Christmas: The Works of Rankin/Bass Remain Some of the Most Charming and Idiosyncratic Christmas TV Specials

The Christmas TV specials of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass are minor treasures of 1960s and early 1970s television. Their company, Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment, was best known for its use of stop-motion animation in beloved specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), The Little Drummer Boy (1968), and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970). They also made traditionally animated specials like Frosty the Snowman (1969), but it’s the aforementioned three stop-motion specials that capture their unique charms. Together, these films offer idiosyncratic and delightfully strange analog Christmas celebrations that are made more special by comparing them to the bland holiday entertainment that has followed them over the past 50 years.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is the best of the bunch. It was released first and set the template for the others, as it tells an imagined dramatic story behind Johnny Marks’ famous 1949 Christmas song (most notably sung by Gene Autry). In one respect, the film is an origin story for Rudolph as a beloved Christmas character. But it also seeks to explain what is only implied by lyrics in the song, such as the meaning of the phrase “reindeer games,” why Rudolph was so mistreated, and why Rudolph was needed to guide Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. These elements pique the interest of children, offering backstory to the songs they hear all the time, but it’s the formal elements of the special that are most noteworthy.

Like The Little Drummer Boy and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, which would follow, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer uses stop-motion animation with a tactile, almost homemade quality to it. The animation doesn’t try for verisimilitude, but instead resembles toys that a child would play with at Christmas. You can see the threads of felt on the reindeer and appreciate how the mixture of clay, plastic, and wood is used to bring to life the North Pole and the Island of Misfit Toys. The settings resemble dioramas, as if the entire film frame is a miniature theatrical stage. This presentation may sound abundantly simple, but it works marvellously when targeted at children.

As well, the animation brings to life a genuinely fantastical world. Instead of presenting the North Pole as something out of a slick, semi-realistic CGI Coca-Cola commercial, the film imagines a mythical world with its own rules and fantastical dimensions. The simple addition of a magnificent castle for Santa Claus shows how the film isn’t regurgitating boring holiday representations of the North Pole. Once Rudolph flees Santa’s workshop, he comes across the boisterous prospector, Yukon Cornelius, and the Abominable Snowman that stalks the snowy wastes. The fantastical elements culminate when he arrives on the Island of Misfit Toys, which is ruled over by King Moonracer, a winged lion that cares for all the discarded misfit toys of the world. The various toys they meet on the Island of Misfit Toys, such as a Charlie-in-the-Box, allow for clever humour and gentle puns, but it’s the design of Moonracer himself and his cavernous castle that best demonstrates the film’s imaginative visual approach.

Everything about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is purely secular, ignoring any and all Christian elements of Christmas. The Little Drummer Boy counters that secular approach by focusing completely on the Nativity Story. Based on the song written by Katherine Davis in 1941 and rearranged by Henry Onorati and Harry Simeone in 1958, the special tells the story of the first Christmas through the lens of an enslaved drummer boy, Aaron, who ends up at the stable where Jesus is born.

Like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Little Drummer Boy focuses on an outsider who’s severely mistreated by others. In the film, the parents of Aaron are killed by bandits and he ends up the slave of a caravaner, Ben Haramad (voiced by Jose Ferrer). Aaron’s journeys with Ben Haramad and his band of musicians and dancers eventually takes him to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where he meets the Three Magi and eventually visits Mary and Joseph in the stable. The story elements and performances exaggerate some of the most Orientalist aspects of the film’s Middle-Eastern setting—Ben Haramad, for instance, personifies many of the nastiest, greediest stereotypes about Arabs. But the film is also beautifully designed, with a great attention to detail on the costumes and sets, even accepting the most Orientalist aspects of its presentation.

The Little Drummer ends up embodying some core elements of the Gospels in its approach to how Aaron comes to the Holy Family on Christmas. Aaron is an angry little boy who is mistreated throughout the film. He first seeks out the Magi to heal his donkey friend, who is run over by a Roman chariot, but the Magi cannot help, instead imploring Aaron to ask the infant Jesus for healing. In lieu of material gifts, Aaron selflessly offers himself and his song at the foot of the manger holding the infant Jesus. His donkey is healed in return, but more importantly, his anger is extinguished by the wave of forgiveness and love made possible through the Incarnation; the spiritual transformation is similar to the transformation of the main character in Ben-Hur. By giving up himself, Aaron finds freedom. The special makes great use of the haunting title song, one of my favourite modern Christmas carols, and especially the excellent recording by the Vienna Boys Choir, which first sung it in 1958 and did an original version for the film.

