The funny thing is when we watched it last night we all noticed for the first time the thing with Mickey at the parade and the fact that there were several black children in Ralphie’s class and both of those showed up in this thread.
'70s, too. “Marking Pencil.”
But it was yellow, or yellow-ish orange, and the handwriting (printing, actually) was childish. I guess I don’t know what grease pencil writing looks like. Maybe it was used to make the comment stand out more. It just seemed odd.
And Scut, not Scott, thanks. :smack:
I want to check the movie again. Some scenes are shot through Ralphie’s youthful eyes. This may have been a distortion to highlight his perspective.
Not this scene. They’re talking about when Ralphie actually got his theme back from the teacher, not the fantasy daydream sequence from when he turned it in.
In that case I’m sticking with grease pencil. I don’t have an image of the scene in my mind, but I don’t recall anything that seemed out of the ordinary. But the film was filled with little odd details. There was another thread once that tried to narrow down the time frame of the movie, but it seems to exist in an ambiguous world of it’s own, designed to evoke subjective nostalgia from the individual viewer.
If it’s what I’m thinking of, it’s very soft, so it smears easily and writes quite thickly even if freshly sharpened. It’s hard to write “pretty” using one, unless you can take up a ton of space.
I think most the movie can be viewed as a exagerrated kid’s perspective though. The department store Santa & his elves aren’t as consistently surly as they are when he’s directly watching them.
I believe this was a sort of backhanded (and good-natured, I think) dig directed at Disney by MGM, the studio that produced A Christmas Story. The Wizard of Oz was another MGM property, so having those characters defeat the nefarious Mickey showed MGM’s victory over Disney in the arena of family movies, or something. I don’t have a cite handy, but I know I read that take someplace.
Who picked up the lug nuts?
If Dad picked them up, how did he find them so quickly?
~VOW
I was so sad when I learned that. It was like learning how your favorite magic trick was done. 
You actually wanted to see a kid to tear the skin off his tongue, leaving it on an actual frozen pole?
Yeah, I don’t get that. I don’t see what’s so sad about movies using tricks.
The restaurant is named Bo Ling Chop Suey Palace. You can see it painted on their door. So presumably they purchased the neon Bowling sign intentionally and turned off the W.
Maybe he used the old trick of taking one lug nut from each of the other wheels…
That’s what I assumed.
The scenes where Scut Farkus is stalking the other kids is highlighted by the Peter & the Wolf theme playing in the background.
And I saw this movie about 100 times before I realized that those Red Ryder guns actually existed.
It makes sense. There weren’t ballpoint pens in the US in 1940, the most likely period for the story to have taken place. If a teacher wanted to make her comments stand out on a paper, she would need a grease pencil or some other colored writing device.
He’s standing on his left, but he punched Grover Dill’s right shoulder. Dill has turned toward Farkus right before the punch.
I know the credits say “Scut,” but Ralphie clearly refers to him as “Scott” throughout the movie.