How Disney Became Revolutionary & The Top Three Christmas Movies

Why Stories Shape Worldview

Welcome to the conversations that matter podcast. My name is John Harris and I am pleased to have with me today Steve Lively and he's gonna be talking about his book that I have just read Sam Lively. I'm sorry I called you Steve Lively, you know, there's a singer named Steve Lively.

Are you related to him? No, but my students always say I look like a Steve so you do look like I'll forgive Sam. I'm sorry about that Sam Lively. And you wrote this book that you gave to me which I've read About it mostly focusing on Disney.

It's called the Trojan Mouse and It just came out and I would recommend it to all Parents, especially and grandparents those who are concerned about what their kids are consuming and maybe even themselves.

I mean parents watch this just as much as kids it seems. So Sam I just got to ask you. Why did you write this book? Well, I mean I have two kids of my own five-year-old or just turned six and a three-year-old and I've witnessed An entire generation of kids Christian and non-christian who have been raised in an entertainment saturated environment and even with very motivated very principled Parenting.

I've seen a lot of them be primed essentially to switch sides in the culture war and to lose their faith. Primarily I believe because of what they consume and so I decided I was going to pick the Probably the most beloved entertainment company in the last 50 years of American history as the Focal point of my analysis because I'd seen it had a big impact on me.

Had a big impact on the kids I grew up with and I think it's having a big huge impact even bigger on The children of this coming generation. Yeah, Sam, you know, I we were talking before I started recording and you grew up in Southern, California.

I'm from Southern, California originally and And I know that in California. It's maybe a little different but things are. The whole country seems to be going the way of California and in California Disney was kind of like a religion almost like like some people are fanatics.

Going to Disneyland seeing every Disney movie and it's um, it's just more than an entertainment franchise. It's like a It's it's a whole world of mythology. Like we have a biblical stories like these are the stories that are shaping our culture and one of the things that clicked for me when I was reading your book is that.

You know a lot of time apologists are very focused on worldview and philosophies. But we neglect I think so often stories and the impact mythology has and you seem to get that and I was hoping you could explain Just a little more for someone who's just never heard this and never thought.

Who thinks that stories don't have an impact on worldview? Flesh that out. How do stories impact the worldview? Sure. Well, and it's best to look at yourself as a sort of a blank slate. When you start out life and over the course of your life, you're looking to Write the story of your own life.

And so as reference you're going to be looking primarily to other people's stories and so we have obviously our own parents lives are our peers lives as Narratives for us to consume but especially in a modern age where?

Entertainment consumes such a huge portion of our time. We're getting a very large percentage of our stories of the of the answers to life. From the kind of narratives that we're consuming through entertainment.

So for an example, we look around us constantly for examples of what to do and what not to do, right? We're looking for the sort of the guidebook to life and so we're going to that's what we would we treat mythology as mythology is the Is the blueprint it's the blueprint for life and you can see it in a story like Pinocchio.

For example to go to Golden Age Disney, you know. We see who the villains are who the heroes are very early on. We see what types of behaviors are rewarded what types of behaviors are punished. We see what type of world that Pinocchio lives in.

If there's good if there's evil and so all those kind of things. Instead of just being consumed as an escape from our reality. I think it's better understood as a Informative a input into our reality to give us information on that.

We can then take into our own lives to decide. Is this the path I'm going to take? Is this the kind of is this what villains look like? This is what heroes look like and over time obviously one one. Individual narrative is not going to transform anybody's worldview.

But over time you plug in enough of that material enough of that narrative material. And eventually you are going to be remaking reshaping. The way you look at life the way you look at heroes the way you look at causes and consequences.

Entertainment as a Zero-Commitment Package

Yeah, so it reinforces itself. There's a quote from your book. You said what makes the lure of entertainment particularly irresistible is that we believe it's risk-free. Experience movies and other forms of narrative driven entertainment aren't the only products to promise us the world.

