The Wonderful Accident Behind a Christmas Classic
The Journal.
The Wall Street Journal
4.2 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Our colleague Ben Cohen is a business columnist, but recently for our podcast, he's had a slightly different beat. |
| 0:12.0 | And you also are kind of like our holiday correspondent because you just had you on the show pretty recently talking about cranberry sauce around Thanksgiving. |
| 0:20.0 | I come on the show to talk about very old foods and very old movies but specifically around |
| 0:27.3 | big holidays. Do you like Christmas movies? I do like Christmas movies. Yeah, when I I am Jewish so |
| 0:35.3 | Christmas to me is like eating Chinese food and going to the movies. |
| 0:39.1 | What's your favorite Christmas movie? I think it's Elf. I might have to say that my favorite Christmas movie is |
| 0:44.0 | is Die Hard. |
| 0:45.0 | All right, I'm not doing that right now. |
| 0:47.0 | That's a whole thing and that's like that's a separate podcast and we're not going to do that right now. |
| 0:51.0 | Die Hard, Elf, those are popular, but when it comes to the |
| 0:55.3 | holidays, no movie is more embedded in American pop culture than it's a |
| 0:59.7 | wonderful life. Merry Christmas movie, Howl! |
| 1:04.0 | Merry Christmas Emporium! |
| 1:07.0 | It is still insanely popular, and it has lasted the test of time. |
| 1:13.2 | The American Film Institute ranks its |
| 1:18.0 | a wonderful life as the 11th greatest American film ever made. |
| 1:21.9 | And one analytics firm said it was near the top of its |
| 1:24.7 | list of the most streamed movies during the holidays. Its wonderful life was right |
| 1:29.2 | up there with Home Alone among the Christmas movies that we can't stop watching and it was easily |
| 1:34.1 | the oldest movie on this list of Christmas movies that remain relevant today. |
| 1:39.1 | It's a wonderful life came Out in 1946. |
| 1:42.8 | It stars Jimmy Stewart, who was one of Hollywood's biggest celebrities back then. |
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