Trivia Facts about A Christmas Story

How well do you know the 1983 classic?

To celebrate our newest escape room, A Christmas Story Escape, we’d like to highlight some of our favorite trivia facts about the essential eighties Christmas movie. Let us know if you have any favorite facts too!

Filming the Flagpole Scene

Do you know how the A Christmas Story team filmed the scene where Flick sticks his tongue to the flagpole? Apparently, the A Christmas Story team had a difficult time replicating hard winter weather, so they found an innovative way to stick Flick’s tongue to that pole. A hidden suction tube ran through the flagpole, and sucked the actor’s tongue into the hole! This fact is typically on any special feature-laden edition of A Christmas Story. Be sure to watch the footage if you can!

Professional Profanity

Like any good movie, A Christmas Story includes many sequences of swearin’ and cussin’. As we know, though, the movie used an interesting filter to keep any actual profanities out of the family friendly film. For the scenes with “The Old Man,” actor Darren McGavin ad-libbed every instance of sailor-speak! But did you also know that he found it nearly impossible to string real words with ad-libbed obscenities? That’s why his character speaks in complete gibberish as he strings his profanities along!

Clear-Cut Curses

The cuss words don’t stop there, though! In the scene where Ralphie beats up the bully Scut Farkus, Ralphie takes after his old man and starts spewing out all the colorful words he picked up from him. Actor Peter Billingsley took a very different approach than Darren McGavin, however. All of Ralphie’s lines during the scene were precisely scripted! Can you imagine memorizing a solid forty seconds of gibberish?

The Red Ryder Combiner

There is a great deal of debate as to when the film “actually” takes place. Most people will push 1939, and others somewhere in the forties. But don’t forget that the film was made to be a mix of the two! One clear example of this is in the famous Red Ryder BB gun. The Red Ryder BB gun was an actual air gun released in 1940, but the model was very bare-boned. The compass in the stock and “the thing that tells time” (a sundial) were never included in the Red Ryder model, but were on a model from 1934, known as the “Buck Jones Special.” The gun used in the movie was specially built, and they even flipped the compass and sundial to the opposite side of the stock so Peter Billingsley could hold it left-handed. 

Mom – The Real Sitting Duck

What connects A Christmas Story to other 80s classics like The Shining, The Exorcist, and Alien? Why, a natural terrified response from one of the actors, of course! For the Chinese restaurant scene towards the end of the film, actress Melinda Dillon had no idea that the duck brought to their table would still have the head. Her copy of the script also neglected to tell her that the waiter would be chopping its head off, too! Cruel or not, her reaction to the duck is definitely one of the best moments of the film.

A Christmas Story is a film with a gigantic following, and there are many more interesting facts and trivia about the movie hidden among special features and commentaries. What are your favorite moments? Let us know in the comments and before you take on our A Christmas Story escape room!

…psst… thanks for scrolling to the bottom. Here’s a fun video if you want to learn how to cook a peking duck, just like in the movie! (I just really like that scene, ok?)