But they are the only ones that can wrap it up in a zero commitment package. We trust that after a few up-and-down thrills and spectacular new sites. We will be posited safely back in our mooring lives with no lasting trauma beyond the faint afterburn of the adrenaline.

And you say that's not true. You're actually bringing something with you when you're done with that journey yeah, and it's a the the title of that of that chapter is called the melting plot and it I think it does function somewhat similar is that you're marinating in narratives constantly and You're observing your subconscious is observing even if you're not consciously realizing it what's happening to the people around you whether that's in real life or whether that's the Fictional lives that you're consuming and so over time.

Yeah, that is gonna it's gonna prime you. I think the best example is is actually in in the frozen series that is currently. It just passed a billion dollars to be him yet another huge that half of America will be watching on Christmas probably I know.

And so it's it's the the priming that occurs in that kind of story. Is it again people look at it as a magical escape from reality? But what it actually is it's a it's a projection of what people believe reality should be and If you if you if you understand that shift instead of I am I escaping into some harmless fantasy.

Rather what you the reason it's so thrilling is you are projecting yourself into those characters. You are allowing a storyteller to take you where you believe you should be and and if you understand that about your heart that the reason your heart is drawn to a story is Not because it is trying to escape life.

But it's trying to enter into a better life if you if you understand that it's a fairly subtle distinction. But I think it can help you to understand why stories can be dangerous is because your heart is not Temporarily preferring their world to yours the heart is actually expressing its true desire and if you allow that desire then to be shaped and transformed by the storyteller and not something that you consciously are taking Stewardship over and in shaping to in accord with With the Bible with with with tradition.

Then yeah. You're going to end up finding your own heart. Pulling you in the direction that the storyteller has primed it to want to go as opposed to the way that the other Institutions of culture that you may trust more intellectually are pulling.

Mm-hmm. It's interesting I've been thinking about this more after I read your book because I you know, I grew up on a lot of I Let's just say I was different than a lot of kids. I did watch some Disney but like my parents You know, they didn't really operate based on the rating systems as much as they did on content and message and so I watched a lot of Westerns and war movies that I think my peers would have thought were violent perhaps at the time or whatever a Lot of you know old John Wayne movies things like that and I've thought about this I thought you know wonder how much that actually really affected me because I think it did like I I was doing a recently you would understand this but a paper on John Ford and Sergio Leone and They're not to get off the Disney track too much.

But I was looking at you know their archetypes and the way that they view reality and the way they view Providence and their Political theory and how it made its way into their stories and I was thinking I'm like, yeah.

That's that's where I got that, you know, and I would see things I had never seen before but to get back on the Disney track most kids grow up Watching Disney movies from the Golden Age to all the way to Frozen 2, which is it Frozen 2?

I think that's the one that now that's the one that just released. Yeah. Yeah, and and you have a brilliant way I think of Sort of categorizing this culture battle and it's a way that I I don't know if you got this from somewhere else or you came up with it, but You talk about two groups of people.

Don't revolutionaries and loyalists and You don't see it as kind of like two fronts where you have like, you know traditionally we think of like conservatives liberals fighting but you think you see it as like it's actually a culture siege not a culture war and the The loyalists are holding out against the revolutionaries who are trying to overturn The current, you know paradigm and and I want you to if you can flesh this out with Disney a little bit.

Because you seem to trace it from there's loyalist beginnings and then over time it becomes revolutionary. Mm-hmm. What what does it mean to be loyalist? What does it mean to be revolutionary? And and what is what does that story look like?

How did that happen in Disney? Right? Well, you have you have essentially three pillars of A belief that I think define the loyalist and a loyalist is somebody who's going to try to preserve those pillars so the first of those is a belief in a Hierarchical system right with a higher power at the top and that works on down through things like man over nature right civilization over primitivism like the patriarch ruling over the family and the children and so you have a Hierarchical structure that is in loyalist terms is believed to be good, right?

