Put that cookie down! Jingle All the Way wasn’t a hit with critics when it was released in 1996, but it’s since become a cult classic.
The holiday film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Howard Langston, a workaholic dad who forgot to buy his son, Jamie (Jake Lloyd), the hottest toy on every kid’s Christmas list: Turbo Man. Along the way, Howard clashes with his overbearing neighbor (Phil Hartman), a meddlesome police officer (Robert Conrad) and a postal worker named Myron Larabee (Sinbad) who is searching for the same toy.
The movie also featured cameos from comedians including Jim Belushi, Laraine Newman and Chris Parnell, the latter of whom made his big-screen debut as a toy store clerk two years before he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live.
While Jingle All the Way has become a perennial holiday favorite, one of its stars still has some questions about the film’s plot. Rita Wilson, who played Howard’s wife, Liz, doesn’t understand how her character failed to realize her husband was the person inside the life-size Turbo Man costume in the movie’s climactic parade scene.
“This is the movie that haunts me,” the Runaway Bride actress told Insider in December 2020. “Why did my character not know that her husband, Howard, who talks like [Arnold Schwarzenegger] and is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, was Turbo Man. How did she not know that? Let’s see: He has an accent. He looks exactly like him. He’s wearing a half mask, but my character does not know. And it made me just feel like, ‘That’s just a little too stupid.’”
Schwarzenegger, for his part, seemingly looks back on the film with somewhat more fondness. “It’s still today the favorite Christmas movie that people are playing every single December,” the former California governor told GQ in 2019. “This movie’s being played on television, and overseas, it also did extremely well.”
Though it’s now hard to imagine the movie with a different cast, Sinbad reportedly wasn’t the first person approached to play Myron. According to director Brian Levant, the studio wanted him to get Danny DeVito for the role following his and Schwarzenegger’s hits Twins and Junior.
“They couldn’t convince DeVito to come onboard in the Sinbad role — apparently, DeVito read the script more carefully than Arnold and I,” Levant quipped to MEL Magazine in January 2022. “I’ve also heard Joe Pesci was considered, but I don’t believe that was the case. I think [producer] Chris Columbus’ connection with Pesci from Home Alone is where that comes from.”
Sinbad said he “felt a vibe” that producers didn’t want him for the part, but during his audition, he accidentally dropped his script pages in a way that fit Myron perfectly. “I lost it, and then jumped on the table and started going off on Arnold. He freaked,” the comedian recalled during a 2019 interview on the “Blerd Empire” podcast. “[Then] I was walking through the lot and got a phone call: ‘Hey man, they loved you, come back.’ It was one of the strangest auditions I ever had.”
Keep scrolling to see where the cast of Jingle All the Way is now: