I'm all right!". Rogers turned it down because she considered it "too bland". The lives George touched are vastly different. Watch popular content from the following creators: Hollywood History(@hollywoodhistory), Hollywood History(@hollywoodhistory), sleepwelldarling(@sleepwelldarling), Matthew Ryan Geroni (@gravmasterhash), Mike Dowd(@mikedowdcomedy) . Appearance at University of Chicago Law School Films, 1978. The original black-and-white version is not featured on the Blu-ray, only the colorized version is on the Blu-ray.[94]. In 1993, due in part to the confusion of the ownership and copyright issues, Kinesoft Development, with the support of Republic Pictures, released It's a Wonderful Life as one of the first commercial feature-length films on CD-ROM for the Windows PC (Windows 3.1). [25] However, film historian Jeanine Basinger, curator of the Frank Capra archives at Wesleyan University and author of The 'It's A Wonderful Life' Book, has said no evidence exists for Seneca Falls' claim. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and has been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made. Stewart also starred in the May 8, 1949 radio adaptation presented on the Screen Directors Playhouse. Three colorized versions have been produced. It is also one of two Capra films Paramount owns despite not having originally released it—the other is Broadway Bill (originally from Columbia, remade by Paramount as Riding High in 1950). Another musical stage adaptation of the film, titled It's a Wonderful Life – The Musical, was written by Bruce Greer and Keith Ferguson. On November 3, 2009, Paramount re-released the previous DVD set as a "Collector's Edition" and debuted a Blu-ray edition, also containing both versions of the film. [34], Jimmy the raven (Uncle Billy's pet) appeared in You Can't Take It with You and each subsequent Capra film. [69] This came as a welcome surprise to Frank Capra and others involved with its production. It's a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas family fantasy drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story and booklet The Greatest Gift, which Philip Van Doren Stern self-published in 1943 and is in turn loosely based on the 1843 Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol. In 1992, the final episode of Tiny Toon Adventures parodied It's A Wonderful Life entitled "It's A Wonderful Tiny Toon Christmas". )[19][12] Capra salvaged a few scenes from Odets' earlier screenplay[20] and worked with writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Jo Swerling, Michael Wilson, and Dorothy Parker (brought in to "polish" the script),[21] on many drafts of the screenplay. [29][30] Both actors had returned from the war with no employment prospects. The website's critical consensus reads, "The holiday classic to define all holiday classics, It's a Wonderful Life is one of a handful of films worth an annual viewing. [80][81] Despite the lapsed copyright, television stations that aired it still had to pay royalties because—though the film's images had entered the public domain—the film's story was still restricted as a derivative work of the published story The Greatest Gift, whose copyright Philip Van Doren Stern had renewed in 1971. 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