I gave Mrs. Chuck a DVD set of old TV Christmas shows and we’ve been watching them the past few days.
One was particularly disturbing: A Christmas episode of Dragnet. In it, a boy opens his Christmas present – a .22 rifle – a bit early and starts playing with it with his best friend. The rifle goes off accidentally and the friend dies.
Really poor choice of theme for a Christmas episode (it was aired in the Christmas season). Jack Webb wanted it to be a lesson to adult to not give their kids guns (the boy, BTW, is about the same age as Ralphie on A Christmas Story – but a BB gun won’t do anything worse than shoot your eye out), but it’s hardly Christmas fare.
What made it even worse was the ending. The parents of the dead boy decided to give all his presents to the boy who shot him. I suppose the idea was that they could watch him opening and think of how happy their son would be, but this seems to give the message: if someone gets shot while playing with guns, you get their toys!
I suspect there was some outrage about the story, because the next Christmas, Dragnet had a sweet story about a baby Jesus being stolen from a church.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that was just so wrong on all levels: wrong theme, wrong message, etc.
Anything else you’ve seen that’s just plain inappropriate in multiple ways? I don’t mean bad acting or script (only), but just plain “what were they thinking?” wrongness.
I heard the radio version of this episode a few years ago. It’s definitely a downer, but affecting, and I wouldn’t say it’s wrong. The ending you mention, if memory serves, was intended as a gesture of forgiveness toward a kid who was carrying an enormous load of guilt.
If anybody wants to watch it (and many of you will not), I think this is the episode in question. And here’s the IMDB entry.
I don’t see how that’s any less appropriate Christmas fare than, say, The Little Match Girl. There’s a pretty well established tradition of downer Christmas fables.
Not sure about the whole, “He gets the dead kid’s presents,” thing, though. That does seem a little sketchy.
In the original version of television’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the misfit toys were left on the the Island of Misfit Toys. So many people wrote in to complain that a new ending was filmed where the toys were retrieved and given homes. Since the moral of the Rudolph story is to not discount people because of their differences, the original ending was antithetical to the story.
No, the original ending was not to discount people for their differences until it turns out you can use them for something. Seen in that light it makes more sense to leave the toys.