Another Nod to A Christmas Story: Great Lines
Another Nod to A Christmas Story: Great Lines by Roxanne McDonald
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“You’ll shoot your eye out” is the classic line, but others are up there in the greatest lines category. |
When it works, effective repetition makes for great hilarity. This is most obvious in the “you’ll shoot your eye out” line that is repeated so much that even the viewer begins to feel like a kid being admonished for wanting a cherished Fisher Red Ryder 200-shot Action Carbine Air Rifle.
But the Christmas classic that certain channels [TBS, for one] show in marathon format for twenty-four hours every year in
December also contains other great lines and snippets of dialogue:
That the oversized plastic leg is a “major award”…
That “frageelay” must be Italian, when Mother corrects that it is the word “fragile”…
That the leg is a “statue” to which Ralphy agrees, open-mouthed and gaping, “Yeah, a sta-tue…” and to which the voiceover speaker says that “only one thing could pull [him] away from the electric sex in the window”—his nightly radio show.
And then when that quiz show prize, that “major award” gets broken when Mother is cleaning, Father yells that she “was always jealous” of that lamp…
Other critics have called the dialogue of A Christmas Story “tedious”, hackneyed, and boring in its repetitiveness. But with each scene, whether it be the scene where Ralphy presents the perfunctory teacher gift that dwarfs all the others and says he thought maybe she would enjoy something different or whether it be little brother Randy rifling through the gifts on Christmas morning and yelling “Mine!” and “That’s mine!” over and again, the timely dialogue never gets too old for the rest of us—who appreciate the contribution to character development and to what was once most original Christmas story-telling.
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