re: Is Christmas Story the worst Christmas movie?

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Except it’s not set in the 50s

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wut?

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It’s set in 1939, that’s 11 years before the 50

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Huh. You learn something every day.

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You learn something every day.

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They never actually say a year but you can narrow it down pretty well. It is post August 1939 given the Wizard of Oz characters (movie was released August of '39).

Little Orphan Annie radio show ran from April 1931 to April 1942.

Given those facts it has to be 1939, 1940, or 1941.

Since there is no mention of Pearl Harbor that rules out 1941. 1939 makes the most sense because the Oz characters would be just a few months from the big screen release.

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1939

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No, apparently, the director intentionally made it ambiguous. The culture being depicted is very late 40's/50's though.

Either way, not my bag.

Fah rah rah rah rah, you roser.

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The culture being depicted is very late 40's/50's though.

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No it’s not, the culture is definitely pre WWII late 30s/1940.

As someone mentioned Little Orphan Annie ended in 1942 also there’s no mention of WWII, if it was 50s “army men” would be a prominent toy also TV existed by the mid 50s more than half of households had a TV and there is zero mention of that.

It only took 4 hours to reach 100 Downvotes

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Well, they definitely don't look like they just got out of the depression.

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I mean, they weren't in the dust bowl region of the country. By 1939, most of life in the country had largely gotten back to normal, especially in the more urban areas.

I think now there’s just an anti 24 hours of a Christmas story crowd, I say it every time, that movie does the best job of capturing exactly what it’s like to be a kid at Christmas time and wanting that one gift

The period depicted always seemed pretty loosey-goosey to me. Coming from the comic-strip character, the Red Ryder BB-guns came out in 1940, along with the movie serial, shortly following the radio-series debut. But the rifle and the character became even more omnipresent in the mid-to-late-1940s, with advertisements and displays, along with the Republic film series (1944-47), which was hugely popular.

But then, you had the "Little Orphan Annie" radio thing, and that was a hotter item in the early-to-mid-1930s. By the late-30s/early-40s, "Captain Midnight" was the far bigger thing. Annie and Daddy Warbucks were on the relative wane as early as 1940, even if remaining constant presences in newspapers for decades to come.

Didn't really seem to jibe, putting Red Ryder and Little Orphan Annie together, the first a kiddie icon of the 1940s, the latter of the 1930s. Conceivable that they were trying to most evoke maybe 1940 or 1941... yet it otherwise seemed moored a bit more in the later 1940s. Especially the sort of smart-alecky, world-weary cynicism of the whole endeavor, which reeked vastly more of a post-war mentality In fact, that's why it actually feels a bit more boomer-ish overall, even if depicting a pre-boomer era.