Ah, the Red Ryder BB Gun. It’s iconic. Almost as iconic as the phrase it birthed: “You’ll shoot your eye out!”
The quote is from the holiday classic A Christmas Story. Those of a certain age, and by that, we mean anyone who grew up in the 1980s or early 1990s, must know of the holiday classic. The film is almost inescapable during the Christmas season. Cable super channels like TNT and TBS now run it for 24 hours straight on Christmas Day, and many others run it repeatedly on the days leading up to Christmas.
A Christmas Story
For those who somehow haven’t seen it, the central plot involves the efforts of nine-year-old Ralphie Parker’s desire to get (and we must be specific here!) a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle for Christmas. His mother, teacher, and even the department store Santa Claus all offer the warning, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” And such a disaster did, in fact, nearly ensue!
An early model RR air rifle and its original packaging. Image courtesy of Invaluable.com
But, by the end credits, Ralphie has his hands on the air rifle and despite a very near miss, does not shoot his eye out.
The period film, set in the late 1940s, certainly made the Red Ryder BB gun a star – even though the exact model that Ralphie desires and obtains wasn’t ever actually produced.
Other models were, and still are, which is why the Red Ryder air rifle remains treasured even today.
What is notable about the Red Ryder air rifle is that it was among the first truly successful licensed products. In fact, it preceded the Star Wars line of merchandise by more than three decades. Created by Stephen Slesinger and illustrated by Fred Harman Jr., The Red Ryder comic strip only began in 1938, but it was soon running in some 750 newspapers across the country.
It told the adventures of cowboy Red Ryder, “America’s FIghting Cowboy.” Along with his sidekick Little Beaver and horse named Thunder, Red Ryder attempted to bring justice to the San Juan Mountains. The success wasn’t limited to the funny pages, as the strip gained enough popularity that Republic Pictures produced a 12-chapter movie serial in 1940 fittingly named Adventures of Red Ryder.
That further proved so successful that 23 feature films were also made between 1944 and 1947, while the strip later spawned a radio show, TV series, and comic books.
Yet, the audiences of the 1980s who saw A Christmas Story likely had no idea, as the character surprisingly burned out as fast as he rose – and unlike Batman, Superman, or the Lone Ranger, Red Ryder practically fell into obscurity. The comic strip was canceled in the mid-1960s, but during the heyday, it was so popular that it spawned that line of Red Ryder air rifles.
In a strange twist, the term Red Ryder is now remembered more due to the enduring success of the holiday film than the original publications and movies where it began. The campy cowboy is but a footnote in popular culture.
The Patent Pending blog says, “Although Clarence Hamilton had started Plymouth Air Rifle with his partner Cyrus Pinckney, and the pair got two patents on air rifles, Hamilton took his third design to a company in which he owned stock, Plymouth Iron Windmill Company. He proposed to the company president that they give an air rifle away with each purchase of a windmill. The president, Lewis Cass Hough, took Hamilton’s prototype, and shot a BB into the wastebasket in his office. Zing! It was an impressive shot. Next he took the gun outside and shot into a wooden shingle, and zing, the bb went through the shingle. Hough said “that’s a Daisy!”, and the name stuck.”
You’re a Daisy if You Do
Daisy Red Ryder BB Gun
Licensed products were rare in the 1940s, so the fact that air rifle maker Daisy stepped up is also noteworthy. And it wouldn’t have happened had windmills been more popular.
Yes, windmills.
The company that is today synonymous with air guns began as the Plymouth Iron Windmill Company in the 1880s. Based in Plymouth, Michigan, it got its start making iron windmills for farmers. Located outside of Detroit, it found early success selling the products throughout the Midwest, but as sales dipped, it looked to entice farmers by offering promotional items.
In one case, farmers received a metal air rifle designed by company founder Clarence Hamilton. According to the legend, the company’s general manager, Lewis Cass Hough, test-fired the air rifle – the first to feature all metal construction – and exclaimed, “Boy, it’s a daisy!” Fans of the film Tombstone may remember that Doc Holliday, played by Val Kilmer, uttered the line “You’re a daisy if you” on more than one occasion.
“Daisy” was a common slang of the era for “top-notch” or “very good.”
Somewhat fittingly, the all-metal air rifle was named the “Daisy Air Gun,” and while it was a promotional item, it turned out that the farmers became more impressed with the rifle than they were with the windmills. By the end of the 19th century, Plymouth Iron Windmill Company’s forges were dedicated to the air rifle and it was soon renamed the Daisy Manufacturing Company.
