12 Burning Questions I Have After Rewatching “Home Alone 2: Lost In New York”

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Howdy do,

This is Peter McCallister. The father.

A couple of weeks ago, I rewatched the Christmas classic Home Alone, and upon its conclusion, I was left with some burning questions that needed answering.

Last night, I revisited the sequel Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, and I have even MORE questions after watching. Can you believe it? Of course you believe it. You know what you got yourself into.

Let’s do this.

1. Why Did This Movie Have To Take Place Only One Year Later?

From Toddler To Terrorist: The Kevin McCallister Story

As you all know by now Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was 20th Century Fox cashing in on the success of the original film. They rushed out a second movie within two years of the first with their breakout star Macaulay Culkin. The result is a beat-by-beat remake of the first film’s plot with the addition of egregious product placement for American Airlines, Coca-Cola, the Plaza Hotel and Tiger Electronics Talkboy.

While Culkin had aged almost three years since the first film, everybody kept saying, “We don’t want what happened last Christmas to happen again,” and “Last year we had a little bit of trouble with Kevin.” Yo, it clearly wasn’t last year! Everybody’s a foot taller and Kevin’s voice has dropped two octaves.

Unless…

Peter McCallister finding Harry’s gold tooth on the ground at the end of HA1 led the family to find out what really happened while they were in France and they shipped troubled Kevin off to a psychiatric facility for a two-year period. When he got out, they enrolled him back in school and now he’s a 5’10” 12-year-old third grader and to keep up appearances they pretend those two years of his life didn’t happen. Good news is he’ll be quite the 20-year-old high school athlete.

2. Did Uncle Frank Really Tell His Young Nephew He Has a Bigger Penis Than Him?

“Get out of here you little pervert or I’m going to slap you silly … with my larger than average genitalia I told you about earlier.”

Kevin tells his parents that Uncle Frank, “Says that if I walked in there and saw him naked, I’d grow up never feeling like a real man.”

Can we pump the brakes for just a second? Did Kevin’s 55-year-old uncle just tell him he has such an oversized manhood that just the sight of it would stunt Kevin’s pubescent development? Can everybody in the family please keep an extra set of eyes on creepy old Uncle Frank when he’s around the young nieces and nephews?

3. What Exactly Does Peter McCallister Do For a Living?

“Kate, I work too goddamn hard mining pure platinum for you to keep losing our youngest kid. I forgot to shut the garage.”

One year, he’s flying his entire seven-person family and his brother’s seven-person family first class to Paris. The next year, it’s the same group of goons to Miami, and after recognizing that Kevin is missing the second time, flying the whole gang from Florida up to NYC on CHRISTMAS EVE. My educated guess is that he’s either a spine surgeon or reputed mob boss. Both cash businesses, I’ve heard.

I’m also from a seven-person family from Chicago, and we never flew anywhere once in my childhood. My old man packed us all into a conversion van and hauled us off to places like South Dakota and Door County. You’d think with all the money Peter McCallister supposedly makes, he’d be able to afford some teeth whitening.

4. Why is Buzz At Least 10 Years Older Than the Other Kids in the Choir?

The guy to the right of Buzz should be on NFL scout’s radars.

Look, I get that older brother Buzz is supposed to be an asshole. But in the original Home Alone, he spends the entirety of the film in a varsity football jacket. In what school Christmas pageant in existence do the older high school seniors perform alongside the third-graders? Buzz looks like he’s pushing 25 years of age and stands a foot-and-a-half taller than everybody else on stage.

It’d be nice if somebody explained that he had a pituitary problem or got held back for a few years due to undiagnosed dyslexia. Maybe the McCallisters hold all of their dumb, hideous children back and just let the hot older daughters graduate on time.

5. Wait, Was That Ally Sheedy?

Quick IMDB check and wow, it was her! Glad to see she was still getting work in 1992.

6. At What New York Airport Did Kevin Land?

Somewhere right in the Hudson River by the looks of it.

Neither JFK, Laguardia or even Newark have a view of the New York City skyline like that. You’d think with how authentically they had to recreate the “run through O’Hare” scene from the first movie that they could have made the NYC airport a little more realistic.

Alright, fine, a little nitpicky.

7. How Hasn’t The Pigeon Lady Been Found In The Attic of Carnegie Hall?

I bet MacCaulay Culkin rewatches this scene now and wishes he’d done a header during filming.

Suspending disbelief at the unlikely friendship between upper-class white bread Kevin McCallister and a dangerous fecal covered vagrant, this is on the security personnel at Carnegie. Surely once they noticed the violas and oboes were covered in pigeon shit they should have realized something was up, right? Also maybe the fact that a 70-year-old woman pushing two bills was slowly trudging up the staircase surrounded by a cloud of pigeons every afternoon in broad daylight as well. Do better.

8. Is Kevin McCallister The Flash?

Pictured: the fastest human being to ever don a pair of Keds.

Let’s disregard the “Kevin exploring the Big Apple” scene where he crisscrosses Manhattan like a goddamn bike messenger. Before the film’s climax, Kevin runs from Duncan’s Toy Chest (somewhere on Fifth Ave) all the way up to the upper West Side (50 some blocks) with Marv and Harry chasing him. I get that with the New York grid system that city blocks are short, but he also would have had to run across two avenues.

Couldn’t Marv and Harry get Metro cards? You know Marv has plenty of change in his pockets.

9. Is Marv A Ghost?

This scene used to scare the living shit out of me as a child, teenager and young adult. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it now.

Did Marv die when he had half a dozen bricks make contact with his skull from atop a five-story roof? Is this why Daniel Stern hasn’t been in anything meaningful since?

I should take it easy on these ’90s movie stars…

10. Did The Hookers In Central Park Really Proposition Kevin For Sex?

“You want someone to tell you a bedtime story… about venereal disease?”

This scene also scared the bejeezus out of me as a child. But wait, did those two streetwalkers just offer to sleep with CHILD Kevin McCallister? Surely there are plenty of New York adult men who are lonely on Christmas Eve and could use some companionship. Rewatching this gave me the chills. These strumpets must be friends with Uncle Frank.

Wait…

11. Is Uncle Frank a pimp?

I don’t know what you heard ’bout me…

Pimps are notorious for making others get their hands/vaginas dirty while they sit back and collect fat stacks. Were these two slacking on the job because their pimp daddy Frank was in Miami with his wife and thousand relatives? It would also explain why Uncle Pimp is comfortable saying sexually charged things to his middle school dropout nephew.

Which leads to the most important question of them all…

12. Should I stop smoking crystal meth and watching ’90s Christmas movies by myself alone?

Happy Hanukkah! .

Image via YouTube

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JR Hickey

Stand up comedian and writer from Chicago who now resides on the West Coast. JR can be seen performing at Cobbs Comedy Club in San Francisco and Zanies Comedy Clubs in Chicago. His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune and recently he was a part of SF Sketchfest 2015. JR's also the host of the PGP dating podcast Don't Take It From Us. He loves you very, very much.

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