'A Christmas Story' and the Buck Jones Conflation

Figure 1 — The buttstock of a Daisy No. 107 Model 36 Buck Jones Special — the only Daisy air rifle ever fitted with a compass in the stock as factory equipment. The brass-bezelled compass is let into the wood… — Figure 1 — The buttstock of a Daisy No. 107 Model 36 Buck Jones Special — the only Daisy air rifle ever fitted with a compass in the stock as factory equipment. The brass-bezelled compass is let into the wood, and the sundial dial with its Roman numerals is engraved into the surface behind it. This is the gun the film's description actually belongs to. It is not a Red Ryder. Source: bakerairguns.com.

Ralphie Parker wants a Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time. He asks his mother, his teacher, and a department-store Santa, and each of them tells him he will shoot his eye out. It is the best-known description of a specific consumer product in American film, it is recited annually by people who have never held an air rifle, and the gun it describes never existed.

Not as a Red Ryder, anyway. The compass and the sundial came from a different Daisy entirely, made by a different licensing deal, for a different cowboy, in a different decade. Jean Shepherd — whose 1930s Indiana boyhood the film fictionalises — appears to have merged two guns he wanted as a child into one gun he remembered wanting. It is the most enjoyable error in the history of American air rifles, and untangling it is the most useful thing this series can do.

8.1 The Gun That Actually Had a Compass

The No. 107 Model 36 Buck Jones Special, produced from 1934 to 1942, had engraving on the frame and — the detail that matters — an inlaid compass and a sundial set into the stock. It is described as the only Daisy air rifle ever to feature a compass in the stock.¹

Buck Jones was a Western film star, and the gun was one of Daisy’s “personality” rifles: a standard youth air rifle wearing the name and the trappings of a cowboy the customer already admired. That formula is what Daisy would run again, with far greater success, when Stephen Slesinger walked in with Red Ryder in 1938.

The Buck Jones gun was not even the first of its kind. The Buzz Barton Special No. 195 of 1932 was Daisy’s original personality gun, named for a circus and cowboy performer, with a paper label on the left side of its walnut stock in its first version and later appearing as No. 195 models 33 and 36.² In May 1934 Daisy ran a nationwide contest pitting the Buck Jones gun against the Buzz Barton gun, and Buck Jones won.² A boy shopping for an air rifle in the middle 1930s was therefore choosing between two celebrity-branded Daisys, one of which had a compass and a sundial in the stock, in a market that would add a third — the Red Ryder — a few years later.

That is precisely the environment in which a memory blurs.

Figure 2 — The Daisy No. 195 Buzz Barton Special, full length — Daisy's original personality gun of 1932 and the loser of the May 1934 nationwide contest. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

Figure 3 — The winner, marked: "BUCK JONES" engraved in scrollwork across the receiver of a No. 107 Model 36. The name on the frame and the compass in the stock belong to the same gun, and neither belongs to … — Figure 3 — The winner, marked: "BUCK JONES" engraved in scrollwork across the receiver of a No. 107 Model 36. The name on the frame and the compass in the stock belong to the same gun, and neither belongs to a Red Ryder. Source: bakerairguns.com.

8.2 Daisy on the Record

The pleasure of this particular correction is that Daisy did not have to be caught out by collectors. The company said it out loud, and the quotation is unambiguous.

Daisy officials describe Jean Shepherd coming to them in 1982, preparing the film, wanting six Red Ryders “made the way they were in 1940 — with a sundial and compass.” Daisy’s response, as quoted: “Unfortunately he was wrong. That model that had the compass and sundial was the Buck Jones model, it never was the Red Ryder.”³

Shepherd had the year right. He had the gun’s name right, in the sense that a Red Ryder is what he wanted. He simply hung the furniture of one gun on the stock of another.

8.3 What Was Actually on Screen

Daisy did the obliging thing, which was to build the gun Shepherd was describing rather than the gun that had existed. The company modified production Red Ryders for the film, adding a compass and a sundial to the stock. Six guns were built for the production.³

And the sundial was silk-screened. Not inlaid, not functional, not a sundial in any sense that would tell a boy in Hohman, Indiana what time it was — a printed graphic on the side of a stock, made for a camera at a distance of several feet.³ The gun Ralphie unwraps behind the desk on Christmas morning is a prop that depicts a gun that was itself a misremembering of a gun that had been out of production for forty years.