This 1889 Daisy BB Rifle is one of the first production models the company produced. The 1888 model was mostly wood.
In early 1901, Daisy introduced its first lever-action air rifle, which attempted to mimic the Winchester and other lever-action rifles that had gained notoriety at the end of the 19th century.
It was almost as if the air rifles needed a tie-in with the frontier myth of the Old West, but it took until 1940 for that to happen.
Birth of the BB
Though today we know what a “BB” is, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that the term entered the mainstream vernacular. Originally, the small lead balls were .180 inches in diameter, a size that was referred to as “BB.”
Daisy sought to control the market and resized its guns to fire a proprietary ball that was .175 inches. It was introduced as the “Air Rifle Shot,” but quickly came to be simply called a “BB.” As noted, these were originally made of lead, but in the 1920s, Daisy found that owners were using steel ball bearings.
In time, Daisy acquired the American Ball Company – finding that steel balls were cheaper to manufacture and had the added benefit of being more accurate.
Daisy Red Ryder BB Gun
The Most Popular Air Gun EVER
Along with setting the standard for the size of BBs, Daisy steadily became established as the leading maker of air rifles. Though the 1930s had been a rough time for the company due to the Great Depression, by the late 1930s, it looked to garner renewed interest with a licensed model.
And this is where the Red Ryder air rifle entered the picture.
Originally, the comic strip’s creators had pitched a Red Ryder revolver, but Daisy was already producing a popular BB carbine – resulting in instant brand synergy. The Red Ryder air rifle was a hit out of the gate, but then America entered World War II. Production was interrupted from 1943 to 1945 but then came roaring back in the years that followed.
After the war, the Red Ryder became a much sought-after toy, one of the most popular of its time – although today, most people wouldn’t label any firearm, even simple air guns – as such.It sold more than a million units in 1949 and proved so popular that the U.S. Post Office began handling mail addressed only to the “Red Ryder Company.” Much of that actually made its way to the Daisy offices in Plymouth, Michigan.
The design was pretty simple. It comprised a lever-action, spring piston air gun with a steel smooth bore barrel. That’s essentially what you see in A Christmas Story.
However, the movie does get a key detail wrong. Ralphie desires a model with “a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.” We’ll attribute that to creative license, as the Red Ryder didn’t feature the compass or sundial – although the previous Buck Jones model did. It has been speculated that author Jean Shepherd, whose book inspired the movie, may have confused the models. However, Daisy modified a Red Ryder with a compass and silkscreen sundial just for the film.
It has long since created a bit of a myth, and some will argue they absolutely had a Red Ryder air rifle with the compass and sundial – just like how some people will swear they had an M-16 made by Mattel during the Vietnam War. It wasn’t until 2020 that a special limited edition version – fitting named the “A Christmas Wish” with the compass and sundial – was released.
Interestingly, A Christmas Story wasn’t the only film from the 1980s to feature the Red Ryder either. In the Stanley Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket – based on the book The Short-Timers – the character Crazy Earl carries a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun along with his M16 while in Vietnam.
That has also led to some believing Kubrick was paying homage to the holiday film, and we could start a crazy fan theory that Earl is Ralphie grown up – as he’d be about the right age. However, Crazy Earl’s odd choice of firearm was noted in the 1979 novel The Short Timers, which bursts the bubble of that particular theory.
More recently, the Red Ryder could be seen in American Sniper, where Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) attempts to impress his future wife, Tanya (Sienna Miller), with his shooting ability.
Today, Daisy continues to produce both adult and youth Red Ryder air rifles, along with accessories. Red Ryder the cowboy may have long ridden off into the sunset, but the Red Ryder air rifle lives on!
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Peter Suciu
About the Author
Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based freelance writer who regularly covers firearms related topics and military history. As a reporter, his work has appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers, and websites. Among those are Homeland Security Today, Armchair General, Military Heritage, The Mag Life, Newsweek, The Federalist, AmmoLand, Breach-Bang-Clear, Newsweek, RECOILweb, Wired, and many (many) others. He has collected military small arms and military helmets most of his life, and just recently navigated his first NFA transfer to buy his first machine gun. He is co-author of the book A Gallery of Military Headdress, which was published in February 2019. It is his third book on the topic of military hats and helmets.
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