King Ralphie

Every year at this time we get to unwrap a gift package filled with red cabbage, BBs and fishnet stockings. It’s “A Christmas Story,” arguably America’s favorite holiday film. It celebrates its 21st anniversary this year, happily planted in the middle of our pop traditions.

Last year, more than 38.4 million viewers tuned into the 24-hour “A Christmas Story” TV marathon on TBS, said the film’s director, Bob Clark. This year’s marathon begins at 8 p.m. Friday (cable channel 55 in Spokane, 44 in Coeur d’Alene).

Not bad for a low-budget flick that took 14 years to get produced. Clark spent that long trying to find a studio to back a film based on radio storyteller Jean Shepherd’s lectures and 1966 book, “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.” It wasn’t until Clark made the 1981 hit sex comedy “Porky’s” that studio bean-counters gave their OK.

“A Christmas Story” stars Peter Billingsley as the earnest but edgy pre-adolescent Ralphie Parker and Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon as his parents. Set in Indiana sometime in the mid-20th century, it tells the story of the Christmas when Ralphie dared ask for a Red Ryder BB gun.

The film portrays Christmases that so many of us experienced, or at least wish we had. Says Clark: “Even shooting it, we knew we had at least a modest classic. It breathed life. It had magic.”

So why does this picture speak to us so? Here are some of the reasons we love “A Christmas Story”:

The Red Ryder BB Gun: It carries a lot more firepower than any ordinary Two-Hundred Shot Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle. The present that Ralphie schemed for – and, indeed, risked his life for – at the hands of Santa’s elves represents the universal gift that we have all lusted after. It is, in Shepherd’s words, “the holy grail” of all presents.

As with the Grail, there is some question whether this rifle ever actually existed. Joe Murfin, vice president of marketing for Daisy Outdoor Products, which makes Red Ryder rifles, recalls that when Shepherd contacted the company for movie props, he described a gun with a compass and a sundial in the stock. Such a Red Ryder was never made.

“We told him, ‘You’re remembering two different guns.’ He said, ‘Oh, no I’m not,’ ” recalls Murfin.

So Daisy concocted a hybrid rifle for the movie. “It’s really a case of history imitating art,” Murfin says.

Daisy welcomes the attention “A Christmas Story” has brought the Red Ryder; this year the company is marketing a special Red Ryder-Little Beaver kit in connection with the film. Daisy even remains unfazed by the “You’ll shoot your eye out” line and the scene where Ralphie nearly does just that.

“The way we like to look at it, the parents were taking responsibility by saying this,” Murfin says. “The BB rifle is not something you can just hand to children. The only negative part is the first thing they allow him to do is go out alone with it. But Ralphie learned his lesson.”

Besides, fans know that the Red Ryder Rifle stands for more than just childish greed. It symbolizes a purer form of spirituality.

Says Robert Thompson, professor of TV and pop culture at Syracuse University: “The rifle is not only not evil, there’s almost a metaphoric function, in that the toy you desire in that white light sort of way is an intimation of heaven. The kid has had a certain (degree) of ascension at the end of the movie.”

Our darkest suspicions about Santa: Forget “The Night Before Christmas.” Many of us spent our childhoods fearing the man in red and what his naughty-nice list could do to us.

In “A Christmas Story,” Ralphie innocently hopes to bypass his mother’s refusal to give him a BB gun by asking Santa himself for the Red Ryder. But when he arrives at the department store, he’s confronted with a Rudolph-nosed monster attended by crazed elves. When Ralphie manages to spit out what he wants for Christmas, Santa betrays him with the deadly “shoot your eye out” curse before kicking him down the terrifying Santa slide.

Bob Clark shows he knows this kind of Santa. “He’s tired, weary, cynical. It’s just a job,” he says.

The bully gets his: That big, yellow-eyed creep Scut Farkus could only shove Ralphie so many times. One day little Ralphie goes ballistic and beats Scut’s proboscis to a pulp.

Fans of “A Christmas Story” often find the sequence with Ralphie’s flying fists supremely satisfying.

The triple-dog dare: This scene is so tantalizing that Clark has had “quite a few cases reported to me of kids getting their tongues stuck on the flag post after they saw the movie.”

The movie effect was created by suction coming through a hole in the pole, but a tongue can indeed stick to metal. Clark has researched the science behind the phenomenon.

“It has to be awfully cold – zero – and dry,” he says.

Plus, you have to be dared to do it.

The Old Man’s major award: Ahh, that leg lamp. Never in the history of cinematography has one prop so successfully combined the concept of sexuality with middle-American kitsch.

In the movie, Mom knew immediately that this lamp was so wrong. It arose like a monster from the depths of its crate, a ceramic she-devil’s leg in black high-heel and fishnet stocking. The lamp shade bore a fringe straight off some hootchy-kootchy dancer.

It exemplified temptation, the “soft glow of electric sex,” wrote Shepherd. Billingsley admits in his DVD commentary that when he first saw it, he couldn’t keep his hands off its thigh (he was 13 during the filming).

Warm memories of the first time we got caught using that word: When was your first time? When the garbage bag you were lugging broke open on the living room rug in front of Dad? When you smashed the kitchen window with a baseball while your mom stood at the stove? Evergreen moments, these.

They’re unforgettable because for Ralphie and many of us, the f-word was “the queen mother of dirty words,” the one you must never ever use. In “A Christmas Story,” his mother screams when she learns he said it and Ralphie gets “sudsed” – his mouth washed out with a bar of soap.

Clark says he’s “never heard a single complaint” about the scene, or about the accompanying invective that the Old Man spews. In fact, every time this film runs, golden memories spring forth and many of us once again recall the piquant flavor of Fels Naphtha.

Mrs. Parker: “Mom is the heart of the family and runs the show, but makes certain that dad thinks he is,” says Jeff Frank, artistic director of Milwaukee’s First Stage Children’s Theater, which is performing a stage version of the story.

Don’t we love that? Don’t we love the fact that Ralphie’s mother has been so busy feeding her family that she hasn’t had a hot meal – even of red cabbage – for herself for 15 years? Don’t we love it that when Ralphie gets into that fight, she handles the Old Man so smoothly that he doesn’t even get angry?

The period look: Audience members are encouraged to speculate as to just what that period is. Though Shepherd set his narratives in 1938, Clark placed “A Christmas Story” in what he calls “an amorphous” time period: anywhere from 1940 to the earliest ‘50s. “It never feels like the Depression is on” is as close as he gets to locking in a date.

That expanded time period assures that even more people will be touched by the “Christmas Story” look: the chenille bedspread, the big-flowered wallpaper, the chunky tree lights.

“We gave great attention to all the details and the period so that people suddenly see things they haven’t seen in so long – the department store, the parade. All the coloration,” Clark says. “It’s real and it doesn’t stop, it flows.”

The fresh feel: While the setting is close to those other Christmas classics “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) and “Miracle on 34th Street,” (1947) “A Christmas Story” is only a couple of decades old.

Says Thompson: “`A Christmas Story’ isn’t as worn out as the rest of them. ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is a great movie, but it’s been around so long, replaying since the ‘70s when it went into public domain.”

“A Christmas Story” is not only newer, he says, “It’s cooler. This is a more contemporary movie. It’s got an attitude to it, more of ‘The Simpsons.’ Besides, with ‘A Christmas Story,’ we haven’t yet memorized all of the dialogue.”

Speak for yourself, Bob.