A Christmas Story Christmas

We got to have our "family Xmas observed" thing this past Tuesday, and in the process I saw last year's A Christmas Story Christmas, and maaan... that wasn't very good, was it?

I'll qualify this by saying that the original Christmas Story is easily my favorite Christmas movie, and would almost certainly even make it into my overall top-ten movies list if I were to make one.  Overexposed in recent years with the 24-hour marathons and such?  Maybe.  But I'd happily watch all 24 hours of it over the course of the holiday, given the opportunity.  I've also read, not yet all, but the majority of Jean Shepherd's short story work and consider myself a fan outside of just A Christmas Story.

But Christmas Story Christmas just didn't capture any of the magic of the original.  The overall plot was pretty cliched, and it relied primarily on the "memba this?" factor, with as many references to the original movie and cameos from its cast members shoved in for no other reason than to evoke nostalgia, with even some of the voice-over "memories" of characters just being audio clips from the original movie.  It even took the forced-nostalgia from *other* classic Christmas movies, with several gags lifted directly from the likes of Christmas Vacation and Home Alone.  The narration was clearly intended to evoke the narration of Jean Shepherd from the original, but didn't capture the voice of his writing, and the dream sequences that were charming with Peter Billingsley at age 12 (playing age 9) were just kind of off-putting with him at age 51. 

The biggest issue, though, is that the point of the original movie was to portray the magic of the holiday through the eyes of a kid, and that magic just doesn't come through with the focus on an older character (even if it is meant to be the *same* character).

It certainly could be worse, though.  The previous sequel, A Christmas Story 2, is, in fact, my single least-favorite movie of all time.  And I've seen some crap.  Objectively Christmas Story 2 may not be the worst I've seen based on tangible or technical elements - that would probably go to Nukie - but none of the films on my worst list, not even Nukie, actively made me angry while watching it.  Christmas Story 2 - which had the nerve to promote itself as "the OFFICIAL sequel" (disregarding the actual sequels that Jean Shepherd was actually involved with) - did.   So, at least this one wasn’t *that* bad, I guess?

At this point... just leave Shepherd alone.  He's gone, and you're not going to recapture his voice either in writing or on film.  We have the original Christmas Story, an all-time classic.  And we have the REAL forerunners and sequels that drew from his actual writings and that he was involved in the making of - My Summer Story (a.k.a. It Runs in the Family) and the four American Playhouse TV movies (Phantom of the Open Hearth, The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters, The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski and Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss).  Just let us have those and don't try to recapture the magic, because you never will recapture it.