It usually happens during this dreamy time of the holiday season when no one is quite sure what day it is and it's hard to keep things in focus.
You'll be half-dozing on the couch or doing something else while the classic holiday film It's a Wonderful Life plays on a TV in the background. Suddenly you'll be roused from your stupor by that magical word: plastics.
Did that really happen? Maybe your work experience is starting to consume your every waking hour.
No, you're not dreaming. Plastics really do play a role in one of the greatest of all holiday films. It's heard in one of the extended flashback scenes when George Bailey (James Stewart) is visiting his not-yet-wife Mary (Donna Reed) and they get a phone call from their high-flying high school pal Sam Wainwright (Frank Albertson).
As the scene goes, Sam recalls a time when George told him about making plastics from soybeans. Sam's family company is interested in starting a plant to do that, and George talks him into building it in Bedford Falls.
If you don't recall the details of this conversation, then maybe because it's taking place in the background at the same time as a key moment in George and Mary's relationship — when George declares he doesn't want any ground floors or Sam's chance of a lifetime.
They then embrace and the next scene shows them right after their wedding. It's absolutely Shakespearean. A little later, a successful Sam swings through Bedford Falls with his wife, Jane, and offers to take George and Mary on vacation to Florida, which the dutiful George of course declines.
"Still got the nose to the old grindstone, eh? Jane, I offered to let George in on the ground floor in plastics, and he turned me down cold," Sam says.
Still later, there's a scene showing what the characters did during World War II. Sam is shown talking to a military general with plastic plane canopies being made behind him. Our narrator — an angel named Joseph — points out that Sam Wainwright made a fortune in plastic hoods for planes.
This is where art and reality intersect. Those plane parts were a real thing during the war. Plastic hoods for planes were made in Evansville, Ind., by Hoosier Cardinal Corp. From a 2007 Plastics News article written by yours truly, Evansville's plastics legacy dates back to 1935, when entrepreneur T.J. Morton launched one of North America's first injection molding businesses.
Morton introduced injection molding at Hoosier Cardinal in 1935. Hoosier prospered during World War II by making plastic bubbles for gun turrets on bomber planes. The boom led many employees to spin off their own molding and compounding ventures in and around Evansville.
Were any plastic hoods made in New York during the war? Or in Seneca Falls, the actual New Yord town that Bedford Falls may have been based on? Hard to say, but PN still includes eight Rochester-based injection molders in its most recent industry ranking.
The idea of using soybeans or other crops to make plastics also was an idea that had been around long before the movie was filmed.
So, who was behind plastics playing a role in It's a Wonderful Life, widely regarded as a Hollywood classic? Was it original story writer Philip Van Doren Stern or by any of the movie's four screenwriters, including director Frank Capra?
My pal and colleague Rhoda Miel wrote about this topic in 2021. Based on what she learned, it most likely was Capra, who was a chemical engineering graduate from the California Institute of Technology. Capra "was frustrated by his inability to turn that degree into a career before he found his way into film" and that there was an unconfirmed theory that Capra's studies led to inserting the line about plastics.
Capra did mention plastics later in his autobiography, The Name Above the Title. He wrote about his struggle to escape poverty and how many times he failed before finding his path.
"It was a magic carpet — woven with the coils and ringlets of a wondrous peel of limber plastic, whose filaments carried the genetic code of all the arts of man," Capra wrote.
At the end of the film, as George Bailey's family and friends are racing to save him from a financial crisis, Sam Wainwright sends a telegram advancing Bailey up to $25,000. We have to guess a good chunk of that money came from plastics.
It's a Wonderful Life wasn't a big hit at the time, although it garnered Stewart an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. It became a cultural mainstay through free TV broadcasts after Capra's rights to the film expired.
So in its own way, It's a Wonderful Life — a classic movie with a plastics element — kept reinventing itself like the plastics market has done for more than a century.
"A curious thing happened," Stewart said in a 1987 magazine piece. "The movie refused to stay on the shelf. Those who loved it loved it a lot, and they told others. They wouldn't let it die. … A whole new audience fell in love with it."
Frank Esposito is a Wickliffe, Ohio based senior reporter for Plastics News. Follow him on X @fesposito22.