Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Music, TV and Film, Netflix, Christmas
Joe Harker
There's a Christmas movie streaming on Netflix which has reworked the classic, if controversial, Christmas tune of 'Baby It's Cold Outside' with some new lyrics.
In the movie Love Hard, Natalie (Nina Dobrev) and Josh (Jimmy O. Yang) meet up after he catfishes her and she travels to spend Christmas with him.
Realising he's not the man she thought he was, she sticks around after he reveals he used pictures of his friend Tag (Darren Barnet) and will try to set them up if she pretends to be his girlfriend for Christmas.
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As part of this charade they end up singing a rendition of 'Baby It's Cold Outside' in front of his family, only they've changed up some of the lyrics.
Only instead of singing the classic version, which every Christmas people wonder is sexist or not, they've got their own one where Natalie is sticking to the original but Josh is making it clear she can leave whenever she wants.
So when she sings 'I really can't stay' it gets a response of 'no problem, there's the door'.
When she begins rattling off lines like 'my mother will start to worry' and 'my father will be pacing the floor', he sings back that she can borrow his phone to call and it's totally fine for her to skedaddle.
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This version has been praised by Netflix fans for being an actual good reworking of the original song, with viewers commenting that 'the writers absolutely nailed these lyrics'.
For some, it was enough that they declared it 'the best version I've heard'.
Someone else added that they were 'actually dreading them updating this song' but said the version from Love Hard turned out to be 'amazing' and 'very well done'.
The original version of 'Baby It's Cold Outside' was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser for he and his wife, Lynn Garland, to sing at their housewarming party as a way of telling all of their guests to clear off for the night.
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The couple ended up getting invited to a load of other parties just so they could sing it at the end of the night, while it ended up being part of the 1949 romcom Neptune's Daughter and won the Oscar in 1950 for Best Original Song.
Some of the lyrics to 'Baby It's Cold Outside' may sound problematic to modern audiences, particularly lines like 'say what's in this drink' and how during the entire song it seems like the lady keeps saying she needs to leave, while the fella tries to convince her to stick around for a night of you-know-what.
However, at the time the song was written, women faced a lot of stigma for spending the night with men they weren't married to and another interpretation of the lyrics is that the couple would very much like to spend the night with each other and just need to make sure they've got some good excuses lined up for why the lady had to stay round.
Blame the 1940s and their attitudes towards women.