It is impossible to overstate the pop cultural impact of 1964's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. With its charming stop-motion animation, built-in branding, and memorable songs, the special burst onto the scene 60 years ago this December and has been a part of American Christmas ever since, its mark on the holiday as indelible as Nat King Cole's voice.
Sit back and think about it for a second: Six decades. That makes Rudolph older than A Charlie Brown Christmas, older than Star Wars, older than the damn moon landing. Entire entertainment ecospheres have risen, flourished, and withered in its shadow, and still, like Rudolph's red nose, it shines over generations of holiday entertainment, influencing everything from feature films to commercials.
But to truly grasp the scope of Rudolph's impact and influence, you have to understand that it was just the beginning, the first in a line of animated Christmas specials that spanned the next two decades, encompassed entire childhoods, and changed the face of the Christmas entertainment world forever.
You also have to understand that things got really, really weird.
Beginnings
Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass began working together in the 1950s, combining Rankin's gifts as an art director and designer with Bass' copywriting and songwriting chops to form Videocraft International. They started with commercials, but before long they were looking into the world of animated children's entertainment. But while their names are the ones we remember, Rankin and Bass couldn't make magic on their own. For that, they needed to go to Japan.
During a Japanese trip to tour studios and production facilities in the country, Rankin encountered Tadahito "Tad" Mochinaga, an animator who was doing exciting, impressive work with stop-motion at the time. Mochinaga's career began during World War II, when the Japanese government pressed him into service making recruitment films and propaganda, something he later grew to regret. Understandably, he'd devoted much of his time post-war to trying to bring brighter, happier material into the world, and Rankin was especially impressed with Mochinaga's approach to stop-motion. Unlike other animators in the field at the time, who were either using "claymation" or swapping out the limbs and heads of their characters constantly, Mochinaga was working on something a bit more efficient. His style involved building fully articulated, posable puppets with interchangeable eyes and mouths. This meant the figures could be used over and over again without stopping to reshape or swap out big body parts. The effect was charming, and Rankin and Bass knew immediately that they'd found a partner.
By 1960, Mochinaga's stop-motion was the driving force behind Videocraft's first TV series, The New Adventures of Pinocchio (believe it or not, not the only time Pinocchio will feature in this story). Just a few years later, Videocraft partnered with NBC and General Electric on a series of specials billed under the title The General Electric Fantasy Hour. The second of these specials? Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which arrived on Dec. 6, 1964 and launched a boom of family Christmas spectaculars on television. But Rankin, Bass, and Mochinaga were just getting started with their overhaul of seasonal programming.
The Golden Age
The success of Rudolph transformed Videocraft into Rankin/Bass Productions. They spent the rest of the 1960s churning out new material in both traditional and stop-motion animation, partnering with Japanese studios with a reputation for high-quality work pretty much every time. Because Rudolph's success stemmed, in part, from the familiarity of the original story by Robert L. May (written for Montgomery Ward department stores in the 1930s) and the later song by Johnny Marks (most famously performed by Gene Autry), the company reasoned that they should stick with some version of the familiar for their follow-up holiday specials.
So, they followed up Rudolph with a traditionally animated adaptation of Charles Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth; then a soulful, patient stop-motion expansion of the classic Christmas song The Little Drummer Boy; and then, in 1969, another Christmas staple, Frosty the Snowman.
Like Rudolph, it was based on a classic seasonal hit song, it featured recognizable voices (Burl Ives narrated the reindeer tale, while Jimmy Durante took on the snowman), a wintry adventure, and a genuine emotional payoff featuring Santa Claus. And like Rudolph, it became a holiday staple.
Behind it all, the guiding hands of Rankin (who oversaw production and worked on the design of each special) and Bass (who co-wrote songs with Maury Laws and helped find each story's emotional center) were keeping the ship steady, and eventually they were credited as co-directors on every single special, like the Coen Brothers of Christmas. But to understand the strangeness of Rankin/Bass to come, you also have to understand the larger collaborative team behind the specials. There was Mochinaga, of course, who brought his own artistic and personal influences to the stories, as well as an astonishing attention to detail. There was Maury Laws, who developed the whimsical musical styles of Rankin/Bass with Bass himself. There were artists like Paul Coker and Don Duga, who designed the characters in concept art before sending them off to Japan to be brought to life. And most importantly, there was Romeo Muller.
