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Best of DVDs...with M.V. Moorhead
A Christmas Story

Just this once, I’d like to use this column for the purpose of boasting. About this time last year, I devoted space to the holiday classic A Christmas Story, which I described thus:

“Bob Clark's 1983 screen rendering of portions of Jean Shepherd’s autobiographical novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash is one of the most re-watchable movies ever made...a nostalgic but unsentimental kids-eye view of the secular side of Christmas in America, circa 1940.

“Set in a wintry, working-class suburb in northern Indiana and narrated by author Shepherd, it revolves around Ralphie (Peter Billingsley), his obsession with the ‘Holy Grail of Christmas presents’—a Red Ryder air rifle—and his frustration with ‘the classic mother/BB-gun block,’ insurmountable ‘by any means known to Kid-dom’: the dreaded phrase ‘You’ll shoot your eye out.’”

Of the DVD edition of A Christmas Story that was available this time last year, I offered the judgment:

“Glorious though A Christmas Story is, I’d hold off on buying the DVD. The film is worth owning, certainly, if only so you can see it uninterrupted by commercials, but MGM put next to nothing into the current DVD edition.

“The presentation is in miserable fullscreen, and there’s little in the way of special features—no commentary tracks, no ‘making-of’ documentary, just the (admittedly very funny) theatrical trailer and some language options (and it is sort of fun to hear Ralphie and friends in Spanish). This movie cries out for a bell-and-whistle-laden Special Edition, and it occurs to me that one may very well be released next year, as 2003 will be, incredibly, the film’s 20th Anniversary.”

Not that the preceding was exactly a prediction worthy of Nostradamus, but I was right. You read it in Wrangler News first.

This year did indeed see the release of a Christmas Story Special Edition, in commemoration of the film’s 20th anniversary, and if it isn’t bursting at the seams with extras, it nonetheless has some very nice goodies and is, finally, a version of the film well worth the investment.

Possibly the best feature of the new disc is that it at last offers the movie in widescreen, although for those baffling souls who favor fullscreen it’s still available in that format as well.

The second disc includes a few dismissible featurettes—including one on the Daisy air rifle and a really annoying one about a company that makes the “leg lamps” popularized by the film—and a couple of interactive games. The only really good extra on Disc Two is an audio selection of author Shepherd’s radio readings.

A much better extra is on Disc One: A commentary track featuring director Bob Clark and star Peter Billingsley chatting their way through the movie (curiously, the box promises that the excellent Melinda Dillon, who plays the mother, is also on this track, but she isn’t).

Clark and Billingsley speak with unforced warmth about the film, and it’s from Clark that you’ll learn, for instance, that Jack Nicholson was once considered for the role of the father, and even the mysterious low-tech secret of how they got the kid’s tongue to stick to the flagpole.

There are also a couple of “Easter Eggs,” of which one is a small treasure—the script for a couple of very funny deleted scenes, including the one in which Ralphie and his air rifle come to the aid of Flash Gordon against the Emperor Ming the Merciless.

By why was the scene itself not included? Is the footage lost, or are they just holding out on us until the 25th Anniversary?

M.V. Moorhead writes regularly for Wrangler News.

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