contests were pretty significant.[/li][li]The “major award” turned out to be a kitschy and probably worthless piece of furniture. This leads me to assume that your prized could be just about anything, and you didn’t know what you won until it was at your door.[/li][/ul]
Are these accurate assessments of the newspaper contests of this era?
Ralphie refers to the Old Man as a garley turkakanus freak (at least, that’s what the subtitles on my DVD say. I’ve never heard the words “garley turkakanus” in any other context, so either Shepherd was just using gibberish, or there is some meaning to this phrase that I don’t know.
The Old Man’s name is never revealed. Is it revealed in any of Shepherd’s books? Furthermore, does the main character in the books go by “Ralphie,” or is it Jean?
There were a lot of contests of the time, but you can’t really judge them from what the Old Man said. The prizes were generally listed in the publicity for the contests. It would be possible that the Old Man entered so many contests that he forgot what prizes were listed for each one, or which one he actually won, but it would be highly unlikely that something like the leg lamp would have been a prize. A bowling alley is just barely within the realm of possibility, but prizes like that would also have a cash component which is what winners were expected to take (e.g., a bowling alley or $2000 cash). That sort of big prize was very rare, though.
Basically, Shepard exaggerated for comic effect.
It should have been “gallus turkakanus.” It’s made up, but “gallus” is latin for “chicken.” The joke is that a turkey is a big chicken.
Again, Shepard used a funny name for comic effect.
The time frame of the movie wasn’t the 30’s or 40’s. It was apparently sometime in the [probably late] 50’s. Post war, economic expansion, anything was possible.
IIRC, the movie was based in Hammond, Indiana. That is right next to Gary, Indiana where the steel mills were located. There were few places in the US that were more undesirable places to live. Yet, people stayed there.
It’s set in 1940. When Little Orphan Annie was on the radio and there was no TV. A very grim time. It’s not just Ralphie’s family who are poor; everyone’s poor because it’s the Depression, although they’re not in the war yet.
The movie does seem to have a 50’s feel to it with the clothing and hairstyles, which doesn’t make much sense considering the radio serializations. By the way, this year is the 70th anniversary of the Red Ryder BB gun in the movie and stores are selling an anniversary box version of it.
It’s not set in any specific year. There are some songs playing on the radio in a scene from Bing Crosby and the Andrews sisters that weren’t recorded until 1943. Bob Clark has said it was set in the “late 1930s, early 1940s”
Okay, so it’s not a specific year (huh; I thought I remembered Clark saying 1940), but I can’t see it being any later than 1940, because there’s no aura of war. If he wasn’t trying to be perfectly historically accurate and he allowed some conflicting details, okay, but absolutely nothing indicates a post-Pearl Harbor society.
The peruiod of the film is deliberately vague. No one year is consistent with the rest of the movie. There are things dating it from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. See the wikipedia artoicle, particularly the section “dating the story”
Anyone claiming this was undoubtedly set in the 1950s clearly wasn’t around in the 1950s.
The recent movie based on the memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is all about winning prizes (I think that was the late 50’s and early 60’s?) - the mother in that one won all kinds of things, some of which were very significant. Cars, trips, once enough money not to lose the house, etc. Also a lot of galoshes, fishing poles, lifetime supply of Turtle Wax, etc. She sold most of it.
Remember that the stories are of an adult recalling his childhood. Ergo, details will not match up exactly with what really happened.
You need to keep that frame of reference when enjoying such a story.
E.G., To a kid, the Old Man was downstairs doing large-scale battle with the furnace. It was war. Father Vs, Furnace. It was a memorable and eventful thing for a kid. To the Old Man, it was two minutes of a nuisance, and just one more thing he cursed during his day.
I was around in the 1950s, and agree that the movie is set in an earlier time (particularly because of the radio serials). However, one element that links it to the 1950s is the fact that Scut Farkus wears a coonskin cap, which was not commonly worn until the Davy Crockett fad in 1955, prompted by the Disney TV programs.
Trying to link the movie to a specific year is like trying to identify which state the Simpson’s Springfield is in - there is evidence that contradicts every theory.
I imagine it somewhat analagous to this: A hundred years from now, when someone makes a movie out of the memoirs of my childhood in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s (What up, Cracka? The Adventures of a White Boy Who Grew Up in the Ghetto), scenes may include a VCR, an iPod, a laptop, a TV that you have to get up to change, and a 1988 Dodge Daytona in the driveway. Which is to say, all of those things indicate a time period “a long time ago,” but the lack of consistency implies an unwillingness to nail down a specific date.
I’m a big fan of Shepard and often commute with one of his shows playing. He had a habit of telling the same story in several different ways, and A Christmas Story in no exception. Depending on the year and the audience, scenes and characters change. His reporting on Schwartz for his (Ralphie’s) use of language, for example: He explains in a different story that this situation was actually having him report Flick for giving him a bunch of human teeth he had been keeping in a tin box under his bed, and which his mother discovered one day while cleaning. In this story, he (Shepard) had been collecting them from a dentist’s garbage can in the neighborhood, thought they were neat, but when he saw the adults reactions to his collection, decided that blaming Schwartz for giving them to him for safe keeping was a better option.
I believe it can be said from some consistency in the stories, that Schwartz was a pretty fat kid, but in the movie he is played by someone pretty skinny. Maybe because they didn’t like any of the fat kids that tried out, or maybe it was something the producer / directory / casting thought people would identify with better.
In another radio segment he talks about his father winning a contest, but it wasn’t a crossword puzzle as the movie suggests. Rather it was a “Name the Sport’s Stars” kind of thing where he had to identify athletes by their photos, and, with the Old Man being a rabid sports fan, he was able to do it and win a regional prize.
I do wish someone would make a movie about his army days. Great stories, there! He also hung out with the Beatles as a reporter and had some delightful behind the scenes stuff.
But the bottom line is that what you are watching in a Christmas Story (an annual tradition at my home!), is fictional but based on real events. Which of those events are real? I dunno. He keeps moving the facts around!
The movie is set in 1940 - see the image of the license plate on this website - note the 1940 (‘40’) on the license plate. Maybe a case could be made that this is late 1939, but go with 1940.
Alas, like many other ‘period’ movies, some anachronisms snuck in like the Christmas songs. (BTW, don’t judge by the mother’s hairstyle - some nitpicker’s guide busted on that, saying a middle class woman of the 1940s would NOT have had a hairstyle like that; much more like a style of the 1980s, which it was…)
BTW, I never had the impression that the Parkers were a poor family - they had a fairly recent, well-kept automobile, lived in a nice house, could afford some decent presents for the kids - Jean Shepard mentions in his writen stories that the ‘Old Man’ works as a clerk for some firm, and they can afford vacations and summer camp for Ralphie and so on (the stories, originally published in Playboy over the years/decades, are also somewhat inconsistant with respect to themselves, but who cares)
The the link in my post #12 above – several “clues” giving the date are inconsistent with each other. It’s set in a nebulous time between the mid 30s and late forties, which not coincidentally places it smack between Shepher’d childhood and director Clarke’s.
