Home Alone and A Christmas Story may be two completely different movies, but both have blonde-haired, shenanigan-making protagonists audiences have come to love, Kevin McCallister and Ralphie Parker. It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculous hijinks each of them endures, they are just kids after all.
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But, like Dennis the Menace (another blond-haired hooligan!) when you stop to think about it, you may not want to spend much time around either of these troublemakers. Let’s take a look at each of them and see who’s the worst of the two. Here are 5 reasons each one of them is terrible.
RALPHIE: AVERAGE WRITER WHO THINKS HE’S AMAZING
One of the assignments Ralphie and his class receive is writing a theme, “What I Want for Christmas”. It may be the only assignment Ralphie’s ever been excited by and he takes pride in declaring that a Red Rider carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle is indeed the best present one could receive for Christmas.
He goes on to imagine his teacher grading the assignment, dolling out Fs to his classmates. But as she stumbles upon Ralphie’s theme, he imagines her celebrating his work and awarding him an A++++++++. Later on, however, the assignment is returned to Ralphie, receiving a mere C+. Now, that’s still a passing grade and he’s only 9, but who can stand writers who think their work is God’s gift to man?
KEVIN: CAN’T PACK A SUITCASE
We are introduced to Kevin on the eve of his family’s Christmas trip to Europe. Inexplicably, he is bewildered at what to pack for the coming holiday ahead. He spends most of the evening going around to his siblings and asking them for help. At first, you can’t help but sympathize with a pre-adolescent kid who still isn’t ready for maybe the biggest trip of his life so far.
But, as we see throughout the rest of the movie, Kevin has a remarkable imagination, protecting his house using rather creative methods. Why is packing a suitcase something he feels completely stumped by? Little wonder everyone he’s the annoying black sheep of the family.
RALPHIE: NOT ABOVE BRIBERY
Despite writing what he believes will be the best theme ever on “What I Want for Christmas” Ralphie takes it upon himself to give his teacher an above-average gift with strings attached. After most kids are giving Ms. Shields an apple or otherwise small token of appreciation, Ralphie approaches her with an enormous fruit basket.
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Not only is it obscenely ostentatious, but he also can’t seem to get the hint to return to his desk, so Ms. Shields is forced to awkwardly think of different things to get him to go away. Teachers love getting presents as much as anyone at Christmas, but maybe not with the expectation of quid pro quo.
KEVIN: TOOTHBRUSH SNOB/THIEF
You’ve been to the toothbrush section of the store. There are hundreds of options. Overwhelmed, you just pick your favorite color and move on. Not Kevin. This little punk shows his true colors picking the ONE toothbrush without the American Dental Association logo and begins pestering helpless employees with impossible questions.
Did Kevin honestly think the average store clerk was going to be able to vouch for the ADA? Instead of just returning the toothbrush to where he got it, he gets scared by his neighbor who shows up unexpectedly and makes a break for it. Why he doesn’t simply drop the toothbrush and run or even go back to the store and pay for the toothbrush is absurd.
RALPHIE: THE REAL BULLY?
Throughout A Christmas Story, Ralphie and his friends can be seen running away from Scott Farkus and his toady Dill. Farkus is undoubtedly a punk and takes pleasure inflicting pain upon Ralphie’s friends, but when Farkus merely throws a snowball at Ralphie’s face and laughs, Ralphie beats the ever-loving daylights out of him, pounding on Farkus over and over, giving him quite the nosebleed.
Farkus is no saint, but he’s more of an emotional threat than a physical one to Ralphie and his friends. Ralphie never sticks around to try and stop Farkus while they’re being subjected to his antics. Maybe Farkus just needs a little tenderness. Ralphie, on the other hand, clearly needs a therapist.
KEVIN: LOUSY TIPPER
At the beginning of Home Alone, Kevin is prevented from having even one slice of his beloved cheese pizza thanks to his older brother Buzz. Naturally, he decides to order pizza one evening while his family is away. Rather than give the pizza guy a few extra bucks for the large cheese, Kevin tells him to keep the extra $0.20 from the cash he throws out the doggy door to pay.
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On top of that indignity, Kevin then proceeds to scare the pizza guy away with audio from the fake gangster film Angels with Dirty Souls. In all likelihood, the pizza guy was going to walk away and keep on delivering other pizzas. Did Kevin really have to kick the guy while he was down by making him think there was a gangster with a machine gun behind the door?
RALPHIE: WORST FRIEND EVER
One of A Christmas Story‘s most memorable scenes is when Ralphie’s friend/classmate Flick sticks his tongue to a frozen flagpole on a triple-dog-dare. Flick finds his tongue completely glued after letting it sit there for just a few seconds. Rather than ask Ms. Shields, or any adult for that matter, for help with Flick, Ralphie simply says, “But the bell rang!” leaving Flick to be discovered by Ms. Shields and the fire department.
On another occasion, Ralphie accidentally drops the F-bomb while trying to help his dad fix a flat tire. When probed by his mother as to where he heard this awful word, rather than blame his dad, he throws another friend and classmate, Schwartz, under the bus, whereupon he receives the beating of his life from his mom. Exactly why is Ralphie good to have around?
KEVIN: OUT FOR BLOOD
There are a number of ways that Kevin could inflict small amounts of harm upon Marv and Harry, the Wet Bandits, to prevent them from robbing his house. However, most of the ways that Kevin comes up with are cruel and potentially lethal. It’s one thing to make your steps super icy; it’s a completely different thing to drop an iron upon someone’s head from several stories up or to light someone’s head on fire.
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At the end of Kevin’s hijinks, he ends up calling the police anyway, so why the devil didn’t he just call the cops to begin with? Kevin isn’t trying to protect his house; he’s trying to take Marv and Harry out. Period.
RALPHIE: ACTUALLY SHOOTS HIS EYE OUT
OK, not actually. But after all the hullabaloo about that blasted Red Ryder gun, the very first shot, THE VERY FIRST SHOT, Ralphie takes with his BB gun knocks off his glasses and eventually breaks them while looking for them.
Ralphie pesters his parents, his teacher, and Santa for this BB gun he will probably not care about at all in a year and does not take the time to think about how he will avoid shooting his eye out, the ONE thing that everyone has warned him over and over will happen if he gets his hand on that BB gun.
KEVIN: THE SCREAM
Before parents couldn’t get their kids to stop singing “Let it Go” from Frozen, parents in the ’90s couldn’t get their kids to stop clapping their hands to their faces and screaming, Kevin McCallister style. Despite the fact that this scream was elicited from putting on aftershave, not once but twice, the gesture was plastered all over movie posters, video game covers, and VHS/DVD cases.
There are probably not many kids that can claim they attempted to protect their houses from burglars, but you wouldn’t have to look far to find kids that drove their parents crazy performing Kevin’s antics voluntarily for years to come.
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