The Amazon Prime edition of It’s a Wonderful Life is nothing short of a desecration of a sacred cultural institution

Giphy images.

If you’ve ever clicked on a blog I wrote in the month of December (note: you should click on all of them repeatedly. Based on my credit card balance, it looks like I bought the Juan Soto family for Christmas). There’s no doubt I’ve stumbled across at least one reference to the greatest holiday movie of all time. It’s a wonderful life. In fact, I argue that it is one of the best films of any genre ever. I remember a particular episode of Siskel & Ebert There they each listed the 10 films they would show if they ever bought a theater and held a film festival, and both had Frank Capra’s masterpiece on their list.

A few summers ago I rented a house in the Finger Lakes and visited Seneca Falls, which bills itself as the real inspiration for Bedford Falls. And when leaving the It’s a wonderful life Museum, I apologized to the nice person in charge for walking around the store spitting out every line of dialogue. And somewhere along my journey I found this little item. It comes from the bar of the only man who actually had a better, happier life in the timeline where George Bailey was never born.

Sorry, Nick. Your bar is exactly the place where I want to spend my Christmas Eve. (Note that this location in Seneca Falls doesn’t actually exist. It’s just a novelty souvenir. We don’t live in such a good timeline either.)

This brings us to the whole alternate reality in the film. The nightmarish sequence in which George fulfills his wish of never being born, only to discover that the city he has spent his life trying to escape is now a dystopian hellscape ruled by an evil oligarch. That all his friends and family are trapped in miserable existences. His uncle is in a mental asylum. His beloved brother died as a small child. The woman he adores doesn’t recognize him. And of course her own children, the source of so much joy in his world, were never born. All of this represents the strongest emotional payoff in the history of cinema.

Unless you’re unlucky enough to see this version available on Prime Video:

What kind of fresh hell is this? How did anyone approve a change that made it seem like George’s guardian angel would loan him $8,000 and all his problems would be solved? With all the bleak, dispirited bleakness of his nonexistence, his redemptive story arc is now gone too. The entire message of the film, which makes such a timeless classic, is now reduced to a mere business deal.

Daily Mail – In the original version of the film, George tells the angel that he believes he is worth more dead than alive. The angel then tells George that he doesn’t know what he has done in his life, before showing him a version of a dark world in which he never existed.

It is then that George realizes that he has a wonderful life and is a positive influence on his loved ones, whom he desperately wants to return to as the film comes to a close.

But in the abridged version of the film on Prime, the moment where the angel tells George he needs to earn his wings ends abruptly with George running happily through the streets, having come to terms with his own life – without to mention what led him to his new acceptance. …

Amazon Prime has clarified that the full version of the film is still available on their platform.

Additionally, it appears that the film’s version was released after a copyright dispute regarding the scene, which was based on a short story.

Oh, so it’s shortened for length. Right. Because who has the 2:10 running time to invest in a film that generations have enjoyed for eight decades? Oh, wait. That’s not it. This is a copyright dispute. Despite the fact that this thing became eminent domain sometime in the late ’70s, which is why it became a staple on cable television. Pfft. Nice try, Bezos. But like Bailey Brothers Building & Loan when Mr. Potter attempted his hostile takeover, no one buys what you sell.

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This is some classy War on Christmas stuff. The answer to a desperate man’s prayers and the meaning of his existence revealed to him through the goodness of heaven are reduced to a mere banking transaction. The limited-time 0.0% APR you receive when you open a home equity line of credit. And exactly the kind of philistine pig ignorance we expect from people who have no idea why an intellectual property is liked IAWL is so widely admired.

It’s like showing Jawbut jump cutting from the crew of the Orca They head off to fight the shark and get straight to Hooper and Brody swimming back to Amity. It is Lord of the rings where the Fellowship leaves Rivendell, only to see Frodo waking up in his bed in Rivendell. It’s that star Wars Prequels say, “Somehow Palpatine has returned.” Which, literally, they did:

…because Disney sucks now and Jar Jar Abrams is incapable of original thought. This is what happens when people with no creativity of their own and no idea of ​​what makes a story truly great are put in charge of respected franchises.

I would be less outraged if my family hadn’t shown the 1942 Bing Crosby film over the weekend Holiday Innthat too on Prime. I won’t embed it here because Barstool doesn’t need that heat. But you can watch this film in full length, blackface minstrel show and everything. (Proceed to the 2:00 mark. But brace yourself.) And since I care about a world without censorship, that’s not a problem for me. Give us things as they were created, as they were presented in their time and place, and let us judge them by our own sensibilities. I’d rather see offensive shit and allow people to process it however they see fit than watch a streaming company chainsaw a perfect work of art It’s a wonderful life. It doesn’t belong to Amazon, it belongs to the world. So keep your dirty hands away from our timeless entertainment.