So many fond Christmas-related memories of mine revolve around animated TV specials. As a kid, they were just part of the total Christmas experience, but as an adult, I’ve come to appreciate them mainly for nostalgia (obviously), and for the closely related sense of history long passed. What I love about animated Christmas specials today is actually how crude they were. Today, if you want to produce animated entertainment on the cheap, you just use CGI like everything else, and the visual quality (to say nothing of the actual content) is nearly on par with theatrical releases. Animation simply doesn’t take as much time or money as it used to.
Before computers, animated TV specials had to be animated by hand. And since they would be airing for free, it seems like most of them were rushed out missing a couple layers of polish. Make no mistake – this is my favorite part about them. The lack of refinement and overlooked mistakes and awkward pacing actually make these specials seem more genuine. More sincere. They may have been cynically produced on the cheap by giant corporations looking for an easy Christmas season advertising cash in (especially true of A Charlie Brown Christmas and its Coca Cola affiliation), but the old fashioned crudeness of the animation lends the impression of having been made by children.
There’s the aforementioned A Charlie Brown Christmas – perhaps the best single example of this notion I’m circling around. There’s also the Gerblick family mainstay A Garfield Christmas, which has its own charms. But I think the one most worthy of writing a snarky blog post about has to be Rankin Bass’s 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV movie. Not only was this an early milestone of stop-motion animation, but it cemented a number of Christmas season tropes we all recognize today (several of which were referenced in the movie Elf).
Given that I wrote a much longer intro than I had intended, I’ll jump right into the thesis statement: When you watch the 1964 Rudolph TV special today, there are just so many hilariously awkward moments that we all seem to have collectively forgotten. Here are my five favorites.