The props have scattered in the way film props do: one to Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie, one to the film archives, and the remainder to the producers and crew. One is on public display at The House From A Christmas Story museum in Cleveland.⁴

8.4 The Second-Order Error, Offered Gently

While in the neighbourhood: the film’s “two-hundred-shot range model” does not match Daisy’s own specification either. The Red Ryder’s gravity-feed reservoir has long been quoted at 650 BBs, though some youth variants quote 400.⁵

This one deserves a lighter touch than the compass. Daisy’s 1930s and 1940s marketing genuinely did use shot-count designations on its guns — “1000 shot” and “500 shot” appear as model descriptors of the period. Shepherd’s phrase is period-flavoured advertising language rather than a specification, and reproducing the cadence of 1930s catalogue copy is exactly what a memoirist writing about wanting a thing as a child ought to do. Treat the capacity mismatch as a soft point, not a hard correction.

8.5 Why Shepherd Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt

It is worth resisting the temptation to score points here. Shepherd was not writing a catalogue; he was writing a memoir with the dials turned up, and the entire artistic method of In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash — the source material — is compression. Decades of Christmases become one Christmas. Several schoolyard humiliations become one. Several longed-for objects become one object, and it acquires every feature that any of them had.

A boy in 1930s Indiana could have seen a Buck Jones Special with a real compass inlaid in its stock, wanted it, not got it, and then a few years later wanted a Red Ryder with a lariat ring and a comic-strip hero burned into the wood. Forty years on, writing at a typewriter, what surfaces is the wanting, and the wanting attaches to a single composite gun that has the compass, the sundial, the lever action, the lariat ring, and the name. That is not a research failure. It is how memory works, and it is arguably why the film lands as hard as it does. The gun Ralphie wants is not a product. It is the shape of childhood wanting, and it has more features than any product ever shipped with.

Daisy, to its credit, then shipped it anyway.

8.6 Daisy Builds the Fictional Gun, Twice

Here the story loops. Having told Shepherd he was wrong, and having then built six props that made him right for the duration of a film, Daisy put the fictional configuration into the catalogue.

The 1983 “Christmas Dream” Red Ryder, with compass and sundial in the stock, was Daisy’s direct commercial answer to the film. It was produced for the balance of 1983 and through 1984 only — a two-year run, which is exactly the kind of short production that creates a collector market.⁶ It is heavily faked today, which is the predictable consequence: a common gun, a rare configuration, and a stock modification that a determined forger can approximate. Provenance matters more than appearance on this one.

Daisy revived the idea in 2020 as the “A Christmas Wish” limited edition, again with compass and sundial, distributed through Walmart.⁷ Thirty-seven years after telling a writer that no such gun had ever existed, the company was selling its second run of it.

The Red Ryder line has of course collected a long shelf of commemoratives besides these — the anniversary editions counting from 1938 as set out in Volume 7, an American Legion limited edition, and a 250th Anniversary “Liberty Edition” for the American semiquincentennial in 2026.⁸ But the Christmas guns are a different category. The anniversaries commemorate the gun’s own history. The Christmas Dream and the Christmas Wish commemorate a mistake about the gun’s history, made by a novelist, corrected by the manufacturer, and then manufactured by the manufacturer.

Figure 4 — The stock treatment itself, on a current "A Christmas Wish" carbine: an engraved sundial with Roman numerals and a raised gnomon, and beside it a real inset compass with a floating needle. Two thin… — Figure 4 — The stock treatment itself, on a current "A Christmas Wish" carbine: an engraved sundial with Roman numerals and a raised gnomon, and beside it a real inset compass with a floating needle. Two things need holding apart here. This is a genuine compass, fitted to a gun sold in this configuration. The film prop was not - Daisy built its six screen guns with a sundial that was SILK-SCREENED onto the wood and did not function, and the compass idea came from the No. 107 Model 36 Buck Jones Special, the only Daisy that ever carried one as standard equipment. What is shown here is the catalogue answering the film, decades later. It is not evidence that a 1940 Red Ryder looked like this, because none ever did. GoSupps product listing, reference use

Figure 5 — The same edition boxed, the carton printed "A CHRISTMAS WISH" with Red Ryder artwork. The box carries no year, and the edition has run in more than one season, so this is captioned by model rather … — Figure 5 — The same edition boxed, the carton printed "A CHRISTMAS WISH" with Red Ryder artwork. The box carries no year, and the edition has run in more than one season, so this is captioned by model rather than by date; the 2020 Walmart run is documented in the text above from Daisy's own announcement rather than from this photograph. eBay seller listing photograph, reference use