Credited as writer or co-writer on more than a dozen of Rankin/Bass' Christmas specials, beginning with Rudolph, Muller was adept at finding the emotional center of each story while also often working from rather thin source material, like a popular song or a simple conceptual hook. He was also, crucially, great at telling stories of misfits who eventually found their community while never compromising who they truly were. What could have stopped with the simple story of accepting Rudolph's red nose became a story of an entire band of outsiders, from a boyish elf who wanted to be a dentist to a failed prospector to an entire island of strange toys just waiting for the right child to play with them. It's no wonder that the queer themes (if you don't read Hermey the Elf as a gay man trying to come out in his own way, I don't know what to tell you) in Muller's writing, expressed in virtually all of his Rankin/Bass work, have become a cornerstone of modern Rankin/Bass fandom. These are, in the end, stories about achieving a sense of belonging, of kind rebellion, of pride, and that makes Muller a vital piece of the Rankin/Bass puzzle.
Today, Rudolph and Frosty remain the best-known specials the company ever produced, but this early era of Rankin/Bass success peaked in 1970 with Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town, an epic Santa origin story narrated by none other than Fred Astaire. Starring Mickey Rooney in what would become a recurring role as Santa, and featuring gorgeous animation by Mochinaga's studio (though Mochinaga himself had moved on by this point), it's the graduation ceremony to Rudoph's freshman year, proof that Rankin/Bass had reached powerhouse status in just six years of producing Christmas programming.
It's got great songs, a great look, a great message, and if you look at it right, it becomes a broad anti-authoritarian fable about a toymaker who partners with a plucky penguin and a reformed warlock (one of Rankin/Bass' great character designs) to invent Christmas as we know it. There's a confidence to it, in Bass and Laws' songwriting, Muller's script, and the animation of Video Tokyo Production, all of which says that these guys were starting to feel like they could do whatever they wanted and still make Christmas hits. The 1970s would bear this out in spectacular, often bonkers fashion.
Things Get Weird
Rankin/Bass weren't solely focused on Christmas. Their animation factory worked constantly to churn out specials for other holidays (most famously Here Comes Peter Cottontail, co-starring Vincent Price as an evil rabbit who rides a bat; it rules), TV series like Jackson 5ive and The Osmonds, and even feature films like the Desi Arnaz Jr.-starring Marco. They spent the early '70s away from the holiday with which they're most identified, honing their versatility, but when they came back, they came back in a big way.
In 1974, Rankin/Bass released the two Christmas specials that arguably represent the zenith of their traditionally animated and stop-motion animated holiday craft. 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, the traditionally animated film, and the Animagic-made The Year Without a Santa Claus, both tell emotionally satisfying, ambitious, truly moving stories featuring beautiful visuals and some of the best musical moments in Rankin/Bass history. They're also weird in a way that Rankin/Bass never was before, and that's saying something for a studio whose opening gambit in the Christmas game was about a reindeer, a dentistry-obsessed elf, a prospector, and a skinny Santa with discriminatory hiring practices.
Night Before and Year Without are both entries in the "What if Christmas didn't happen?" sub-genre of seasonal specials. The first is about a town who's left out of Christmas because one kid wrote a letter saying Santa was a fraud, and the second is about Santa (again, voiced by Mickey Rooney) simply deciding that no one will care if he takes a sick day. Only they're not just about that.
The most important characters in Night Before are a talking family of mice and a depressed clockmaker who's ostracized by his community after one of his clocks suffers a PR disaster, while Year Without is mostly focused on Mrs. Claus (Shirley Booth) teaming up with a pair of elves and a baby reindeer to save Christmas. Year Without is also the special which gave us the Miser Brothers, twin avatars of hot and cold weather, both of them messy bitches who live for drama.
Like the Abominable Snow Monster of the North in Rudolph and the Winter Warlock in Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, the Misers represent an attempt by Rankin/Bass to branch out beyond accepted holiday lore and do something not just singular, but deeply strange, particularly when both Misers have to answer to their mother, who is literally Mother Nature. The world of Animagic Christmas was getting bigger, and it didn't stop there.
Over the last 11 years of their Christmas epic run, Rankin/Bass threw every ornament they could dream up at the pop culture Christmas tree, just to see what caught on a branch. In The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow, a special that's definitely not about the "first" Christmas, a blind shepherd dreams of snowfall, and when he finally experiences it, cries happy tears so powerful they restore his sight.
