Holiday greetings from Touchstone Heating & Air! We hope you are having safe and pleasant season, enjoying your favorite traditions for this time of year. \u00a0We wish you the very best, and we thank you for your business this year.<\/p>\n
In honor of the season, here are some fun facts about one of everyone’s favorite holiday movies:\u00a0It\u2019s a Wonderful Life.<\/i><\/p>\n
For years, one of the enduring December traditions in the United States was watching the movie It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i> playing almost nonstop on numerous television stations. No matter the time of the day, you could turn on the TV set, flip through channels, and discover It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i> playing. Whenever you needed him, you could find Jimmy Stewart shouting, \u201cHello, Bedford Falls!\u201d<\/p>\n
But now\u2026 It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i> only appears on broadcast television a few times during December, and most families instead choose to watch the movie on video. What happened?<\/p>\n
The reason goes back to the film\u2019s initial wide release in January 1947. (That\u2019s right, it opened after<\/i> the holiday season. It was not even promoted as a holiday film.) It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i> was a box-office disappointment at the time, and its studio, RKO Radio Pictures, lost more than half a million on it. The movie\u2019s production company, Liberty Films, was sold to Paramount to avoid bank foreclosure. (A bit ironic, considering the movie\u2019s plot.) In 1955, the National Telefilm Associates (NTA) took over the rights to It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i>, which included the television syndication rights.<\/p>\n
However, NTA failed to properly renew the copyright in 1974 because of a clerical error, which allowed the film\u2019s images to enter into the public domain. Although the movie\u2019s plot was still under copyright protection because it was adapted from a published story called \u201cThe Greatest Gift,\u201d television stations across the world could now broadcast it with only minimal royalty payments.<\/p>\n
In 1993, Republic Pictures, which now owned the NTA library, tried to enforce their claim to the copyright of the film, as they possessed the rights to \u201cThe Greatest Gift.\u201d Republic Pictures succeeded, and licensed exclusive television rights to NBC. Suddenly, It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i> vanished from local television stations, and NBC made the movie\u2019s broadcasts\u2014usually twice during December\u2014into major events. As of 1998, Paramount again has the rights to It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i>\u2026 43 years after they lost them.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s still easy to make It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i> a part of whatever traditions you observe during the holidays, whether through home video or television broadcasts. Despite its lackluster initial reception in 1947, Frank Capra\u2019s film is now an inseparable part of December in the United States.<\/p>\n
Have a great holiday week!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Holiday greetings from Touchstone Heating & Air! We hope you are having safe and pleasant season, enjoying your favorite traditions for this time of year. We wish you the very best, and we thank you for your business this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-happy-holidays","tag-happy-holidays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touchstoneheatingonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}