In the film, this scene doesn’t happen until Ralphie is at the breakfast table. …we then get the Black Bart dream sequence where Ralphie and “Ol’ Blue” save the day. We hear Jean Shepherd reading the entire ad and focusing on the last line that says “Tell Dad it’s great for target shooting and varmits, and it will make a swell Christmas gift.” As that line reverberates in Ralphie’s mind… The script emphasizes the Red Ryder ad on the back cover of Ralphie’s Boys Life magazine more than the film. The BB gun is shown in the window and Ralphie hints at his scheme but Red Ryder nor the “Holy Grail of Christmas Gifts” isn’t mentioned until the dissolve to Ralphie in his bedroom. There is more of an indirect approach to the Red Ryder air rifle in the script while at Higbee’s. Then we arrive downtown Hohman at night with shoppers about and the kids making their way to Higbee’s department store (like in the film.) Red Ryder Not Fully Introduced at Higbee’s Shepard narrates more about the first big blizzard that just hit and the anticipation of Christmas.

Other locations are highlighted as we follow the kids (Randy trailing behind) through a junkyard and in front of a candy store. We see a wide shot of Hohman at dusk, which narrator Jean Shepard describes as clinging “precariously to the underbody of Chicago like a barnacle clings to the rotting hulk of a tramp steamer.” The movie begins with Ralphie and his home on Cleveland Street, but there was a much more elaborate opening in the script. Here they are for your enjoyment in chronological order: Welcome to Hohman, IN In all, I’ve compiled 41 differences between the theatrical release of the film and shooting script. The script I found online is the 83-page shooting script dated December 7, 1982. The only thing I’ve heard is a Flash Gordon dream sequence that was cut so beyond that, I’m just hoping to find a few nuggets that will add to a movie I know too well.

With A Christmas Story, I’ve never seen any deleted scenes or really researched what might have been cut from the original shooting. With Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, I wanted to dig into the extra scenes that were cut from the original 3.5 hour director’s cut.

With National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, I noticed an image of a deleted scene on the back of the DVD case that made me curious to know more. I’ve had a couple motivations for digging into movie scripts. The 1940s era depicted in the film is pretty fascinating to me and every year I watch it, I put myself in Ralphie’s shoes and fantasize about living in that era. It wasn’t until TNT/TBS began airing the film on 24-hour loop that I truly grew to love the story, the characters, and pretty much everything about it. If I had to guess, I likely caught it on cable sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s.

I’m not sure exactly when I watched A Christmas Story for the first time.

A Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd