How Disney Became Revolutionary & The Top Three Christmas Movies

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Welcome to the conversations that matter podcast. My name is John Harris and I am pleased to have with me today

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Steve Lively and he's gonna be talking about his book that I have just read

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Sam Lively. I'm sorry I called you Steve Lively, you know, there's a singer named Steve Lively. Are you related to him?

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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

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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

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Parents, especially and grandparents those who are concerned about what their kids are consuming and maybe even themselves

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I mean parents watch this just as much as kids it seems so Sam I just got to ask you.

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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

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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

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Parenting I've seen a lot of them be primed essentially to switch sides in the culture war and to lose their faith

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Primarily I believe because of what they consume and so I decided I was going to pick the

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Probably the most beloved entertainment company in the last 50 years of American history as the

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Focal point of my analysis because I'd seen it had a big impact on me had a big impact on the kids

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I grew up with and I think it's a big huge impact even bigger on The children of this coming generation

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Sam, you know, I we were talking before I started recording and you grew up in Southern, California and I'm from Southern, California originally and And I know that in California.

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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

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Going to Disneyland seeing every Disney movie and it's um, it's just more than an entertainment franchise.

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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

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I was reading your book is that You know a lot of time apologists are very focused on worldview and philosophies

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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

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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?

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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

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When you start out life and over the course of your life, you're looking to Write the story of your own life.

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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?

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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We see who the villains are who the heroes are very early on we see what types of behaviors are rewarded

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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

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Instead of just being consumed as an escape from our reality. I think it's better understood as a

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Informative a input into our reality to give us information on that We can then take into our own lives to decide.

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Is this the path I'm going to take? Is this the kind of is this what villains look like?

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This is what heroes look like and over time obviously one one

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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

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The way you look at life the way you look at heroes the way you look at causes and consequences Yeah, so it reinforces itself.

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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

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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

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We trust that after a few up -and -down thrills and spectacular new sites

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We will be posited safely back in our boring lives with no lasting trauma beyond the faint afterburn of the adrenaline

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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

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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

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Fictional lives that you're consuming and so over time. Yeah, that is gonna it's gonna prime you.

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I think the best example is is actually in in the frozen series that is currently

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Just passed a billion dollars to be him yet another huge that half of America will be watching on Christmas probably

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I know and so it's it's The the priming that occurs in that kind of story is that 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

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I escaping into some harmless fantasy Rather what you the reason it's so thrilling is you are projecting yourself into those characters.

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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

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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

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But I think it can help you to understand why stories can be dangerous is because your heart is not

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Temporarily preferring their world to yours the heart is actually expressing its true desire and if you allow that desire then to be

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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

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Bible with with with tradition Then yeah You're going to end up finding your own heart

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Pulling you in the direction of the storyteller has primed it to want to go as opposed to the way that the other

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Institutions of culture that you may trust more intellectually are pulling in. It's interesting

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I've been thinking about this more after I read your book because I you know, I grew up on a lot of Let's just say

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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

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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

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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

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Providence and their Political theory and how it made its way into their stories and I was thinking

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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

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Disney track most kids grow up Watching Disney movies from the Golden Age to all the way to Frozen 2 which is it

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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

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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 if 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

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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

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Because you seem to trace it from there's loyalist beginnings and then over time it becomes revolutionary

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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?

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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

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Hierarchical system right with a higher power at the top and that works on down through things like man over nature, right

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Civilization over primitivism like the patriarch ruling over the family and the children and so you have a

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Hierarchical structure that is in loyalist terms is believed to be good, right? It's protective.

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It's It's enshrining the progress of Man over a very dark past, you know

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So it's a the loyalist wants to preserve those hierarchies because they fear what happens when you overturn them, right?

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So the the hierarchy would be the first pillar then the second pillar would be this idea of good and evil right a very

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Primarily Christian derived but it can be downstream progression in in the old golden age

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They rarely were explicitly Christian, but they operated off of a very Distinctly Christian perspective on good and evil sin and redemption, right?

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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

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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

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Sacrifice in present for the future gain, right but but more fundamentally it's self -sacrifice being willing to sacrifice your own

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Well -being your own life even for the benefit of those around you and so those three things

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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

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They have also defined the revolutionaries the people who are trying to overthrow that loyalist

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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 may they want to smash the patriarchy because the patriarch is a

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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

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Instead of being objective good and objective evil. They they much prefer a subjective definition.

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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

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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

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Against what the loyalists stand for they're trying to overthrow and and replace it with this

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With a negative definition this idea of we are free from rules of the patriarch

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We are we have a whole new world out there where no one can tell us no and we can embrace

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What we were always meant to be if it wasn't for all these hierarchical Institutions that have always kept us down.

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Yeah in the in the third one there the sacrifice though the revolutionaries they want to Have a self -serving

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I guess like motive for living instead of a sacrificing for the group kind of Intimidation to jump away from Disney for a moment, although technically, it's

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Disney now that they purchased Fox Avatar was the classic example of the revolutionary ideal of sacrifice in which he sacrificed himself

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Yes, but he's sacrificing his old oppressive patriarchal identity to become one with the

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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

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Sacrificing the order the old order to make way for the new and you actually see that if you watch frozen 2

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It has a very explicit Sacrifice of the old

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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

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So you can't tell everything but in general like what happened at Disney? How did we go from you just mentioned

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Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty to frozen? yeah, what's it's a

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Tragic case study in Not not

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Realizing the the stakes of the of the cultural battle you enter into I mean Disney was essentially loyalist by default

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It emerged in And it really rose to prominence in a time when America was trying to resist and a very atheistic communistic

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Movement and fascistic movement that was sweeping Europe, right? So it was we had in God we trust, you know, we had all this very

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Loyalist messaging that was emerging from the 50s and Disney embraced it wholeheartedly. And so Walt Disney essentially

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Built a giant castle 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 Championing of those values and so as soon as he died in 1966

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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

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Understood the gravity of the ideological battles that were going on. So it was a son -in -law a few old hands from the

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From the the business side that we're trying to basically just draft on momentum And they got into trouble really quick and think about where Disney is

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I mean Disney's in Burbank Disney is surrounded by Hollywood and by the time Disney Walt's chosen successors.

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It's kind of gotten in gotten themselves over their heads that 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 Yeah, you you talk about when

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Mike Eisner took over in this Katzenberg and he he had a new formula which

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I guess brought in some Broadway influence on the Disney animations and Oliver was one of them

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But, you know, they kind of like changed the way that they were approaching animation and storytelling and And it's kind of like I was thinking about the movies from you know this era

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Like you were spot -on when you're like describing Like even for when

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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

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Mulan, you know, very new agey Like if there's any kind of Transcendence or Purpose in the movie.

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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

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And 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 it did yeah, it came it had a

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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 look to Broadway for that energy for that enthusiasm

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But with it came that Broadway ethic and the Broadway ethic was very much about emotional

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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 and that be the

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The trilogy the renaissance trilogy that watched Disney again on new secular new revolutionary footing was

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Little Mermaid Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and if you think of them as a trilogy almost like you would the

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Star Wars trilogy it works They're very it build progressively on the messaging and Little Mermaid actually starts out

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Well, I think I actually a big fan of Little Mermaid and I think it's almost prophetic of what would happen later

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But if you look at the way they set up King Triton, right this big beefy

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Divine patriarch right who's trying to protect his daughter who's trying to set boundaries?

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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

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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

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Ursula who is the Proto -feminist revolutionary right the person who's going to get her to smash the patriarchy, right?

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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 all that through the rest of the

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Renaissance you can see it progressively becoming a Vindication of Ursula Ursula actually wins the

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Renaissance and after her all ten villains of that era are all

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Men and almost exclusively Patriarchal men. Yeah so you immediately go to Beauty and the

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Beast which Caricaturizes masculinity with Gaston, right and demonizes it through the

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Beast, right? The Beast actually is an embodiment of toxic masculinity he is he is accursed by an enchantress who in the original fairy tale by the way was evil in the

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Disney version now becomes a sort of a benevolent Sort of a fairy type who gives the beast some benefit and so From Beauty and the

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Beast onward The patriarch is now bound right? It's it's something that is 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

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Defeating enemies who are almost exclusively male and repressive And the second wave

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Would you say because you said I was the first wave that is the second wave then these lot these live -action

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The new remakes of these cartoons with live actors Where's that?

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Well the second that's an interesting Sort of pivot from the company because that actually is more aligned with first wave

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Linda Woolverton was the 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

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Kind of except I think even reaching a little burnout levels with a lot of audiences But she was the one who started with Alice in Wonderland She went back and she

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Reimagined Alice which was a gap Golden Age Fairly fairly loyalist interpretation of that story and she turned it into a very revolutionary

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Very sort of Arch feminist kind of take on that story And so that really

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I would view that as a continuation of the first wave most of the if you look at most the live -action ones, they're either almost seen -for -seen remakes of the original

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Disney Renaissance works or they are Classic revolutionary revisions of Works like jungle book.

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So the second wave I would be the second wave is what we're seeing now with That sort of the woke version of Disney which instead of viewing things in terms of patriarchy

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Just Patriarch, which is the big villain for the first wave. The second wave is much more worried about This idea of guilt right this idea of Internal guilt, so it's less worried.

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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 the utopia that The revolution was supposed to deliver

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How do we how do we deal with the the the problem that it hasn't yet come? And so the the characters of the second wave the the patriarch has been bound

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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?

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Where are these sort of hidden loyalists out there preventing the revolution from from what movie would be a good example of that?

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I think Wreck -it Ralph. Oh, it's not like it's it. 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 released a couple

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Weeks ago frozen 2 probably takes the crown away from Wreck -it Ralph, but Wreck -it Ralph was really the prototype

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It was it was released in 2012 And it occurred right as a leadership transition had occurred in In Disney's Storytelling team

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John Lasseter had come over from Pixar and he didn't want to really force himself onto the classic

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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.

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It's called the great awokening, right? So they were starting to bring in some of those corporate generated ideas of intersectionality

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Wokeness into the Mythological form of narrative. It's a

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Wreck -it Ralph is the ultimate Primer I think for people's utopia. Those is another one that you told me

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Yeah, you told me you kind of I think you almost need to understand intersectionality to understand Zootopia But Wreck -it Ralph would be a great primer

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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

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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

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Ralph and his journey is really one of recognizing 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?

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How to become an ally and in in preventing him not only himself from rising to oppressive patriarchy

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But actually also going and try to take down anybody else who represents it now I'd like I'd like to talk about Pixar a little bit, but we're running short on time

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So I'm just gonna kind of throw that out there is you should get the book so you can learn about Pixar And I do recommend it

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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.

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All right. So yeah, just Google Google search the Trojan mouse on Amazon One last thing.

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I just want to be practical with you for a minute You said you had kids and you know, what do you do? What do you do as a parent when you're like, well,

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I don't have time to be an expert on you know what a protagonist should look like and You know the messaging of all these things before I take my kids

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I just want to go to the theater and have a good time So I'm just gonna ask you I know, you know, you've spent a lot more time thinking about this

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What do you do with your kids? Yeah. Well, I mean I just to answer the that first point. I mean, we don't have the luxury of treating entertainment as a

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Complete let our guard down time anymore. I mean you have to understand the people who tell the stories have a

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Mythology that is diametrically opposed to what anybody who's who's Traditionally like conservative or Christian Those are the the umbrella terms that loyalism captures and you don't have a luxury of letting your guard down and suspending disbelief

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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

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I do with my kids is I try to I don't boycott I don't shield them from from anything that Has Worldviews that that I disagree with but what

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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

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I can also talk to them through the process and not let them get completely swept away and it's a bit of a killjoy

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Sometimes but if you're if you're walking through with him If you're actually actively sitting down and watching their stuff with them and not just allowing them to be babysat

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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

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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

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Christmas, it's a great chance to just start talking Like why do you think that?

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Why do you think that he's bad in the story what what is the What is the the goal of this character is it why is he trying to accomplish this and if if they can start to see the

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The motives of those characters then you can take it to the next level. It's like do you think that that's true?

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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

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Which is for example that the the stereotyping of a certain type of role is always being villainous, right?

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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

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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

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True of my own life and then you can also do with the characters that they identify with right if you're watching a

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Aladdin right the the new live -action remake and and they're they're investing themselves into that Jasmine character into that Aladdin character

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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?

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We're happy that they did this but what if you really did that what if you really stole that loaf of bread, right?

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Right, you really Defied your father in that key moment.

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Would that be a good thing or would that be a bad thing? And so doing that what you can they can still enjoy the story.

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They can still get Love the songs they can still have fun, but they're not being swept away from you, right?

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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 to 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.

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I can't remember which but there's other Alternatives popping up out there with stories. I just saw there's an animated pilgrims progress that just came out recently.

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Yeah And that's that's another thing too is beyond Disney. It's really time for people

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Who are loyalists as I would turn to actually start investing even in lower quality productions?

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with the with the understanding that Even Disney started out pretty low quality, right?

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And that was people rewarded an innovator people rewarded somebody who was speaking to what they wanted to see

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And if we can do those same kind of things, even if we're not getting the same quality Early, we are investing our entertainment capital in things that could produce

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Much greater fruit later on as opposed to just going with what's already matured now, which is unfortunately usually in pretty hostile hands

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Yeah, that's great. Well, I appreciate you talking with me about this Sam and 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

31:20

For now, it's just the book. Okay, hopefully soon. We'll have full -blown ministry going but for now one really final thing

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I noticed I saw this on Twitter a couple weeks. So you have these these excellent Little like profiles of the movies where if you go to my

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Twitter account or the Facebook Trojan mouse page So if you just look up the

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Trojan mouse on Facebook I've been producing with the help of my wife these Disney dossiers

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Which are sort of 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

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Discussion points of every major Disney Film especially for people who are subscribers to Disney Plus.

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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.

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This is what I should celebrate And these are some discussion points that we could talk about his family afterwards.

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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

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If you go to Amazon, you can find the Trojan mouse if you want to subscribe to him on Twitter follow him It's Samuel P lively.

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That's Samuel P lively on Twitter and And I'm just gonna wrap this up with something

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Just a little fun because it is Christmas week And I just wanted to share some of my favorite

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Christmas films and in a book that I've been reading recently on Christmas That now I think has become a tradition

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But I'll start with the films. So a film I've watched around the Christmas season before I don't do this every year

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And this isn't a family tradition it's something that I just I've done but it's been her and I want this to be a tradition in my house kind of because It's a good movie

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If you haven't gotten a chance to watch it one of my favorite It's sort of a redemption story

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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.

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I But he it starts out with the Nativity it ends with The crucifixion and It's there's sort of like another life

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Judah been her his life parallels 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

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But he keeps intertwining he was bumping into Christ and it never shows Christ from the front.

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It always shows him from behind So you so there's sort of it has a different soundtrack whenever Christ comes on and so odd It gives me like goosebumps even thinking about it.

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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

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It's like another story in addition to but it presents Christ I think in a way that glorifies

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God and it's done. Well, I mean this whole Hollywood's Golden Age, you know awesome soundtrack big budget just You gotta see it it's it the nativity scene and the nativity music it's just it's my favorite nativity scene on film

34:25

All right, so that's one the other two are movies that I Have been you know in my family they were movies that we'd watch every

34:35

Christmas just about and 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

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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 so what's your favorite

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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.

