SALT LAKE CITY — Twenty-eight times. That’s how many times Ralphie says he wants the Red Ryder BB gun in the movie “A Christmas Story.”
That’s once every 3 minutes and 20 seconds, according to Mental Floss.
But it wasn’t Ralphie’s quest for the beloved BB gun that stuck out to Chris Carsten when he first watched the movie.
In the scene where Ralphie’s younger brother, Randy, gets stuffed into winter clothing that seems to swallow and practically suffocate him, Randy is so puffy that he can’t even keep his arms down by his side. But for Carsten, it was the narrator who really drove the hilarious moment home.
“My kid brother looked like a tick about to pop.”
Or the scene near the end of the movie when Ralphie’s Old Man is sitting in his chair, reading the newspaper and eagerly anticipating the Christmas turkey dinner to come. Enter the cursed Bumpus hounds from next door, who run through the home and shred the turkey to pieces.
“Ah, life is like that,” says narrator Jean Shepherd, whose semi-autobiographical short stories inspired “A Christmas Story.” “Sometimes at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.”
For Carsten, Shepherd’s comic narration — which went on to influence “The Wonder Years” — was the star of “A Christmas Story.”
“I loved not only the way he put words together, but the energy of his voice really kind of stuck with me,” Carsten told the Deseret News. “I never dreamed in a million years that I would play that part later on.”
Jean Shepherd’s legacy
Since 2014, Carsten has played narrator Jean Shepherd in the musical production of “A Christmas Story,” which runs at the Eccles Theater Dec. 3-8. The Tony-nominated musical brings the classic scenes to life — Flick’s tongue getting stuck to the flagpole, the Old Man’s prized leg lamp and Ralphie’s pink bunny suit are all there. But added in are songs from Pasek and Paul — the award-winning duo behind “Dear Evan Hansen” and “La La Land.”
The narrator’s role in the musical is more pronounced than in the film. In the 1983 movie, we only hear the narrator — although we do actually see Shepherd once in a cameo role, playing a disgruntled man waiting in line at a department store to see Santa. (When a confused Ralphie steps in front of him, Shepherd snarls and says, “Hey, kid, the line starts back there,” before Santa eventually shuts down Ralphie’s dream of shooting that Red Ryder BB gun.)
In the 2012 musical, though, the narrator is onstage for most of the show, telling the story in a unique way only Shepherd could do, Carsten said.
“Jean Shepherd was kind of off the beaten path with the stuff that he did — the energy and style of the way he commented on the mundane things that were happening,” Carsten said, noting Shepherd’s successful radio career. “His commentary had its own style that was successful enough to influence a myriad of different people who took pride in listening to his shows.”
Among Shepherd’s fans is director/actor Jon Favreau. In an interview with Vanity Fair, the “Elf” director — who also directed “Iron Man” and stars as Happy Hogan in the “Avengers” franchise — recalled how his dad listened to Shepherd’s monologues on AM radio, and credited “A Christmas Story” as a main inspiration for “Elf.” Peter Billingsley, who had his career-defining role as young Ralphie in “A Christmas Story,” even had a small part in “Elf.”
Billingsley, too, admired Shepherd’s ability to weave a series of seemingly pointless vignettes into a funny and cohesive Christmas tale.
“The movie, by modern-day standards, is about nothing,” Billingsley told Vanity Fair. “It’s a family a couple of weeks before Christmas, and the kid wants a BB gun. That’s not exactly a pitch in which you’d say, ‘Let me get the president of the studio on the phone!’”
But six years after “A Christmas Story” came out, comedian Jerry Seinfeld — who was also drawn to Shepherd’s way of making the most minor life incidents comical — would star in the NBC sitcom “Seinfeld,” widely regarded as the “show about nothing.”
“He really formed my entire comedic sensibility,” Seinfeld has said. “I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd.”
‘Not your typical Christmas story’
Despite being a low-budget film — MGM gave director Bob Clark $4.4 million — and disappearing from theaters after just a few weeks, “A Christmas Story” grew in popularity. It appeared on TV in 1985 — around the time it was released on VHS, according to Vanity Fair.
“People discovered it and began sharing it, and buying it, and ritually watching it, and it just sort of steadily grew,” Billingsley told Vanity Fair.
Since 1997, a 24-hour marathon of “A Christmas Story” has run annually on TV. That’s 22 years of airing the film 12 times in a row from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day. It’s one of the most popular holiday programming events on cable — the marathon reaches more than 40 million viewers across TBS and TNT, Variety reported.
“A Christmas Story” has endured all these years, Carsten said, because “it’s not your typical Christmas story.”
“When people think of Christmas, they think of, ‘Oh let’s go out and buy toys and put them under the tree and … give gifts to each other and see our kids’ expressions and learn the message of love at Christmastime,’” he said. “But then they don’t ever stop to think about what all that could entail.”
“A Christmas Story” doesn’t shy away from the commercialism that surrounds the holidays. It takes a middle-class family and paints a real picture. It shows disappointed kids and fighting siblings. Even Santa’s grumpy and ready to call it a night as Ralphie and hundreds of other kids wait not-so-patiently to tell him their Christmas wishes. And in the end, after the neighbor’s hounds devour the turkey, Ralphie’s family is left with no choice but to eat a not-so-traditional Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
“It kind of helps us keep in mind what Christmas is about — the love and the experiences we share as a family,” Carsten said. “It’s a quirky odd story that has touched so many lives over the years.”
If you go ...
What: “A Christmas Story,” the musical
When: Dec. 3-8, times vary
Where: Eccles Theater, 131 S. Main
How much: $50-$120