Sunday, December 18, 2022

A Christmas Story 2 (2012)


People love sequels. For audiences, it’s a chance to revisit characters that they fell in love with. For studios, it’s a chance to make money off the audiences who want to revisit those characters. It’s a win-win situation. Unless, of course, you’re of the mind that every movie should be an original movie, movies should remain stand-alone, and you should never continue intellectual property because all that happens nowadays is that intellectual property is driven into the ground. If you’re not one of those people, you probably like sequels.

Early in my bad writing blogging, I hit upon the idea of sequelitis, a condition where filmmakers are too beholden to what came before that they can’t let a story blossom into something of its own. To suffer from sequelitis is typically to tell the same story over again, with very minor changes. A filmmaker may not want to fix what wasn’t broken, so they put on the same show thinking it will find the same success. That doesn’t usually work because audiences are smarter than that. They want some change. The other major form of sequelitis can be that a different story is told, but so many references and callbacks are placed into it that it forces the new story to feel very much like what came before, even if it isn’t.


The second form of sequelitis is where I would place the 2014 direct-to-video sequel A Christmas Story 2. Ralphie Parker (Braeden Lemasters) was a fifteen-year-old who wanted nothing more than a car for Christmas. Okay, he wanted a car and the love of Drucilla Gootrad (Tiera Skovbye). While checking out a car he liked, Ralphie accidentally ruined its roof. He needed money to pay back the angry car salesman, so he and his two friends got jobs at the local department store over the holidays. Wacky holiday antics ensued, both at work and at home with Mrs. Parker (Stacey Travis) and The Old Man (Daniel Stern).

Everyone knows A Christmas Story. It’s one of those staples of the holidays. It plays on TBS for a full twenty-four hours every year. Ralphie wanted a Red Ryder BB Gun, but everyone said he would just shoot his eye out. His father got a leg lamp. That one kid got his tongue stuck to the frozen pole in the schoolyard. If you know Christmas movies, you probably know all these things. You probably saw all these things. And, like so many people who watched the movie over the years, you probably experienced these sorts of things. That’s why it endured through so many generations of movie watchers.


A Christmas Story 2 didn’t have nearly the same lasting power. That was where the sequelitis of it really set in. There was a new story because of the difference in age for Ralphie. He was a nine-year-old in the first movie. Now he was fifteen. Even if the stories were narrated as memories of the same adult character, they came from different perspectives because of his ages at the time of the experiences. The first movie was very much about Ralphie being forced into family things, while the sequel saw him with more freedom in his teenage years.

The sequelitis came from the references placed throughout A Christmas Story 2. Every scene seemed to have some sort of callback to the first film. It wouldn’t have been a bad thing if there were a couple nods here and there. It would have been a continuation of the story with the world built through the history of the characters. That’s fine and dandy. But there were some references that felt forced for the sake of bringing up the memory of that same sort of moment in the prior movie. That’s the stuff that felt like the filmmakers were trying to recapture the magic without putting in the effort to do something new.

One of the main stories that The Old Man had throughout A Christmas Story 2 was a simple rehash of a story he had in A Christmas Story. He was battling it out with the malfunctioning furnace in the basement. Eventually, he would replace it with an Oil-o-matic furnace and things would work out. For the time being. His other storyline, one that felt a little fresher, was that he wasn’t willing to pay for a turkey that had risen in price. Instead, The Old Man decided to go ice fishing to catch Christmas dinner. It was a new spin on his struggles with Christmas dinner.


Some references in A Christmas Story 2 felt more forced than others. There was a scene while Ralphie and his friends were working. Flick (David W. Thompson) kissed a pneumatic tube, only to get his lips and tongue stuck in the suction. This was clearly a play on the same character licking the frozen pole in A Christmas Story and getting his tongue stuck. The problem was that the pneumatic tube scenario felt unrealistic. Nobody in their right mind would do that. Especially without a triple dog dare egging them on. That dare wasn’t present, so Flick just made a very poor decision.

