Season Screenings
It's official. Ralphie Parker and George Bailey are the kings of Christmas as far as Butler Eagle readers are concerned.
“A Christmas Story” and “It's a Wonderful Life” tied for favorite Christmas movie with each drawing 19 percent of the vote in a Butler Eagle online poll.
The two front-runners easily outdistanced second-place finisher, “Christmas with the Kranks” which scored 11.9 percent of the votes and third-place finisher, “Miracle on 34th St.,” which garnered a mere 7.1 percent of the votes cast.
The four top vote-getters left perennial holiday movie favorites such as “Love Actually,” “White Christmas” and “Home Alone” splitting the remaining 43 percent of the vote with less traditional Christmas movie fare such as “Die Hard,” “Gremlins” and “Scrooged.”
At first glance, it's hard to see the similarities between “It's A Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story.”
Director Frank Capra's “It's a Wonderful Life” came out in 1946.
The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams to help others in his hometown of Bedford Falls and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody.Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched, and how different life in his community would be if George had never been born.In Bob Clark's 1983 “A Christmas Story” the only dream its nine-year-old protagonist, Ralphie Parker, has is getting a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle for Christmas.“It's a Wonderful Life” has some genuinely dark moments in its tale of George Bailey's redemption, while Ralphie's efforts to convince his parents and his school teacher that he won't shoot his eye out is an out-and-out comedy with some poignant moments of nostalgia.
But what the two movies have in common is saturation-level exposure on television.In the case of “It's a Wonderful Life,” the movie initially bombed at the box office at the time of its release, but has since become a staple of Christmas television around the worldTurner Broadcasting has maintained ownership of the broadcast rights to “A Christmas Story,” and since the mid-1990s, aired the film in Christmas Day marathons on channels TBS, TNT, and TCM.Due to the increasing popularity of the film, in 1997, TNT began airing a 24-hour marathon dubbed “24 Hours of A Christmas Story,” consisting of the film shown twelve consecutive times beginning at 7 or 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve and ending late on Christmas Day. This was in addition to various other airings earlier in December.
The relatively recent “Christmas with the Kranks” hasn't had nearly the exposure of the two first-place finishers. The 2004 comedy stars Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple who decide to skip Christmas one year since their daughter is away which causes much turmoil in their suburban Chicago neighborhood.The parade of thwarted Christmas traditions features a lot of mugging and squealing on the part of Curtis, the sight of a spray-tanned and botoxed Allen and cries of “Free Frosty.”“Miracle on 34th Street” from 1947 is a more restrained affair. In it, Macy department store Santa, Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is put on trial to determine if he is the real Santa Claus.Whether “Die Hard”'s NYPD detective John McClane or “Scrooged”'s network president Frank Cross move up in the polls is something only the Ghost of Christmas Future knows.
