"Good Will to Men", 1955 animated Christmas film

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the release of "Good Will to Men", directed by none other than William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who went on to create The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, and a lot of other classic cartoons.

"Good Will to Men" is basically a remake of the much darker (and hard to find) 1939 short "Peace on Earth".

Thankfully, we are no longer under such dire threat of nuclear annihilation as audiences were in the Fifties. But I thought this was worth sharing all the same. Its themes are more timely than ever before.

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Here’s the Douay English translation of St. Jerome’s late 4th century Latin Vulgate:

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.”
Luke 2:14

So: The verse is not “Good will to men” or similar.

Luk 2:14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Our Authorized Version gives the wrong impression here. The angels did not say, “on earth peace, good will toward men.” What they actually said was, “peace to men of good will,” or “peace among men with whom He is pleased.” ..........

J Vernon McGee

Folks,

There is a nugget to think about. Reading the whole Bible, Vernon makes more sense and many other scholars agree with him.

Here is the rest of Vernon’s comments:

The angels did not make the asinine statement that many men make today which goes, “Let’s have peace, peace, peace.” My friend, “There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked” (Isa_48:22). We live in a day when we need to beat our plowshares into swords—not the other way around. We live in a wicked world. We live in a Satan-dominated world, and therefore there is no peace. There is, however, peace to men of good will. If you are one of those who has come to Christ and taken him as Savior, you can know this peace of God. Rom_5:1 states: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” When Christ came the first time, this is the kind of peace He brought. At His second coming He will come as the Prince of Peace; at that time He will put down unrighteousness and rebellion in the world. He will establish peace on the earth. But until He comes again, there will be no peace on this earth.

There is a lot of irony here. Church mice surviving to tell a story. They are the weak and usually the first to go. The lines in this cartoon are rich with double meaning — you go to war and hurt yourself, as the walking stick breaks in two, of the mouse that is speaking. Some people back then might claim this is a propaganda film by the communists to get the West to surrender under the guise that war and killing are wrong. I think Hollywood had a lot of communists back then, too. So this is a tangled web of a cartoon that shows one side — the pacifist side — and all violent sides are wrong. The other side, the non-pacifist side, may not necessarily be wrong, but here that question is not addressed. Perhaps the cartoon is pointing to the pain, ugliness, and misery of war as a damn shame. And it is a shame became we are not always men of peace and good will. That seems to be the best and simplest answer.

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