In Frosty's Winter Wonderland, Frosty makes his human friends build him a wife, turning Frosty into Rankin/Bass' resident Wife Guy, and then battles Jack Frost.
Then there's Rudolph's Shiny New Year, a Romeo Muller-written direct sequel to the original Rudolph (it literally picks up immediately after Santa's Christmas Eve trip) in which the beloved reindeer must aid the physical embodiment of time itself to defeat an evil vulture who's trying to stop time by kidnapping the Baby New Year (who's on the run because he has big ears and people laugh at him). To make this work, Rudolph teams up with a knight, a caveman, and a time avatar who looks and acts like Benjamin Franklin. It is nuts, and if you're looking for pure Rankin/Bass strangeness, this is where it's at.
But even that wasn't the end. Throughout the rest of the '70s and into the early 1980s, Rankin/Bass made a sequel to The Little Drummer Boy (way weirder than its predecessor), a Jack Frost origin story, a Rudolph rip-off about a long-eared "Christmas donkey" named Nestor, an adaptation of a Christmas Carol called The Stingiest Man in Town, a Pinocchio Christmas special, a story called The Leprechaun's Christmas Gold in which a sailor accidentally awakens a banshee while searching for a Christmas tree on a leprechaun island (it's even weirder than this makes it sound), and for their final-ever Animagic production, an adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, an epic fantasy version of the Santa story featuring some of the most beautiful character designs in any Rankin/Bass work.
Rankin/Bass also beat Marvel Studios to the punch by producing the single most ambitious crossover event in pop culture history: Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July, an expansive TV movie in which the two leads must fight another evil snow wizard (yes, there are at least two in Rankin/Bass canon) who's trying to steal the magic that now resides in Rudolph's nose.
Also, there's a circus on a beach, which Frosty can hang out in because he has a magic amulet that keeps him from melting. Oh, and there's an evil, rogue reindeer who's mad because Rudolph took his job.
By the mid-1980s, Rankin/Bass had moved on from Animagic and from Christmas specials, though they continued working in animation. In 1985, they produced a little cartoon you might have heard of called ThunderCats, and another one in 1986 called SilverHawks. Yes, I'm serious. Look it up.
The Rankin/Bass Christmas Legacy
For the casual viewer, it is tempting, and quite understandable, to draw the Rankin/Bass line somewhere around Santa Claus is Comin' To Town, maybe The Year Without a Santa Claus, and leave their output at that. It's easy to reduce them to the first few years of their seasonal career, to talk about how timeless Rudolph and Frosty are, and move on. After all, producing Rudolph and then Frosty in the span of five years would be more than enough to leave a lasting mark, as Rankin/Bass so clearly has.
But this is a dramatic oversimplification of the kind of pop culture impact that's made the Rankin/Bass style a presence in everything from episodes of Community to Elf to commercials that pop up nearly every holiday season. These specials could have stopped at the water's edge of established midcentury Christmas lore, each of them tight half-hours (with commercials) that didn't invent so much as remix.
But Rankin/Bass was never content to stop there, or to keep their inventions confined to basic villains like snow monsters and the simple danger of a lack of belief in Santa. The talents involved in creating these specials wanted something more than that, something that would catch the eye but also capture the imagination. They wanted Winter Warlocks and Miser Brothers and evil time vultures. They wanted to get weird.
That weirdness, and Rankin/Bass' willingness to mine every possible avenue of Christmas from Leprechauns to Drummer Boys, created a body of work which casts the widest possible net over its audience. Yes, they are commercial products designed to sell advertising for TV networks, but they are also a bold, hilarious stew of influences and ideas in the same way that our modern Christmas celebrations are. In the world of Rankin/Bass, you can hang out with Santa Claus as he goes about his annual business, but you can also go save the New Year with a caveman and a knight. You can meet Rudolph and Frosty, but you can also watch wizards and wood nymphs argue over whether or not Santa should be an immortal like them. You can be traditional and strange at the same time. There is no wrong way to get festive in these specials. Differences are celebrated, wrongs are forgiven, and kindness reigns above all when the holiday season rolls around. Through their strange seasonal worlds, Rankin/Bass gave us Christmas as it should be: An endless sandbox of posable toys and magic, big enough for all of us.
