![]() ![]() Jingle All the Way’s Howard plays the usual Schwarzenegger familial tension out in reverse. In the scene below, the fictional Slater saves the real Arnold and they briefly interact. In Last Action Hero, for example, he plays both Jack Slater the fictional movie character, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hollywood movie star who plays Slater. The subtext of most of these “Family Protector” movies - and the main text, in a couple of cases - is the question of whether a macho action hero could become a responsible father and loving husband. That split between Schwarzenegger the badass and Schwarzenegger the good dad is often made literal in these films, with Arnold taking on dual roles or playing characters with multiple identities. The shift towards all these parental figures was surely personal for Schwarzenegger, whose own children were mostly born during this period. Fatherhood is also at the center of Junior, a very strange kind of spiritual sequel to Schwarzenegger’s Twins. Once again teaming with Danny DeVito, they play a pair of scientists who figure out how to impregnate men, and make Schwarzenegger’s character the first test subject. Schwarzenegger played more traditional fathers too, like in True Lies, where his Harry Tasker is a master spy whose family believes he’s a humble computer salesman. ![]() In Last Action Hero, fictional movie cop Jack Slater becomes partners with a precocious film fan who uses a magic ticket to enter the world of the movies. ![]() In Terminator 2, he is sworn to protect (and inadvertently learns to be human from) a young John Connor. In the process, he woos a fellow teacher, and becomes a surrogate father to her young son. With the surprising success of Kindergarten Cop, that sort of role - the burly yet empathetic stand-in dad - became a staple of Schwarzenegger’s throughout the early ’90s. These “Family Protector” movies begin in earnest with 1990’s Kindergarten Cop, where Schwarzenegger plays a more stereotypical action hero - an unstoppable cop - who slowly morphs into a cuddly kindergarten teacher as part of an undercover operation. In fact, Jingle All the Way acts as the capstone to a whole phase of his acting work from the early and mid 1990s where he played one heroic father after another trying to save or improve the lives of children. But if the subject matter didn’t make perfect sense as a wacky kids movie, it did make sense for Schwarzenegger at that point in his career. Sure enough, Jingle All the Way was not as big of a box-office hit as Home Alone, earning just $129 million worldwide compared to Home Alone’s $475 million. Your effort is irrelevant to their pleasure. (Speaking from experience as a father of two, kids don’t care how hard or how easy a toy is to get. So it features a protagonist that children don’t relate to, with goal they wouldn’t have much interest in. While it’s filled with broad physical comedy, the key kid character is barely involved, and the primary focus is instead an exasperated workaholic dad’s increasingly desperate search for this toy. As a result, Jingle All the Way is a strange children’s movie. The main difference between Home Alone and Jingle All the Way is that the former was told from the child’s perspective, with little Macaulay Culkin defending his home from a pair of bumbling burglars, while the latter focuses more on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father character. The two films also share a key creative figure: Chris Columbus, who directed Home Alone and produced Jingle All the Way. Jingle All the Way’s combination of Christmas sentiment and grown men getting hit in the groin for laughs was clearly inspired by Home Alone, which opened in theaters a few years earlier and used the same formula to become one of the most financially successful comedies in history. ![]()
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