Gun meets Ralphie’s specs

Limited-edition Red Ryder has Christmas film’s famous features

NWA Media/ANTHONY REYES
Joe Murfin, vice president of public relations for Daisy and chairman of the board for the Daisy Museum, shows the 30th Anniversary Daisy air rifle, "A Christmas Dream" Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013 at the Daisy Museum in Rogers. The limited edition rifle features a sun dial, compass and hardwood stock. Only 2500 of the rifles were produced.
NWA Media/ANTHONY REYES Joe Murfin, vice president of public relations for Daisy and chairman of the board for the Daisy Museum, shows the 30th Anniversary Daisy air rifle, "A Christmas Dream" Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013 at the Daisy Museum in Rogers. The limited edition rifle features a sun dial, compass and hardwood stock. Only 2500 of the rifles were produced.

ROGERS - There it sat in its display case, the reincarnation of an honest to goodness blue steel beauty, capable of taking ducks on the wing and handy when spectacular hip shots are required.

In 1983, Daisy’s Red Ryder BB gun was made all the more iconic by the movie A Christmas Story. To commemorate the three decades since the film’s release, Daisy is offering the 30th anniversary edition of its Red Ryder gun, named A Christmas Dream, exclusively at the Daisy Airgun Museum in downtown Rogers or at daisymuseum.com.

Privately owned Daisy began in 1886 and has operated in Rogers since 1958, when the company moved from Michigan. It employs about 100 workers assembling guns during its peak time of the year - the months leading up to Christmas.

The 30th anniversary gun isn’t one of the thousands and thousands of standard Red Ryder’s sold by Daisy every year, including those with pink stocks marketed to girls. The standard Red Ryder and the company’s Powerline Model 880 are its biggest sellers.

No, this one is the real deal. Well sort of.

The 30th anniversary edition comes complete with - as Ralphie Parker, the film’s main character, a 9-year-old with a particular BB gun on the brain, would proudly note - a compass in its stock and this thing that tells time, a sundial carved into the walnut stock. The 2,500 numbered collector guns sell for $89.99, plus shipping and applicable tax. So far, more than 600 have been sold.

These BB guns are true to the version that Ralphie coveted for Christmas, though technically, no Red Ryder gun had those features until they were added for the film.

Joe Murfin, a Daisy spokesman and chairman of the museum’s board, explained that Jean Shepherd, the author of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, the book on which the movie A Christmas Story is based, approached the company to make the Red Ryder gun he remembered as a kid to use in the film as a prop. The problem was, the gun Shepherd recalled, and Ralphie hungered for, didn’t exist, and never had existed.

The Red Ryder guns had never had a compass in the stock or a sundial. Those features were on Daisy’s Model 107 Buck Jones Special. Shepherd insisted his memory was correct, so the company made six movie prop versions of the gun as Ralphie describes it in the film.

“It was a true case of life imitating art,” Murfin said.

After the film’s release, Daisy sold Red Ryder guns with the added features in 1983 and 1984, and the guns are now highly desirable with collectors, Murfin said. The company tends to release a different collector version of the Red Ryder each year, with its sales benefiting the museum.

A Christmas Story, directed by Bob Clark, was released by MGM to a limited amount of success but eventually became the property of Turner Entertainment Co. when Turner purchased MGM’s pre-1986 films. The film was distributed on VHS tapes, shown on Home Box Office but then began to become more popular after Turner Broadcasting began showing it at Christmas on its stations - eventually ending up with 24-hour marathons of the film in 2009 on TBS.

In December 2012, A Christmas Story was one of 25 films selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Other films inducted at the time included Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Two-Lane Blacktop and Dirty Harry.

“These films are not selected as the ‘best’ American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring importance to American culture. They reflect who were are as a people and a nation,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a release.

Tony Harkins, associate professor of history and director of the division of popculture studies at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, said A Christmas Story reflects a time of lost innocence, set before World War II and America’s rise as a superpower. It also features a child-centered world, filled with adventure and imagination, with caring adults who brush up against a child’s view without intruding on it.

“The film manages to be honest, while still remaining romantic and all the while doing it without seeming schmaltzy,” Harkins said.

The Daisy BB gun and the leg lamp that Ralphie’s father wins in a contest and flaunts as “a major award” to his neighbors have become iconic and have taken on a life of their own, signifying the optimism and love seen in the film, Harkins said.

Brain Jones, the founder of Red Ryder Leg Lamps and A Christmas Story House and Museum, says people love products based on the film. He should know, he makes them and sells them.

Jones received a homemade leg lamp from his parents after he learned after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis that he would not be a Navy jet pilot because of poor vision. The lamp not only cheered him up, he eventually started making them and selling them online in 2003.

In 2006, he had the chance to buy the Cleveland house used in the film for $150,000. After spending $250,000 in renovation, he opened the A Christmas Story House and Museum. He said the place is hands-on, where folks can flop on Ralphie’s bed or hide under the sink like his little brother Randy.

And of course, he has a 3,500-square-foot gift shop where folks can buy themed Christmas ornaments, sets of the horrid pink bunny pajamas Ralphie received as a gift, decoder rings and, of course, Red Ryder BB guns. But they don’t have the compass in the stock or a sundial.

He said the visitors to the museum, which average about 50,000 annually, connect with a film that once was a cult classic but has graduated to a piece of mainstream Americana.

Daisy’s Murfin knows the film nearly as well as he knows BB guns. He can quote lines and laughs easily when he discusses his favorite scenes.

“All of us can identify with something in that movie,” he said. “There’s a lot of good America in there.”

Business, Pages 61 on 12/08/2013

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