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Sixty years after the debut of the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stop-motion animated classic, the yearly flood of holiday films can thank the small reindeer for their success

As we spend the Christmas season binging on , one diminutive reindeer has been part of Christmas media longer than any other figure.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created as a coloring book in 1939 by Robert L. May for Montgomery Ward when the retailer decided to produce its own coloring books after distributing books from other publishers for years. May faced pushback on the story, since red noses were associated with drinking at the time, but ultimately Montgomery Ward distributed more than 2 million copies of the story that .

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

The first Rudolph cartoon debuted in 1948, directed by . The next year, the famous song written by May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks debuted behind the vocals of Gene Autry, hitting number one—the first top song of 1950 that was added to Fleischer’s cartoon when it was reissued in 1951.

Autry’s beloved version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” sold more 1.75 million copies in 1949 alone, and altogether Autrey’s and every other version of the song have behind only Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” in total Christmas song sales. It is also the only No. 1 song to fall completely off the charts the week after it peaks.

receiving a writing credit after suing for trademark infringement. Autry also wrote and sang

The growth of the recording industry after World War II was part of a larger post-war economic boom in the United States that supported the increased commercialization of Christmas, which had started a century earlier with depictions of Santa in the 1840s and his first in-store appearance at the His appearance in the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924 was thought to kick off the holiday shopping season, with his modern image confirmed by A decade later, Rudolph joined Santa on his sleigh as a Christmas icon.

Stop-motion animation

In the first 25 years after May created Rudolph, the reindeer with the light-up nose became a multimedia legend, inspiring comic and children’s books in addition to the original coloring book and 1948 cartoon. But the small animation studio Rankin/Bass—founded as Videocraft and going by that name until 1974, when it rebranded as Rankin/Bass— and produced the longest continuously running Christmas special in United States television history.

The unique stop-motion animation style Rankin/Bass used was called and his MOM Production Studio. The process debuted in the United States in 1961 in a syndicated series called The New Adventures of Pinocchio, but the helped the stop-motion animation approach become legendary. Rankin/Bass was one of the earliest studios to outsource its animation to Japan, which became common practice in .

Since its debut in 1964, the Rudolph special has gone In 1965, the song “Fame and Fortune” was added, to the chagrin of fans of the original; the song and the scene were removed and Santa’s visit to the Island of Misfit Toys was added in 1966. 

Since its debut Dec. 6, 1964, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has gone through a number of edits. (Image: Rankin/Bass)

Yukon Cornelius’ visit to the peppermint mine was also edited out of the original and would not return until 2019, when the network Freeform obtained the rights to this and several other Rankin/Bass specials as a part of its .

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer aired on NBC, its original network, until 1971, when , which it held until 2023. For the film’s 60th anniversary this year, NBC will air the full film in a 75-minute broadcast on Dec. 6, the same date the original debuted in 1964. Unlike other Christmas specials, the film is not available as a part of any streaming service and must be purchased to view it outside the

The stop-motion Rudolph film not only became an instant classic, but also led to a wave of classic Christmas visual media in television and film. A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted in 1965, followed in 1966 by the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, which was adapted from the 1957 Dr. Seuss book. Rankin/Bass would continue to produce holiday specials, including traditionally animated specials based on the Charles Dickens Christmas novella The Cricket on the Hearth (1967) and The Mouse on the Mayflower (1968), a Thanksgiving special.

The studio’s greatest successes, however, were its specials based on popular holiday songs and traditional stories. Later in 1968, The Little Drummer Boy debuted, a stop-motion special based on the song written in . The song became a holiday standard in the United States through the later version by The Harry Simeone Chorale, who also recorded the popular version of “. “The Little Drummer Boy” was also covered by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby with David Bowie.

The film The Little Drummer Boy is fairly dark for an animated special of the time, featuring the drummer boy Aaron’s family being murdered before he is kidnapped, forced to perform and escaped to join the .

A holiday deluge

Rankin/Bass studio produced Frosty the Snowman in 1969, which was drawn to look like a Christmas card. (Image: Rankin/Bass)

In subsequent years, Rankin/Bass continued to produce specials that became staples of various holidays, including the traditionally animated The studio also produced a number of other stop-motion specials, including and . The partnership between Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass resulted in more than two dozen holiday specials and numerous other films and series, including the .

What used to be special, sprinkled throughout late November and December, has become a massive media industry leading to most regularly scheduled series taking a as a torrent of holiday specials and sporting events dominate television from Thanksgiving through the college football bowl season in January. The holiday season is now overrun by a collection of animated specials, holiday episodes and cheesy rom-coms. The latter of these were popularized by Hallmark, which has been sponsoring specials for broadcast since 1951, making what is now known as the the longest-running anthology series on television.

Hallmark’s low-budget holiday specials have been a staple of the holidays since 2000 and dramatically increased when . Since then, the channel, which has grown in popularity over the last two decades, has produced more than 300 holiday specials created around formulaic narratives largely focused on family-appropriate romance. Other media outlets, including Lifetime Network and Netflix, have also joined this trend, leading to a deluge of specials of varying quality dominating the holiday season.

However, many of these specials rooted in nostalgia and familiar formulas can thank Santa’s ninth reindeer for using his shining nose to lead the way in establishing our holiday watching habits.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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