It's protective. It's it's enshrining the progress of man over a very dark past, you know, so it's a The loyalist wants to preserve those hierarchies because they fear what happens when you overturn them, right?

So the the hierarchy would be the first pillar then the second pillar would be this idea of good and evil right a very Primarily Christian derived but it can be downstream progression in in the old golden age they rarely were explicitly Christian, but they operated off of a very Distinctly Christian perspective on good and evil sin and redemption, right?

So the idea that there is an evil out there. There is a force for good that is resisting that evil and that there's only a few paths for redemption. In light of that battle between good and evil and the sin that can contaminate people in As they become sort of collateral damage of that battle so the loyalist doesn't believe in those two pillars and then the final pillar is the the idea of sacrifice and that's that can be sacrificed in terms of time preference.

Sacrificing present for the future gain right but but more fundamentally it's self-sacrifice being willing to sacrifice your own. Well-being your own life even for the benefit of those around you and so those three things I think are the the three basic pillars that loyalists are always going to Be able to rally around and in the culture war terms.

They have also defined the revolutionaries the people who are trying to overthrow that loyalist Center so if you think of it as two concentric circles where the loyalists are trying to preserve those three fundamental ways of looking at life and The revolutionaries are trying to either redefine them or completely overthrow them.

And so a revolutionary is going to be somebody who is trying to overthrow any sort of oppressive hierarchy, right? A they they they want to smash the patriarchy because the patriarch is a Hierarch right a hierarchical relationship over others, right?

And so they want to write and that hierarchy they also want to redefine good and evil Instead of being objective good and objective evil. They they much prefer a Subjective definition that's much more about group status.

So if you are part of a oppressed group, for example a revolutionary is going to view anything done against that group as Evil, right and they're going to justify anything done on behalf of that group as good.

So it's a it's a it's a shift from again. This is a little bit more philosophical. I meant to get but the general idea is that the revolutionaries are Against what the loyalists stand for they're trying to overthrow and and replace it with this With a negative definition this idea of we are free from rules of the patriarch.

We are we have a whole new world out there where no one can tell us no and we can embrace What we were always meant to be if it wasn't for all these hierarchical Institutions that have always kept us down.

Sacrifice, Patriarchy, and the Revolutionary Ideal

Yeah in the in the third one there the sacrifice though the revolutionaries they want to Have a self-serving I guess like motive for living instead of a sacrificing for the group kind of Intuition to jump away from Disney for a moment, although technically it's Disney now that they purchased Fox Avatar was the classic example of the revolutionary ideal of sacrifice in which he sacrifices himself.

Yes, but he's sacrificing his old oppressive patriarchal identity. To become one with the mother nature spirit, which is radically revolutionary in terms of of Flipping every single hierarchy along the whole spectrum and so the the idea of sacrifice from a revolutionary perspective is you're Sacrificing the order the old order to make way for the new and you actually see that if you watch frozen 2 It has a very explicit Sacrifice of the old Arendelle, I think it's the name of the city to the nature gods as a as penance for their colonial Oppressive past so so tell me this how did the transition and I know that your whole books about it.

So you can't tell everything but in general like what happened at Disney? How do we go from you just mentioned Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty to frozen? Yeah, what's it's a tragic case study in not Not realizing the the stakes of the of the cultural battle you enter into.

I mean Disney was essentially loyalist by default it emerged in. And it really rose to prominence in a time when America was trying to resist and a very atheistic communistic Movement and fascistic movement that was sweeping Europe, right?

So it was we had in God we trust, you know we had all of this very Loyalist messaging that was emerging from the 50s and Disney embraced it wholeheartedly. And so Walt Disney essentially built a giant castle to to preserve these values.

But he never really created a good succession plan to ensure that once he was gone. That there was going to be someone continuing that um championing of those values and so as soon as he died in 1966 um The jungle book was the last movie animated movie that he directly supervised there was a giant leadership void and he had never really filled it with anyone who Um understood the gravity of the ideological battles that were going on so it was a son-in-law um a few old hands from the uh.

