Quote/cite? I can’t bring a line to mind despite umpty viewings, one just days ago.
But yes, it’s 1939 or so despite the strong impression that it’s immediately postwar. You do have to overlook a few anachronisms - such as the magazine, which was probably chosen for reasons other than the exact date (photogenicity and availability in pristine shape), and the integrated classroom (a sop to the modern audience - as is the patent cut-in of the Christmas gospel singers). The bones of the story place it in the prewar era.
I thought he said it was the Depression when he broke his glasses, but apparently I’m wrong, according to youtube.
However, Little Orphan Annie, the radio show, was on only from 1930 (went national in 1931) to 1942.
The “unreliable narrator” is the best explanation. The Red Ryder BB gun, which was introduced in 1938, never had a model exactly like the one Ralphie wants-- that is, “carbine-action” (which I think is a meaningless term, because “carbine” describes the length of the barrel), with a “compass in the stock.”
But I still think it’s reasonable to assume it’s pre-war. Children don’t have anything to compare their childhoods to. My aunt spent her first four years hiding from the Nazis, but she doesn’t remember it as being a wretched or frightening time, because it was all she knew, and because her parents didn’t discuss adult problems with her. So, aside from the fact that not all Depression-era families were the Joads-- there were some people who were comfortable-- Ralphie just doesn’t know all the bad things that were going on. School bullies and scheming to get the right Christmas present are foremost in his mind.
I was born in 1967, and I don’t remember much about the Vietnam war, or the legalization of abortion. I remember common kid problems, and how huge they were in my mind at the time, like how horrified I was when I injured my cornea, and had to go to school wearing an eye patch in the first grade, or how traumatic it was when a friend moved away.
Well, the movie itself is adapted from parts of various unrelated Shepherd stories - the Bumpuses’ dogs stealing the Christmas dinner was originally the dogs stealing an Easter Ham (which caused the Father to concoct a fiendish revenge plan on the Bumpuses, foiled only by them skipping out of town to avoid rent collectors), the Glow of “Electric Sex” leg lamp had nothing to do with Christmas, and so.
In other stories Ralph is a WWII radar operator (and the King of Gravy, and eventually a Veteran, experiencing a disastrous New Year’s Eve), so try to reconcile that with a 9 year old Ralph in a movie set in, say, the year of 1940.
For me, when I see a movie in color, it always feels like 50’s or later. I didn’t really pay that much attention to the details when I saw the movie, but it felt at least that late to me, even early 60’s.
I never thought too much about it. My dad loved this movie and seemed to identify somewhat with Ralphie, so I assumed it was set around 1949 when my dad would have been around Ralphie’s age.
Regarding the depression reference–I think it’s made in regards to the mom and her cooking. I took it as being she grew up in the depression so that still affected how she cooked…but now since it seems clear that it’s 39/40, it still means that same thing I guess. Less “grew up” more “got married and started a family.”
The Wizard of Oz was released in August of 1939 and did only three million dollars of business. It didn’t sink without a trace, but by the Christmas of 1940 would have been a distant memory and the costumed characters from the movie wouldn’t have been in the parade. There was a re-release in 1949 but that only did half the business of the original.
It didn’t become a family favorite and perennial event until the annual television broadcast made it one. The only year WoO characters would have been in a Christmas parade is 1939.
The very first time I saw the movie, I couldn’t believe how much was true to my childhood. Not just the big stuff, but little details, too. The whole tone of the movie, rather than the period details.
Also, the 1940 date on his decoder pin notwithstanding, Ralphie couldn’t have gotten the Ovaltine message at Christmastime of that year. Sometime during 1940 Ovaltine stopped sponsoring Little Orphan Annie (Quaker’s Sparkies cereal was the new sponsor). So 1939 looks like the best guess if real world details are anything to go by.
But until I started looking into this stuff, I tended to assume the setting was post-war/pre-TV '40s. It just feels a bit too “modern” to me to be the '30s.
I know people in Indiana who attended integrated schools before integration was ordered by the Supreme Court. One of the points of “separate but equal,” was the “but equal” part. If a small town couldn’t afford to maintain separate schools, then its only school would be integrated. Now, Ralphie’s town looks big enough to have more than one elementary school, but maybe there really were some progressive towns. Or maybe there were so few black people that it wasn’t worth it to build another school, and no one objected forcefully enough for the town to cough up the money.
This doesn’t mean there might not have been separate water fountains for the black students within the school, or that they may have had to sit in the back of the classroom.
I have read the book, and there is no mention one way or another, IIRC, of Ralphie’s school being integrated.
Hammond, Indiana is in Indiana, but it is very far north, and essentially a suburb of Chicago. It has northern sensibilities, and the people identify more with Chicago than Indiana. (Since I live in Indiana, I’ve had people ask me if the characters shouldn’t have rural dialects; no. If anything, they should have Chicago accents, but the generic Mid-western accents were fine.) I’m sure Hammond was a much different city in 1939 than some of the far southern cities that are suburbs of Louisville, KY, even more so than now.
I have the Playboy magazines all the original stories appeared in, so it is definitely pre-war to me. As SirRay noted, the movie is an amalgam of a number of different stories which take place over several years.
I think the war-years stories of Company K, Banjo Butt, Lonesome Ernie and the like take place in an alternate universe from the Ralphie stories. Otherwise A Christmas Story takes place in 1936 at the latest.