BONUS: Introducing: Everybody Has a Podcast With Ruth and Ray (Kelly Stewart Harcourt Interview)

SUBSCRIBE NOW to the new weekly "EVERYBODY HAS A PODCAST" at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/everybody-has-a-podcast-with-ruth-and-ray/id1722783945 You heard "GEORGE BAILEY WAS NEVER BORN" creators Ruth and Ray and their story in Ep10 "Happy Ending".  Just in time for the end of the holidays…

Part 10: Happy Ending

Going meta, the last episode spotlights how this podcast came about, how co-creator Ray Nowosielski and partner Ruth Vaca were drawn into the world of It's aWonderful Life and how the making of it proved one of the most existential years in their lives.  Listeners meet the Groundhog Day writer and …

Part 09: Mary Hatch, Hero (For Our Times)

The most controversial moment in It's a Wonderful Life for modern fans is the fate of George Bailey’s spouse Mary in the part of the multiverse in which he had never been born.  An examination of Mary as the true hero of Bedford Falls leads to the stories of Donna Reed as unappreciated feminist, fe…

Part 08: The Creators' Movie (1938 to '73)

Probably the episode most fans came to this podcast seeking.  After spotlights of so many influential fans' interpretations across the series, here we ask:  what did the creators of It's a Wonderful Life actually intend, and for what did they stand?  With their next of kin, we come to know them int…

Part 07: Bailey Park Returns, a.k.a A Couple of Decent Rooms & a Bath

George Bailey’s do still exist today, as we witness with Seneca Falls’ community banker Menzo Case, following his efforts to create much-needed affordable housing via his own Bailey Park.  Ordinary Americans “do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community,” George famously…

Part 06: The George Bailey Generation

The much-admired George Bailey was not a stand-out but an almost perfect representative of his Greatest Generation, as historians argue in this episode that spotlights the relationship of parents and children and the yin and yang of eras, seeking a culprit to who upside-down’d America from the etho…

Part 05: Pottersville

If western New York's Seneca Falls is the “real Bedford Falls,” then what can that town tell us about what happened to the people of that place in It's a Wonderful Life?  We come to know real corollaries of the beloved characters from that movie today, learning about their hopes and struggles, and …

Part 04: The Corporations' Movie (1993 to 2023)

How was it that It's a Wonderful Life went from a local TV free-for-all to only airing during the holidays on NBC for most of the past three decades?  In search of the answer, the podcast unearths a never-before-told story that up-ends many of the broadly-held assumptions and reveals much about the…

Part 03: Henry F Potter, American AntiHero

Going in search of the reason why “up-side down” takes on It's a Wonderful Life have eclipsed traditional ones in recent years, this episode quickly becomes a history lesson about the U.S. government’s attack on the movie’s writers, and an examination of the state of heroes and villains today.  Wha…

Part 02: You Are Now in Bedford Falls

A deep dive into the Wonderful Life Festival in western New York's Seneca Falls, a town that makes a powerful case that it is “the real Bedford Falls.”  Annually every December, one of the last surviving people associated with the production of It's a Wonderful Life, Karolyn “Zuzu” Grimes, travels …