From the the business side that were trying to basically just draft on momentum. And they got into trouble really quick and think about where disney is. I mean disney's in burbank Disney is surrounded by hollywood and by the time um Disney waltz chosen successors.

It's kind of gotten in Gotten themselves over their heads and were looking for guidance. They ended up looking around them to hollywood and hollywood was more than happy to fill that Ideological vacuum with the radical antithesis of everything that disney had tried to stand up for.

The Broadway Influence and the Disney Renaissance

Yeah, you you talk about um when mike eisner took over in this catstenberg and he he had a new formula um. Which I guess brought in some broadway influence. On the disney animations, uh and uh, Oliver was one of them.

Um, but you know, they they kind of like changed the way that they were approaching animation and storytelling and uh, and It's kind of like I was thinking about the movies from you know, this era. Um, Like you you were spot on when you're like describing.

Um, Like even for when I was a kid, like I remember being in the theater crying because of lion king, right? I remember like lion king very new agey moulin, you know, very new agey. Um, like if there's any kind of uh, transcendence or Purpose in the movie.

It's not from a christian understanding of what that would look like. It's it's like they got to do it in a different context somewhere On the other side of the world. Yeah, if you look at that as sort of first wave.

That was the first wave of revolutionary sentiment and it did yeah it came it had a broadway style and that was where they really got the The magic back because disney was had been without Creative inspiration for quite a while since walt disney's death and so they looked to broadway for that energy.

For that enthusiasm, but with it came that broadway ethic and the broadway ethic was very much about emotional Self-fulfillment being the ultimate king which is a very revolutionary idea that everything has to be sacrificed to make sure that you're happy that you are personally fulfilled and so you can see that as the running theme and To make sure that you can get happiness think about what has to be sacrificed think about what has to be overthrown and in those stories, especially early on in the the The uh, the trilogy the renaissance trilogy that watched disney again on new secular new revolutionary footing was little mermaid Beauty and the beast and aladdin and if you think of them as a trilogy almost like you would the star wars trilogy.

It works. They're very they build progressively on the messaging and little mermaid actually starts out. What I think I actually am a big fan of little mermaid and I think it's almost prophetic of what would happen later.

But if you look at the way they set up king triton, right this big beefy Divine patriarch right who's trying to protect his daughter who's trying to set boundaries. Who's trying to teach her how to be a woman, right?

And then against that is her own heart right her own restless rebellious Singing heart, you know, like she wants to be a part of their world someone else's world and so into that we then introduce ursula who is the Proto-feminist revolutionary right the person who's going to get her to smash the patriarchy, right?

She can have the desire of her heart. So if you follow from that I mean, obviously that doesn't work out very well for ursula in little mermaid. But if you follow that through the rest of the renaissance, you can see it progressively becoming a vindication of ursula ursula actually wins the renaissance and after her all 10 villains of that era are all All men and almost exclusively patriarchal men.

Yeah so you immediately go to Beauty and the beast which caricaturizes masculinity with gaston. Right and demonizes it through the beast, right? The beast actually is an embodiment of toxic masculinity.

He is he is a cursed by an enchantress who in the original fairy tale, by the way was evil in the disney version now becomes a Sort of a benevolent Sort of a fairy type who gives the beast his own benefit and so from beauty and the beast onward.

The patriarch is now bound right? It's it's something that is uh has to be overthrown to allow for people like bell then moving on jasmine pocahontas mulan right for them to Become full-flowered heroines who are now pursuing self-actualization.

Who are defeating enemies who are almost exclusively? male and repressive and the second wave, um, would you say. Because you said that was the first wave is the second wave then these uh, these live action.

Um, the the new remakes of these cartoons with live actors. Or is that well the second one that's an actually interesting. Uh, sort of Pivot from the company because that actually is more aligned with first wave.