The other forced reference was the costume scene. Anyone who saw A Christmas Story will remember the scene where Ralphie was forced to wear a bunny onesie because his aunt sent it special for him. That same idea made a comeback on Christmas morning in A Christmas Story 2. Ralphie opened a gift from his aunt to find a sailor suit. He was embarrassed because he was fifteen and she was still sending him this stuff. The twist was that the suit wasn’t for him. It was for Randy (Valin Shinyei), his younger brother. The effect was the same. A child awkwardly wore a costume on Christmas morning.


A couple other references felt like refreshing takes on what had been parts of A Christmas Story. The leg lamp made a reappearance. That might feel like something forced into the story simply to pull at the nostalgic memories of the audience. I guess it kind of was. At the same time, however, the return of the leg lamp helped tie a nice little bow on the relationship of Ralphie and The Old Man. Ralphie got the lamp from a pawn shop as a Christmas present for his father. The Old Man’s eyes lit up when he found out what he got. It was the same love that he showed to Ralphie whenever he got Ralphie what he wanted for Christmas.

The other reference was another Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant. It wasn’t the Parker family, this time. The Old Man was too busy trying to save a few dollars by catching fish. He didn’t have time or money to take everybody to the Chinese restaurant again. It was Ralphie who went to the restaurant. Throughout the course of A Christmas Story 2, Ralphie worked hard to make enough money to repair the roof of the car he had damaged. When he finally got the money, he realized it was more important to help the down-on-their-luck homeless people in his town. He used the money to buy them a hot meal at the Chinese restaurant and a tire for their broken-down car. Ralphie was becoming a more giving person, rather than a person who simply wanted everything given to him.


That said, A Christmas Story 2 did feel like it suffered from sequelitis. It was too beholden to A Christmas Story. There were too many call backs, too many references. Only a couple of them felt natural to the story being told, while the others seemed like they were shoehorned in because the people behind the sequel wanted to be like “Hey, remember this?” There’s a fine line that must be ridden between remembering the past and taking a step into the next chapter. A Christmas Story 2 was reluctant to take that step, and it showed.

A Christmas Story 2 told a story that was different from what came before. It shared similarities, sure, but it was different because of Ralphie’s age. He was no longer a nine-year-old being forced to participate in holiday traditions. He was a fifteen-year-old with some freedom, allowed to go off on his own into the world. There was still one thing he desired more than anything for Christmas. That part was the same. But the way that he went about his desire was wholly different because of the freedom that came with being older.

What set it back was the incessant need to use A Christmas Story as a reference point. Somehow, with the six-year difference in setting, the events lined up in a way that felt like the Christmas of the first movie was bleeding into that of the sequel. The pneumatic tube, the leg lamp, the Chinese restaurant, and the Christmas costume were all factors in that feeling. It was like it couldn’t allow the story to be its own thing. That is the idea of sequelitis: a sequel that can’t separate itself quite enough from what came before. A sequel that can’t even really put its own spin on these things. For the most part, at least.


Sequelitis frequently comes from a fear of straying too far from what came before. A studio or a filmmaker found success with one thing. They fear that if they change that thing too much, the audience will turn on them. They fear that if they don’t recognize how much people loved the first movie, people will dislike the sequel. This can sink a sequel. When a franchise holds the earlier outings too dearly, it tends to stunt its own growth. It can’t move forward when it’s only looking back. The sequelitis strikes again.

Even though people enjoy watching sequels to movies they love, revisiting the characters and locations, they also want to see some growth. It’s not enough to see the characters and places again. There needs to be some forward momentum to justify the revisit. If there isn’t, audiences will feel like they might as well just pop on the original and forget about what came after. When that forward momentum is there, however, sequels can become major successes. Both financially and critically. People like familiarity. They just want a little change in that familiarity. And that’s where a strong sequel can prevail.


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