This is the real story of It's A Wonderful Life, a remake of She's A Sexual Wife. Because this story is so long and the length of it necessitates that it has chapters and therefore under the new rules is not allowed in the Winter Contest, this is my unofficial Winter Contest entry.
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Every Christmas holiday like most American families, we'd gather around the television and watch, It's A Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. That was such a great movie, a classic right up there with the Judy Garland's Wizard of Oz, Maureen O'Hara's Miracle on 34th Street with Natalie Wood playing the little girl, and Bing Crosby's White Christmas. I could watch those movies a thousand times and never tire of them. A time when life was simpler then, before television appeared in every home, before DVD's, cell phones, home computers, and the Internet, those were the days of innocence and fairy tales.
Hollywood could tell a good story back then, albeit a censored one. Back then, it wasn't like it is today. Then, everything was censored before it was shown to the public. They thought they were protecting us from ourselves. Back then, they would have censored a Disney movie. I can imagine the hard time they must have given Walt Disney over his movie, Bambi, a movie made in 1942.
"Uhm, you'll have to change the doe's name from Bambi to something more appropriate. What about Dorothy? The deer's name sounds too much like a stripper I used to know, I mean, it just sounds too much like a stripper's name. If you keep this name, soon we'll have strip joints all across America. And you can't name a rabbit, Thumper. Rabbits are known for having sex and by naming the rabbit Thumper, well, it gives the wrong image. It will make every man and woman in America want to have sex with one another. Then, the next thing you know is we'll have a baby boomer generation where everyone is having babies after World War II."
In hindsight, maybe the censor had a point about the names Bambi and Thumper. All this time I thought the baby boomer generation was a natural occurrence from the end of World War II, when it was all Walt Disney's fault.
"Zippity Doo Dah..." Now, we know why Jiminy Cricket likes to watch and Pinocchio's nose grows.
For some inexplicable reason, my Dad had a problem with the movie, It's A Wonderful Life. He hated that movie. Every year, we shushed him from trying to give us his reasons why he hated the movie so. We didn't want to hear the real story and know about the behind the scenes glimpse and the true information about the movie. We didn't want one of our favorite movies ruined. Besides, we thought he was kidding. We thought he was making it all up. As it turned out, he was no fan of Donna Reed or Jimmy Stewart, perhaps the real reason why he hated the movie so and the reason for this story.
He told us that we don't know the real story behind the movie and if we did, we would feel differently about the movie and not like it either. He told us that if we knew about the lack of morals of Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed that we wouldn't like them either. Moreover, he told us that once we knew what really happened, we'd view the movie and Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart with a different perspective and without the tears that well up our eyes throughout the movie.
"That slut, Donna Reed, is hardly innocent," he'd say between sips of his whiskey and water. "Look at her with her white gloves. They make her look so pure. They make her look so innocent," he'd say every time he watched a rerun of the Donna Reed Show and he watched them over and again.