Uh, wendell wolverton was the um screenwriter behind beauty and the beast the first beauty and the beast. And she was the one who really kicked off the live action craze that is now um kind of I think he can reach in a little burnout levels with a lot of audiences.

But she was the one who started with alice in wonderland. Um, she went back and she Reimagined alice which was a gap golden age. Fairly, uh fairly loyalist interpretation of that story and she turned it into a very revolutionary very sort of um Arch feminist kind of take on that story.

And so that really I would view that as a continuation of the first wave. Most of the if you look at most of the live action ones, they're either almost scene for scene remakes of the original disney renaissance works or they are um classic revolutionary revisions of Of works like jungle book.

So the second wave I would view the second wave as what we're seeing now with. The sort of the woke version of disney which instead of viewing things in terms of patriarchy. Of just patriarchy which is the big villain of the first wave the second wave is much more worried about um.

This idea of guilt right this idea of of internal guilt. So it's it's less worried. Although they still demonize the patriarch whenever they can it's much more about how do we come to terms with this idea that the um the utopia.

That the revolution was supposed to deliver. How do we how do we deal with the the uh, The problem that hasn't yet come and so the the characters of the second wave the the patriarch has been bound. The revolution has been loosed on the earth.

And so usually what the second wave is trying to answer is why isn't the revolution working? Where are these sort of hidden loyalists out there preventing the revolution from from what movie would be a good example of that?

I think wreck-it ralph. Oh, it's not I thought you'd say that. Yeah, it's not the best known. I mean if you go and watch frozen 2 frozen 2 is in the book because it was just uh released a couple Weeks ago frozen 2 probably takes the crown away from wreck-it ralph.

But wreck-it ralph was really the prototype. It was it was uh released in 2012. And it occurred right as a leadership transition had occurred in uh in disney's uh storytelling team. Uh, john laster had come over from pixar and he didn't want to really force himself onto the classic disney animation brand.

So he brought in a whole a new team and in that team. There was a group of people who brought right around 2011. It's called the great awokening, right? So they were starting to bring in some of those corporate generated ideas of intersectionality and wokeness into the the Mythological form of narrative.

It's a wreck-it ralph is the ultimate Primer I think for people's utopia. Those is another one that you tell me. Yeah Zootopia you kind of I think you almost need to understand intersectionality to understand zootopia.

But wreck-it ralph would be a great primer trying to figure out what why are these people so worried about this kind of stuff? And it really is if you look at wreck-it ralph it's about this video game villain who has to become a Who has to come to terms with his own villainy has to realize that he is the problem.

So it's all these ideas of of like white fragility. And white privilege are all bound up in the character of wreck-it ralph and his journey is really one of recognizing um how to move out of the way to make way for the next generation of leaders and.

And how to then spend whatever heroic energy does have smashing people like him, right how to become an ally in in uh in preventing him not only himself from rising to oppressive patriarchy. But actually also going and trying to take down anybody else who represents it.

Practical Parenting and How to Watch Disney Oppositionally

Now i'd like i'd like to talk about pixar a little bit, but we're running short on time. So i'm just going to kind of throw that out there is you should get the book so you can learn about pixar. Um, and I do recommend it.

Uh Amazon is where I think you that's where you sent it to me. Is that the place you'd like people to go? Amazon the trojan mouse. All right, so yeah just google google search the trojan mouse on amazon.

Um one last thing. I just want to be practical with you for a minute. You said you had uh kids and um, you know, what do you do? What do you do as a parent when you're like, well, I don't have time to be an expert on uh, you know what a protagonist should look like and You know the messaging of all these things before I take my kids I just want to go to the theater and have a good time.

So i'm just going to ask you I know, you know, you've spent a lot more time thinking about this. What do you do with your kids? Yeah, well, I mean just to answer the that first point. I mean we don't have the luxury of treating entertainment as a um Complete let our guard down time anymore.

