A Christmas Story’s Forgotten Summer Sequel Is a Stranger Film in Every Way

Buried somewhere between shameless appropriation and the utter oblivion of wide release movies that have subsequently passed entirely out of memory, resides a 1994 film that was titled It Runs in the Family during its initial theatrical release. Directed by pioneering slasher/sex-comedy pioneer Bob Clark, who had brought us the likes of 1974’s Black Christmas and 1981’s Porky’s, It Runs in the Family was actually a belated sequel to the film by which Clark would ultimately become best known: 1983’s perennial holiday classic A Christmas Story. Inexplicably titled and confoundingly cast, the film that would eventually be retitled My Summer Story has all but disappeared entirely from the cultural consciousness, existing today as a hazily recalled exercise in cynical sequelization, albeit one with a few inspired moments that make it at least more of a legitimate effort than the likes of 2012’s particularly soulless A Christmas Story 2. Still, at the end of the day, the thing that stands out the most when you watch My Summer Story today is the uncanny valley weirdness of it all.

Of course, one might be surprised to find out that A Christmas Story had a mid-‘90s film sequel to begin with, much less one where the biggest recurring storyline is about the kids fighting over “battling tops” in the schoolyard. Although beloved today for its deft balance between period nostalgia, childlike innocence, sarcasm and dark humor, Clark’s original film was anything but a runaway hit in its initial release. In fact, the film performed only modestly at the box office in 1983, received middling reviews, and would likely have faded into obscurity itself if not for the advent of cable TV, which led to repeated screenings in the early 1990s, which continue to this day. This is how A Christmas Story eventually became hailed as a classic, taking the same long-distance path to cultural immortality shared by films such as The Wizard of Oz or It’s a Wonderful Life. And it was this TV rediscovery that led to more adaptations of the work of humorist and radio personality Jean Shepherd, whose book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash had provided the core material for A Christmas Story. In fact, My Summer Story wasn’t even the only additional film to feature Ralphie and the Parker clan: A series of PBS television movies also aired in the late 1980s, with titles like Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss and The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters.

Only My Summer Story had any kind of budget behind it, however, a necessity in at least attempting to recreate the setting of early 1940s northwest Indiana, where the Parker clan toils somewhere near the poverty line of a lower middle-class Midwestern existence. With more than a decade having passed since the original film, however, director Bob Clark was forced to effectively start from scratch, recasting the film from the ground up. And this is where things really started to go wrong.

Quite simply, almost every performer who was cast is fundamentally wrong for their part, and the choices made for most roles seem to have little rhyme or reason. To replace the far-too-old Peter Billingsley as Ralphie, we have a young Kieran Culkin—not a bad choice on paper, but one that feels designed to reflect not his own abilities but the contemporary audience’s association of the Culkin name with family holiday comedies … despite the fact that this is no longer a Christmas movie, taking place roughly six months after Ralphie finally receives his Red Ryder BB gun. In comparison with Billingsley’s wide-eyed and emotive portrayal of a nine-year-old’s dramatic swings between joy, terror and petulant, crushing disappointment, Culkin feels like a void of personality, which the film attempts to prop up throughout via Shepherd’s narration rather than his own performance. The characters around him have likewise degraded or slipped into monotony—Randy somehow seems several years younger than in A Christmas Story, and is barely capable of speech, while Ralphie’s schoolyard friends Schwartz and Flick have become indistinguishable blobs rather than distinctive cronies. Only the delightful Mary Steenburgen escapes unscathed as Mrs. Parker, perhaps due to the fact that the film isn’t really interested in her to begin with. She makes the best of what she’s given.

These issues are nothing, however, when compared with the genuinely painful performance of the beloved Charles Grodin, an actor who feels profoundly unsuited to his role as Ralphie’s Old Man, inhabited so memorably by Darren McGavin in the 1983 original. Where the understated humor of McGavin’s performance often stems from his sheer aloofness around his family, the seeming disinterest he has for the daily workings of the household and the kids scampering around within it, and the way those kids fear this distant specter of a man, Grodin’s Old Man is a much more wholesome part of their lives … and it’s all wrong. This Old Man doesn’t just exist in their vicinity; he’s genuinely warm rather than gruff, which leaves the character feeling like an entirely different person. You can’t fathom why a kid would even refer to this father as “the old man” to begin with, and perhaps this is why Grodin looks so confused as to what kind of energy he’s meant to emanate.