by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor

In 1955, Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass founded Videocraft International to produce television commercials based on their background in advertising. In 1960, they renamed the company to Rankin/Bass Productions, and started to work on longer material. While they started with traditional animation, they began to work on their stop-motion process, which they called “Animagic.” Rankin would work on scripts and character designs, while Bass would sometimes write but would also contribute music and lyrics. Together they would co-direct the films. 

The animation itself was headed by stop-motion animator Tadahito Mochinaga at his studio, MOM Production, in Tokyo, Japan. Rankin/Bass Productions was one of the first U.S. companies to outsource and collaborate with Japanese animators to complete projects. This is also the backstory behind the wild, and wonderful, King Kong Escapes from 1967, directed by Godzilla legend Ishirō Honda. 

The fourth collaborator I want to highlight today is Romeo Muller, who wrote the screenplays for four of the five specials I’ll be talking about today. All of these elements came together, plus some really catchy tunes, to basically define a significant part of what feels like Christmas to me.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was first aired on December 6, 1964, sponsored by General Electric, and was, as far as I can tell, the second animated Christmas special made for television, after Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol two years earlier. Before that, there had been a marionette show in 1953, The Spirit of Christmas, mainly in the Philadelphia region, and a Disney compilation package with some new wraparound segments called From All of Us to You that first aired in 1958 as part of Walt Disney Presents on ABC. 

Along with A Charlie Brown Christmas, and a few other classics, Rudolph became an annual television event almost immediately. Growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the tail end of when these specials would air once per season on regular television. But it was also the age of the VCR, and so Rudolph (and a few of the others I’ll mention today) was committed to tape by my parents, mostly omitting commercials, and allowed me to watch over and over. As a kid, I identified with the misfits and felt bad for them (we can be honest and say Santa is kind of a jerk in this special). The main theme of the song, of course, is that being weird is fine, as long as you’re useful—which definitely fits into the early ‘60s mentality. At this point, The Beatles were still wanting to hold your hand, and had not explored psychedelics yet. 

The special takes the framework of the song and expands out the story. In addition to the original 8 reindeer, Santa, and Rudolph, it adds Mrs. Claus, an elf workforce, an arctic prospector, an abominable snowman, and a more literal snowman narrator voiced by Burl Ives. This set the pattern for the first wave of Rankin/Bass specials. Take a familiar Christmas song and create a world around it. The new characters, like Hermey the elf and Yukon Cornelius, the aforementioned peppermint prospector, add a unique flavor to the story and turn the very short song into an epic that spans the entire North Pole, and the Island of Misfit Toys. This sense of imagination and adventure, combined with iconic character designs has made this an enduring classic. Add some catchy original tunes and make it a coming of age story and this is essentially the same kind of thing that Tim Burton and Henry Selick created with The Nightmare Before Christmas, a few decades later.

The next Christmas song to receive the Animagic treatment was The Little Drummer Boy, in 1968. As a child, I found this too upsetting to watch every year. Aaron, the titular drummer, sees his parents killed, their beloved livestock stolen, his home burned down, and is forced into slavery—all in the first act. He becomes a misanthrope, and that’s before his lamb gets hit by a chariot. While the final moments feature a rousing version of the title song, this special is like 1940s Pinocchio-levels of bleak, and doesn’t really hold back. In terms of purity of vision and focus, this is the most earnest and direct about the hardships of life, but it’s still not one I go back to. 

I wanted to include 1969’s Frosty the Snowman here even though it was produced with traditional animation instead of stop motion simply because it feels like the most widely seen after Rudolph. Again, Romeo Muller takes a simple song and expands the mythology, while dramatizing as much of the lyrics as possible. Here Frosty is voiced by Jackie Vernon, and the special is narrated by Jimmy Durante. The inclusion of talents like these, especially Durante, provide a link between these beloved specials that goes all the way back to vaudeville. The tone of these Rankin/Bass productions is rife with puns, wordplay, and characters bending the fourth wall—if not breaking it. There are so many performers like Jimmy Durtane, including Thurl Ravencroft, Basil Rathbone, Vincent Price, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire that children are mainly exposed to due to their involvement in work that they likely took on because it was an easy paycheck and leaned on their existing personas. These also likely made these specials more interesting to adults. See also, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, which served as my first exposure to Cass Elliot, Tim Conway, and Sandy Duncan. 

Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, first aired in 1970, has become my favorite over the years. A Santa Claus origin story (a topic Rankin/Bass would revisit in 1985, adapting L. Frank Baum’s take), it barely has anything to do with the song except to explain the toy making, the list checking, and some other adjacent traditions like stockings. Set in the gloomy burg of Sombertown, it shows Santa (and the Kringles) becoming a force for good, trying to bring joy to a dull town. This sets them against the local magistrate, the Burgermeister Meisterburger, who hates toys, because this is aimed at kids and that’s more interesting than whatever his tax policy. There’s also the evil Winter Warlock to contend with, who eventually becomes a magical ally. This also tells the story of Jessica, who becomes Mrs. Claus, in her earlier days. As voiced by prolific voice actor Robie Lester, she really sells the love story within a packed 50-ish minutes of runtime (depending on how much has been cut for commercials). Lester’s autobiography was titled Lingerie For Hookers In The Snow: An Audiography Of A Voice Artist, an amazing title that I am adding to my to-read list. 

The Year Without a Santa Claus, which debuted in 1974, is based on a book rather than a song, and that leaves it feeling a little more stilted. This is the one with the Heat Miser and Snow Miser, who are probably the most iconic Rankin/Bass original characters, after Burl Ives’s snowman from Rudolph. And after “Holly Jolly Christmas,” the Miser Brothers’ song is a standout in the Rankin/Bass original songs category. This involves a lost reindeer (Vixen), a sick Santa, Mother Nature, and could easily be remade as a climate change fable in a very literal sense. 

The death of Jules Bass is what prompted this article, and thinking about the ways that pop culture and traditions connect us to the past. Running through these–some of which I watched religiously each holiday season, and others I would scour TV Guide to see if I could finally watch The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow or Rudolph’s Shiny New Year–was also a reminder of how the whims of large corporations has always shaped the landscape of movies and television. But even if some of those specials aren’t very good, all of these have that coming together of handmade animation and idiosyncratic creatives that absolutely make me feel like holidays are anything but a time for conformity.