Many claims about the harm allegedly caused by violent video games, movies, and other media today-that they turn kids into violent criminals, rob them of sleep, and wreak havoc with their nervous systems-were lobbed just as strongly at radio in the 1930s. “He now imagines footsteps in the dark, kidnappers lurking in every corner and ghosts appearing and disappearing everywhere and emitting their blood-curdling noises, all in true radio fashion.”
One father, in a letter to The New York Times in 1933, described the effects on his child of the “all-too-hair-raising adventures” broadcast during radio’s “Children’s Hours.” “My son has never known fear,” he wrote. They saw the intense excitement Annie and other shows inspired in children and quickly concluded that such excitement was dangerous and unhealthy. This imaginative power is precisely why some parents and reformers saw the radio in much the same way Ralphie's mother saw the leg lamp: as a seductive villain, sneaking into their homes to harm the minds and corrupt the morals of their children. The same lively imagination Ralphie uses to picture himself defending his family with a Red Ryder BB gun, or reduced to a blind beggar by the effects of Lifebuoy soap, brought Annie's adventures to life more vividly than a television ever could. “ All people during that period, budding delinquents, safecrackers, stock market manipulators, or whatever, listened to Little Orphan Annie,” wrote Richard Gehman in the Saturday Review in 1969.īecause radio’s “theater of the mind” requires a fertile imagination, it has always had a special appeal for children. The exploits of the redheaded comic-strip heroine and her dog Sandy-who battled gangsters, pirates, and other scoundrels on air from 1931 to 1942-had a surprisingly wide listenership. This scene perfectly captures the powerful hold that radio in general, and Little Orphan Annie in particular, had on young minds in the 1930s and 1940s, when A Christmas Story is set.
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“Only one thing in the world could've dragged me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window,” Ralphie's older self, voiced by the humorist Jean Shepherd (upon whose book the movie is based), says in narration. Ralphie immediately plops himself down and stares up at the family radio the way later generations would gaze unblinkingly at the TV. All she has to do is remind him that he's missing his “favorite radio program,” Little Orphan Annie.
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She can't stop her husband (Darren McGavin) from displaying his “major award” in their front window, but she knows just how to divert her son's attention elsewhere. Young Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) can't keep his eyes (or his hands) off the thing his mother (Melinda Dillion) looks on in pure horror. In a scene from the classic film A Christmas Story (1983), the arrival of a lamp in the shape of a woman's leg throws the Parker home into discord. Ralphie from A Christmas Story gets his decoder ring from Little Orphan Annie.