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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

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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.

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It just it takes place around Christmastime at the end But it is a it's just a good movie

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About how our lives affect other people's lives and it reminds me of the the Francis Schaeffer quote.

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There are no small people no small places to God that God cares about even the details and And so I'm not gonna 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 last but not least is

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And by the way, it is fantasy. I should say that is fantasy. There's some people are gonna watch it They're like, hey, there's angels in this and angels don't do it.

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Yeah, there's there's some angels throughout it that it's anyway it's a fantasy, but it's a it's

35:51

Christian in its Its value system. So there's that Scrooge is another one

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Christmas Carol and 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.

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I've seen a few versions of it But this probably is the best one.

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Yeah, it's a Christmas Carol 1951 Yeah, IMDb says it's an 8 .1

36:17

out of 10, so it's a it's a good one and now Alistair Sim is the one who plays

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Scrooge in it and there's been so many renditions of this Of course, I like them up at Christmas Carol, too But but this this is a good version of it and I actually oh

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I have it somewhere in here I have a facsimile of the original Christmas Carol that was given to me by a good friend of mine and I'm hoping to read it for the first time this year, but on that note, here's another

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This this will that this is an awesome book guys, and maybe I'm a nerd Maybe I'm a history guy that just is out of touch

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I don't know, but this is a book called Old Christmas by Washington Irving and I just I don't know

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Maybe you'll never like You'll never trust my recommendations again If you read this,

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I don't know because it is kind of like it's a peculiar book It's not the kind of book that most people today read for pleasure

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But I got so much pleasure out of it Like I can't like I become obsessed with this book a little bit and it's the weirdest thing

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Like I found it. I found it on Amazon Audible, I found an audible and it's so short and I listened to it last year and I was like, oh, this is so good

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And so I listened to it again this year and my wife fell asleep. We were driving and so I ordered the

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The actual book itself because I was like, oh I got to read it and I'll probably listen to it now every Christmas but Washington Irving goes to England and He's already like talk about nostalgia, right?

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He's it's like the 1830s and he's already talking about how like They don't have the good old -fashioned

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Christmases anymore that happened on the English countryside And he wants to go find a good old -fashioned

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Christmas And so he eventually through a course of events he finds himself

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He describes all the events that lead him to the the countryside for into this manor

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The the way Christmas used to be done in the good old English days and I'm thinking man This is like 1830s and he's already talking about like how times have changed and we've lost, you know some of the traditions and And one of the things this is one of the things that's interesting to me.

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You talk about hierarchy, but The the lord of the manor or whatever they the guy who's running the estate

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Christmas was a time when he would he would endear himself to the peasants and Who near him on his property to the to his servants to those who are renting from him and so forth

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They would all come and he would just shower them with blessing. He'd set up games for them to play he'd

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Present, you know and he describes this he describes that this is like this was falling out of fashion but this is the way that used to be done and all there wasn't this class warfare thing like the the people that were on the bottom loved the the lord of the manor and he

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Loved them and at Christmas their hearts were knit together And it was like this beautiful thing that happened like they feasted for days and like I don't know

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It's just the coming together the unity It's just like a beautiful thing and it reminded me as I was reading

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I was like this is like what heaven's like kind of like like there's a hierarchy and like you sit at the master's table and you and I started thinking about all this and I was

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Like hey hierarchy is actually beautiful. It's vilified so often because it can it can be abused

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It's possible for it. Anything can be abused. Okay, but but it's actually when it's functioning, right the way it's supposed to function like when

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When people on the top of the social ladder are You know lavish blessings on people at the bottom and they look with gratitude at the people at the top like there's just something beautiful about it and I've never seen something capture it better Well an old

40:03

Christmas. So yeah now now you can go read old Christmas by Washington Irving It's very short and I hope you'll enjoy that.