I mean you have to understand the people who tell the stories have a mythology that is diametrically opposed to what anybody who's who's Traditionally like conservative or christian, you know. Those are the umbrella terms that loyalism captures and you don't have a luxury of letting your guard down and suspending disbelief.

So that unfortunately there's bad news on that front. Is you just got to be willing to go in there and be willing to to view things oppositionally? But what I do with my kids. Is I try to I don't boycott I don't shield them from uh from anything that uh has worldviews that uh that I disagree with but what I do try to do is I try to Approach it with them.

Oppositionally, right? So as if if i'm not allowing myself to get swept away I can also talk to them through the process and not let them get completely swept away. And it's a bit of a kill joy sometimes.

But if you're if you're walking through with them if you're actually actively sitting down and watching Their stuff with them and not just allowing them to be babysat by the kind of entertainment. That's that you're putting on.

Then you're going to be able to have these conversations and kids love it. I mean kids really do like to talk about the stuff that they've just consumed with you, right? So if you're watching frozen 2 or frozen this this christmas, it's a great chance to just start talking.

Like why do you think? that um. Why do you think that that he's bad in the story? What what is the um, What is the the the goal of this character? Is it why is he trying to accomplish this and if if they can start to see the um The motives of those characters then you can take it to the next level and it's like do you think?

That that's true. Do you think that that most people who are in that position would act like that way? And so you can just start to get at the the the ideas that are potentially dangerous um, which is for example that the Stereotyping of a certain type of role is always being villainous, right?

As as as males and authorities always potentially being abusive or or tyrannical, right and so you just ask them to compare those characters with positive role models in their own life. Um and to get them to think about well, no, that's that's not representative.

That is not something that that I think is going to be. Um true of my own life and then you could also do with the characters that they identify with right if you're watching a Aladdin right the the new live-action remake and and they're They're investing themselves into that jasmine character into that aladdin character.

You can just ask them is what he did right here. Would you say that would be good? Right is the the story is making it good, right? We're happy that they did this but what if you really did that what if you really stole that loaf of bread, right?

Right, you really um defied your father in that key moment. Would that be a good thing or would that be a bad thing? And so doing that you make them still enjoy the story. They can still get Love the songs they can still have fun, but they're not being swept away from you, right?

You don't want them to be pulled away from you into a hostile storytelling world without you having to say it and you said too in your book that they can still go back to those golden era films and watch them because they're available and There's other companies.

I can't remember which but there's other Alternatives popping up out there with uh stories. I just saw there was an animated pilgrims progress that just came out recently. Yeah. And that's that's another thing too is beyond disney.

It's really time for people Who are loyalists as I would turn to actually start investing even in lower quality productions with the with the understanding that Even disney started out pretty low quality, right?

And that was people rewarded an innovator people rewarded somebody who was speaking to what they wanted to see. And if we can do those same kind of things, even if we're not getting the same quality Early, we we are investing our entertainment capital in things that could produce much greater fruit Later on as opposed to just going with what's already matured now, which is unfortunately usually in pretty hostile hands.

Favorite Christmas Films and Old Christmas

Yeah, that's great. Well, I appreciate you talking with me about this. Uh sam and um. Is there somewhere else you want to direct people to find you or is it just the book just go to amazon and type in?

Trojan mouse. I don't know for now. It's just the book. Okay, hopefully soon. We'll have a full-blown ministry going but for now. One really final thing I noticed I saw this on twitter a couple weeks ago.

You have these these excellent, uh little like profiles of the movies. Where if you go to my twitter account, um, or the facebook trojan mouse page. Um, so if you just look up the trojan mouse on facebook i've been producing with the help of my wife these uh, disney dossiers, which are sort of uh, So you don't have to read the whole book or if you do read the book and you forget some of the details.

The whole idea is to give you a profile good bad discussion points of every major disney Film especially for people who are subscribers to disney plus. I hope this will be a really invaluable aid where you can just click Look through it.