Figure 6 — A "Christmas Dream" stock engraved "35th Anniversary" and "1983-2018", with the compass inset above the sundial and a Certificate of Authenticity in frame. Read the dates carefully: this is the 201… — Figure 6 — A "Christmas Dream" stock engraved "35th Anniversary" and "1983-2018", with the compass inset above the sundial and a Certificate of Authenticity in frame. Read the dates carefully: this is the 2018 commemorative OF the 1983 gun, not the 1983-84 original. That distinction is the practical heart of collecting this variant. The original two-year run is heavily faked, so a stock bearing anniversary dates is evidence of a later edition rather than of provenance, and provenance is the only thing that separates a real Christmas Dream from a modified Red Ryder. eBay seller listing photograph, reference use

One last note for the geographically minded: the Red Ryder is still built in Rogers, Arkansas, which makes the most famous Christmas present in American cinema a Northwest Arkansas product.⁹ The gun that Ralphie’s mother worried about, that his teacher warned him about, and that a department-store Santa kicked him down a slide for asking about, comes off a line in a town of sixty-odd thousand people in the Ozark foothills, and has done since 1958.

8.7 Bibliography

American Rifleman, “I Have This Old Gun: Daisy Buck Jones BB Gun.” https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/i-have-this-old-gun-daisy-buck-jones-bb-gun/ ; DaisyKing, “The No. 107 Buck Jones Special,” http://www.daisyking.com/history/PumpGuns/TheNo107BuckJonesSpecial.htm ; Baker Airguns, https://www.bakerairguns.com/product/daisy-no-107-model-36-buck-jones-special/ (confidence: high). ↩
Pyramyd Air, “Buzz Barton: first of the personality BB guns,” May 2006. https://www.pyramydair.com/blog/2006/05/buzz-barton-first-of-the-personality-bb-guns/ (confidence: high). ↩ ↩²
Mental Floss, “A Christmas Story Red Ryder BB gun history.” https://www.mentalfloss.com/holidays/christmas/a-christmas-story-red-ryder-bb-gun-history ; NBC4i, “So just where did A Christmas Story’s Red Ryder BB gun come from?” https://www.nbc4i.com/news/u-s-world/so-just-where-did-a-christmas-storys-red-ryder-bb-gun-come-from/ (confidence: high). ↩ ↩² ↩³
The House From A Christmas Story, “Iconic Red Ryder BB gun from A Christmas Story now on display.” https://housefromachristmasstory.com/iconic-red-ryder-bb-gun-from-a-christmas-story-now-on-display-at-the-house-from-a-christmas-story/ ; WTHR, https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/red-ryder-bb-gun-christmas-story-enshrined-cleveland/531-43d93255-af35-4503-b1a7-f86b49652fc6 (confidence: medium). ↩
Daisy, Red Ryder product page. https://daisy.com/product/red-ryder/ (confidence: medium; the capacity mismatch is offered as a soft point). ↩
NRA Family, “Limited edition Daisy Christmas Dream air rifle,” November 2017. https://www.nrafamily.org/articles/2017/11/24/limited-edition-daisy-christmas-dream-air-rifle/ ; Daisy Museum forum, https://forum.daisymuseum.com/1984-christmas-dream-red-ryder_topic10624.html (confidence: high on the existence and the two-year run). ↩
The Firearm Blog, “Daisy Christmas Story Red Ryder,” October 2020. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/10/27/daisy-christmas-story-red-ryder/ (confidence: high). ↩
Daisy, Red Ryder American Legion Limited Edition, https://daisy.com/product/red-ryder-american-legion/ ; 250th Anniversary Liberty Edition, https://daisy.com/product/250th-anniversary-red-ryder-liberty-edition-kit/ and https://www.ssusa.org/content/daisy-marks-america-s-250th-with-limited-edition-red-ryders (confidence: medium). ↩
Axios NW Arkansas, “Red Ryder BB gun, Daisy, A Christmas Story, Rogers,” November 2023. https://www.axios.com/local/nw-arkansas/2023/11/27/red-ryder-bb-gun-daisy-christmas-story-rogers (confidence: high). ↩