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“What an asshole,” my fifteen-year-old daughter remarked when we watched “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” last Christmas. For some families, this might have been an indication that the children had aged out of “Rudolph.” But we didn’t take it that way. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is fifty years old this Christmas season, and I have watched it every year of my life, and my children—the older one is eighteen—have, too. Even my husband, who is Jewish, grew up watching it. When you’ve seen something that often, it demands new reactions—and sometimes a new rhetorical palette. “Rudolph” isn’t complex, but over the years we’ve managed to think some new things about it.
Lucy was not, I hasten to clarify, calling Rudolph, or even the Abominable Snowman, an asshole. She meant Rudolph’s father, Donner. As you may recall, Donner is an intolerant blowhard, ashamed of his boy’s fancy nose. (Yes, he comes to regret it—as everybody who made fun of Rudolph does—but only after driving Rudolph from his home and nearly losing him for good.) Lucy is active in her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, and Donner reminded her of a bullying homophobe. And, though Rudolph is not L, G, B, T, or Q, Donner’s Great Santini act with his dear, decorative son suddenly struck me that way, too.
This year, my husband wondered aloud whether the nerdy elf who wants to be a dentist might be Jewish. (I just learned from the fiftieth-anniversary Rudolph postage stamps that the character’s name is Hermey and not, as I’d always thought, Herbie.) There’s no particularly good reason to believe this, but the show’s dreamy embrace of difference makes a Jewish elf seem like a possibility.
Meanwhile, I had been watching Rudolph for years before I asked what so many viewers wonder: Why is that basic rag doll on the Island of Misfit Toys? Unlike the water pistol that shoots jelly, the cowboy who rides an ostrich, or even Charlie-in-the-Box, she is outwardly normal. In a 2005 interview for the Archive of American Television, Arthur Rankin, the co-creator of the Rudolph special, offered this explanation: “I always say, well, she has psychiatric problems. She was under the care of an analyst.” It was a joke, but not entirely, because “Rudolph,” with its oedipal conflicts and its search for independence shadowed by fears of abandonment, is as on point, psychologically speaking, as an animated Christmas special is likely to get.
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” débuted, on NBC’s General Electric Fantasy Hour, on December 6, 1964. Its creators, Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass, assumed that it would air once, maybe twice, as a promotion for G.E. appliances, before entering a nice long hibernation. Instead, it became the longest-running Christmas special in history; along with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965), “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (1966), and “Frosty the Snowman” (1969), “Rudolph” is one of four Christmas specials still shown on television every year.
One reason for its longevity is the obvious care involved in its animation. As the Times’ obituary of Rankin, who died in February, explained, “Mr. Rankin’s stop-motion films were painstakingly handmade. Collaborating with Japanese puppet makers who fashioned each figure from wood, wire and wool—Rudolph was about five inches tall, Santa about nine inches—the filmmakers shot thousands of still photos of the incremental movements involved in every gesture each character made. Running them together at 24 frames a second created the whimsical, herky-jerky effect of dolls being moved by invisible hands.” Watching the film, it’s easy to imagine that those hands belonged to children. In this way, Rudolph resembles snow globes and dioramas and Lego villages: the many self-contained worlds of childhood.
Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion—they called it “Animagic”—influenced filmmakers such as Tim Burton, who once said he had “a fond burning feeling” for the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials he had watched as child, and Wes Anderson, who used stop-motion puppets for his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” But “Rudolph” persists for deeper reasons than unembarrassed nostalgia. Like Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak, two great children’s writers of the sixties, Rankin, Bass, and Romeo Muller, the author of the Rudolph screenplay, were deeply aware of children’s powerlessness, and of their powerful ability to imagine. Rankin, in particular, combined the sensibility of a postwar New York analysand with a strong appreciation of the release offered by fairy tales. As he told the television-archives interviewer:
I think all kids feel slightly inferior. Because, as the man said when he went to send his daughter to a psychiatrist, What’s wrong with her? And the psychiatrist said, What do you mean, what’s wrong with her? She’s four years old, she’s three feet tall, and she’s broke. She’s got problems. Kids have problems whatever they maybe be …. And when the characters are relieved of their problems by their own actions … kids love to see someone of their own age or inferiority achieve things. It makes them feel good.
In its twee way, “Rudolph” promised a future that would be kinder to nonconformists. The original “Rudolph” song, which was inspired by a department-store promotion and became a big hit when sung by Gene Autry, only had one misfit, Rudolph. The early-sixties special added Hermey, Yukon Cornelius, the Island of Misfit Toys, and an explicit message about acceptance. Of course, the oddballs still had to prove their worth—Rudolph cuts through the fog with his luminous schnoz, Hermey defangs the abominable snowman—in a way that would be hard to imagine today. Now Rudolph could just be that way, even born that way. And old Donner, rejecting patriarch, looks more and more like an asshole.