Where Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer creates a fantastic world for a secular Christmas story and The Little Drummer Boy captures the religious promise at the centre of the Nativity Story, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town tries to reconcile both approaches. To be clear, it mythologizes the secular origin story of Santa Claus, so it leans more towards Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but it also incorporates references to the Nativity Story and Christian meaning of the holiday. In its own idiosyncratic way, it attempts to syncretize the various versions of the Santa Claus character, both religious and secular, into something resembling an iconic take for post-war America and its civil relationship to Christianity.

The 51-minute film is based off J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s song, which was popularized on radio by Eddie Cantor in 1934. It’s framed as a direct answer to all those questions kids have about Santa Claus when Christmas comes around each year. The narrator, a fleet-footed mail carrier voiced by Fred Astaire, has his truck break down and passes the time by answering questions from the various letters to Santa Claus he’s delivering, such as “Why does Santa have whiskers?” and “Why is he named Kris Kringle?” He answers these questions by telling the story of Kris Kringle (voiced by Mickey Rooney), an orphan raised by elves in the mountain valley outside a dismal, vaguely-Bavarian place called Sombertown, where the Burgermeister Meisterburger has outlawed all toys and Christmas traditions.

The film combines elements of legends about Saint Nicholas with fantastical and goofy inventions to create a composite portrait of Santa Claus. He’s raised by the toy-making elf family Kringle, which explains why he’s called Kris Kringle, and he tries to deliver the toys to the children of neighbouring Sombertown, having to sneak down their chimneys and hide toys in stockings to avoid detection by the Burgermeister’s guards. 

The movie is mostly goofy fun. Sometimes it’s cloying, such as during a romantic song between Kris and his eventual Mrs. Klaus, the schoolteacher Miss Jessica. At other times, the additions are fantastical, such as the character of the Winter Warlock, who haunts the mountain passage between Sombertown and the valley where the Kringles live. His design resembles a mixture of the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia with Saruman from The Lord of the Rings and Merlin from Arthurian legends. Keenan Wynn’s vocal performance as the Warlock is also a highlight, which is impressive in a film employing both Fred Astaire and Mickey Rooney.

The mythical, magical elements of the film are its most notable, but the film also goes out of its way to reference the religious elements of Christmas. For instance, Astaire’s narrator explains that Kris and Jessica decide to get married on Christmas Eve because it’s the night when God gave the gift of his Son to the World. The film is never explicit about religion, but it implies that Santa Claus is a practicing Christian. The entire presentation suggests that there’s nothing incompatible with incorporating Santa Claus into Christian Christmas traditions. In a sense, such an approach is as much a dated element of the special as the casting or the music or the animation. 

These Rankin/Bass TV Specials come from a time when secular elements were coming to dominate Christmas traditions, but had not yet supplanted the religious ones as the dominant cultural presentation. They’re products of a secular culture that still understood the essential Christian nature of Christmas, allowing secular elements the prominence without dismissing the Christian elements outright. You see a similar mixture in A Charlie Brown Christmas and other Christmas specials of the time, which all are products of America’s post-war incorporation of a vague form of Christianity into American cultural life.

Thus, the balance between secular and religious traditions is a part of the charm of these nostalgic animated specials. They’ll always be best remembered for their charming stop-motion animation, iconic voice actors, and lively songs. But their meaningful engagement with cultural traditions is what helps make them register so strongly half a century later. They’re pop culture artifacts that are worth unearthing each Christmas season.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

Directed by Larry Roemer; written by Romeo Muller; starring Burl Ives, Larry Mann, Billie Richards, Paul Soles, Stan Francis.

The Little Drummer Boy (1967)

Directed by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr.; written by Romeo Muller; starring the voices of Teddy Eccles, Jose Ferrer, Paul Frees, June Foray.

Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town (1970)

Directed by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass; written by Romeo Muller; starring the voices of Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, Keenan Wynn, Paul Frees, Joan Gardner, Robie Lester.

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