“I spend my winters in Florida and everybody is all so keen they dress up like Ralphie. “I’m a Canadian and so it doesn’t ring home to the same extent it does to my American friends,” said Malivoire, who still watches A Christmas Story every year. “I tracked down the artist who painted the leg lamp and the guy who fabricated it and they were all so modest and unassuming and maybe not appreciating how huge the leg lamp has become,” added Schwartz, who sells about 1,000 leg lamps in Canada each year. “At that time, there was no value to them,” said Malivoire, who still has one of the customized Red Ryder BB Guns he adapted for use by the left-handed Billingsley onscreen. ![]() was destroyed in the early 1990s, just before A Christmas Story found new life on TV. Sadly the identity of the leg model has been forgotten and the last remaining leg lamp in his possession - dusty and unappreciated after years in the window of Malivoire’s former special effects shop on Booth Ave. “They made a couple of versions - this is stuff nobody knows and for all the fans out there this is really interesting stuff.” “He (Malivoire) told me they actually got a chubby-legged model and made a plaster cast from her leg and made a mould out of it,” laughed Schwartz. Malivoire also made that famous flagpole and got a good chuckle out of the news his design has been immortalized in a bronze statue. “Nobody expected that,” said Malivoire, 64, of the immense popularity of the leg lamp, the “major award” won by Ralphie’s dad ( Darren McGavin) that was dreamed up by Shepherd’s imagination and brought to the screen by production designer Reuben Freed. “Here’s the movie that’s become huge, right there with The Wizard of Oz and all those other classics and it was filmed on a shoestring budget in and around Toronto, largely by Canadians doing it for the love of film.” “I was excited to try to bring the Canadianism of it all,” said Schwartz. Those True North details are the facts Schwartz was most anxious to share with A Christmas Story fans, especially those south of the border. It sells, among other things, various sizes of the famous leg lamp that Ralphie’s dad receives with glee in the movie.Ī Christmas Story Treasury shares behind-the-scenes facts and interviews with production crew members - including one of the makers of the leg lamp, Toronto special effects creator and now Beamsville winery owner, Martin Malivoire. Schwartz, whose doc Road Trip for Ralphie followed his search for A Christmas Story filming locations, now runs Retrofestive, an online-based pop culture Christmas retailer. Thirty years ago, audiences first saw Flick get stuck to the pole, watched little Randy ( Ian Petrella) snuffle through a plate of mashed potatoes to show “how the piggies eat” and heard 9-year-old Ralphie Parker ( Peter Billingsley) make his breathless, pleading speech to a crabby department store Santa that his holiday heart’s desire was an official Red Ryder BB gun. Clark was determined to turn the kid-centred tales into a holiday film.Ĭlark was killed, along with his 22-year-old son Ariel, by a drunk diver in 2007. The radio raconteur whose broadcast stories of his childhood captivated writer-director Bob Clark (director of Canadian box office titan, Porky’s). The stuck tongue has become such a classic movie moment, it’s been immortalized in a bronze statue at the Indiana Welcome Center in Hammond, Ind., the hometown of Jean Shepherd. ![]() It’s among the many Canadian-shot scenes Oakville entrepreneur and arguably the film’s biggest fan, Tyler Schwartz (no relation to Scott), deconstructs in his new book A Christmas Story Treasury, written to help mark 30 years since the movie’s release on Nov. Catharines, with excited Canadian kids playing the bystanders and classmates - all for $1 each with another $3.50 an hour per child going to the school board. The flagpole may have been flying the stars and stripes in holiday classic A Christmas Story as Flick ( Scott Schwartz) folds in the face of a “triple dog-dare” and ends up with his tongue stuck to the frozen metal.īut the scene was shot outside Victoria Public School in St.
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