Okay. This is what I should look out for. This is what I should celebrate. Um, and these are some discussion points that we could talk about as family afterwards. Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you. Sam. God bless you.

Have a merry christmas you too. All right. Bye now, so i'm thankful that sam lively was able to join me and I cannot recommend His book enough if you go to amazon. You can find the trojan mouse if you want to subscribe to him on twitter follow him.

Uh, it's samuel p lively. That's samuel p lively. Um on twitter. And um, and i'm just going to wrap this up with something um, just a little fun because It is christmas week and I just wanted to share some of my favorite christmas films and in a book that i've been reading recently on christmas, um that now I think has become a tradition, um,.

But i'll start with the films. So, um. A film i've watched around the christmas season before I don't do this every year. And this isn't a family tradition. This is something that I just I i've done but uh has been her and I want this to be a tradition in my house kind of because It's a good movie.

Um, if you haven't gotten a chance to watch it one of my favorite, um, it's sort of a redemption story. Um,. But but one of my favorite elements in it is it's a story of christ in a way. But it's it's from the peripheral like christ isn't the center character of it.

I. But he it starts out with the nativity it ends with Uh the crucifixion and it's There's sort of like another life judah ben-hur his life parallels um christ's life except that he's involved in other things like he's.

You know, there's there's a lot of action in it, but he keeps intertwining. He was bumping into christ and it never shows christ from the front. It always shows him from behind. So you so there's sort of and it has a different soundtrack whenever christ comes on and so it gives me like goosebumps.

Even thinking about it. I love that movie, but it's it's a It doesn't really compromise in any way that I can remember the biblical message. It's like another story in addition to. But it presents christ, I think in a way that glorifies god and it's done.

Well, I mean this whole hollywood's golden age you know awesome soundtrack big budget just um. Uh, you you gotta see it it's the nativity scene and the nativity music it's just it's my favorite nativity scene on film um.

All right. So that's one. Um, the other two are movies that um, I Have been you know in my family, they were uh movies that we'd watch every christmas just about and um, One of them is a movie I watched with my wife the other night called it's a wonderful life and you know.

The reason i'm bringing this up you think everyone would know about it. But I was getting my hair cut about a year ago. And I asked the person cutting my hair. I said, what's your favorite christmas movie?

And she started rattling off all these hallmark movies. I had never heard of. And I said what about it's a wonderful life. She goes. What's that? I'm like with jimmy stewart. Who's he i'm like All right.

Well You have a homework assignment. Um, we watched it the other night and it is. It is a really good movie. It's not. It doesn't have the nativity scene. It just it takes place around christmas time at the end.

Um, but it is a it's just a good movie. Um about How our lives affect other people's lives and um, it reminds me of the francis schaeffer quote. There are no small people no small places to god that god cares about even the details and um.

And so I would i'm not going to tell you the whole plot. But it's a very good movie and I would encourage you to watch that teaches good moral lessons and then um last but not least Is uh, and by the way, it is fantasy.

I should say that is fantasy. There's some people are gonna watch and they're like, hey, there's angels in this and angels don't do it yeah, there's there's some angels throughout it that it's anyway, it's a fantasy, but it's a it's christian in its um in its value system, so there's that um, scrooge is another one, uh christmas carol and um, I should have had this queued up probably but it's the I think it's 1951 version of scrooge that we've always watched.

I've seen a few versions of it um. But this probably is the best one. Yeah, it's a christmas carol 1951 uh, yeah imdb says it's an 8 .1 out of 10, so it's uh, it it's a good one and um Alistair sim is the one who plays scrooge in it and there's been so many renditions of this, of course, I like the muppet christmas carol too, but Uh, but this this is a good version of it and I actually oh I have it somewhere in here I have a facsimile Of the original christmas carol that was given to me Uh by a good friend of mine and um, i'm hoping to read it for the first time this year but on that note, here's another um This this will this is an awesome book guys, and maybe i'm a nerd.