Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: Everything You Didn't Know

As the holiday season draws nearer, TMI's Misfits of Minutiae delve into the tale of Santa's favorite genetic mutant. In addition to learning all about the song and the production of the beloved 1964 Rankin/Bass TV special, they also explore Rudolph's truly tragic backstory, which is SO much sadder than all the other reindeer laughing and calling him names. You'll learn all about the controversy surrounding his red nose — and the gross reason why it would occur in real life — as well as the insane lengths producers went to get their puppets accurate, and the ridiculous amounts fans have paid for the surviving figurines. And, at long last, Jordan and Heigl will clear up the most enduring mystery involving The Island of Misfit Toys. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
and welcome the Too Much Information, the show that brings
you the secret history and little known facts behind your
favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. Or your misfits
of minutia, your bumbles of banality, your dental fetishizing elves

(00:23):
of entertainment trivia.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
My name is Jordan ronzg isn't Bumble a dating app?
At this point it is? I know for fact it is.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Yeah, but the but Yukon Cornelius calls the abominable Snowman
bumbles for some reason, bumbles bounce.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Maybe it's bumbles plural. Okay, And I'm Alex Heigel, a
condescending music major from our recent September review of this show,
and I would like to correct that listener respectfully. I
minored in jazz and majored in English, which is also
the reason that I am where I am, so, sir
or madam, thank you for the review.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Well, today we're talking about what I'm pretty calm and
calling the most beloved TV special in history.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
When you say it's up there, yeah, for sure, I'm
hard pressed to think of another that. I mean, I
don't know. As you grew up with like your family
watching Wizard of Oz every year.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
No sound in the music was more our jam for
lengthy cinematic feature that was put on network TV to
eat up the hour as well posts and stuff when yeah, yeah, yeah,
or or I should say it's this, or or you
know Christmas story, We've already done yes, So yes, this
is a holiday mainstay that's about the notch. It's fifty
ninth consecutive Christmas, making it the longest running Yuel Tide

(01:36):
TV spectacular of all time. From the folks at rank
In Bass, creators of some of the most distinctive yet
slightly unnerving stop motion animation, we're talking about Rudolph the
Red Nose Reindeer, Heigel. I got to say, given your
ambivalence towards my cherished Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, I'd assume
that you would be equally indifferent to this.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Televisual tradition, if you will.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
But I was surprised when you were actually the one
who suggested we do it.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
So yeah, tell me more. What's your what's your history
with Rudolph and the Rankin Bass Oovra. I just love
stop motion animation. I think it is such a fascinating
footnote in film history. I mean the fact that it
was kept alive longer than it sort of should have
been by like the same three people. It's like, you

(02:25):
know Ray Harryhausen and his Willis O'Brien, his mentors, and
then like.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
What do those guys do? I don't I don't know
the names. I only know Tim Burton for a Nightmare
before Christmas.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, Harry Selnick was the director of that, and he
was he was the guy who just executed all of
Burton's stuff. But and he is actually like Coraline was
him as well, right, so he has actually kept that
flame alive for as I said, again, an unreasonably long
amount of time. Willis O'Brien was the guy who did

(02:56):
King Kong and Mighty Joe Young uh, and like the
early monster movies. And then his protege was Willis O'Brien,
who's like did a lot of that through the fifties
and sixties. Is probably most remembered today for doing Jason
of the Argonauts. He did that, oh yeah, not just
the crake in, but he did that insane fight scene
where they basically choreographed an entire fight scene with the actors.

(03:19):
I'm unsure of the order with the actors. And then
he animated the same fight scene with stop motion skeletons
and then they composited them and it is just like
an insane technical feat. Yeah, And that was just like
as a as a thing of me, just like reading
about how movies were made and getting into like the
effects world and kind of behind that. And it is

(03:40):
such a damn pain in the ass though, Like it's
so funny about it is that people like Harry Selnick
is God beloved him for keeping this flame alive, or
like the Walls and Gramt guys, where it's just like, uh, yeah,
that is an insane labor of love, and the returns
on it are really not that like they you know,
he obviously not out of the park with Night Before

(04:01):
Christmas and Coraline, but like, I don't think some of
his other projects have been as successful as either one
of those, and you know, Wallace and Grammage has just
done so. I think infrequently that I just admire people's
you know, it's just the same through lined all of
my art stuff. I admire people's dedication to things that
should not by any right continue to exist.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
I hadn't really thought about situations where stop motion animation
was used in conjunction with humans in the movie. I
was thinking of just things like this where it was
just purely stop motion animation for you know, style's sake.
But I forgot about how a lot of those early
Monster movies, the scenes with the monsters were stop motion.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah. I mean he actually won the Willis O'Brien won
an oscar in nineteen fifty for Mighty Joe Young, which
is the giant ape movie that isn't King Kong. But
you know, he was working as far as the early
Edison films, not the even earliest, but like by in
like nineteen seventeen, was working on stop motion stuff for Wow,

(05:03):
Thomas Friggin Edison. So Willis O'Brien is like a very
formative figure, and even though his discipline has kind of
been phased out, you know, it lives on through through
not just his protege's immediate protege uh and Ray Harry Housen,
but now guys like Harry Solnick and everything. And you know,
there is something that's so fascinating about it to me

(05:23):
because it really does have a Yeah, it's there's something
so uncanny about them. That's still so and it gets
it like in the Freudian sense, which I think I've
also talked about on the show before. But like that,
they that that kind of unease that comes from you
looking at something and going that's alive and it shouldn't be. Yeah,
and it's personified, so you know, all the tricks of

(05:45):
animation are kind of brought to the fore with it,
where you like, you imbue it with personality via these
exaggerated uh features, and that all plays into the design
of it and then it's moving, but you're still like, ah,
there's something a little bit off about that, And that's
what tuget the tug of it is for me. I'm
so glad you said that, because yeah, like I said
in the intro, they always seemed a little especially these

(06:07):
ranking bass ones, a little unnerving to me, especially like
in the Year Without a Santa Claus.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
But the Heat Miser, like all the evil characters are.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Incredible and iconic, you know, and I think Pixar like
kind of stole a bunch of their whether or not
they didn't git to it or not, like for legal reasons. Yes,
that is a that is your say.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Well, Obviously, I love the Rudolph Special, and not just
because I'm deeply sentimental.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
And cling to any and all traditions, but.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
I especially love just how gloriously early sixties it looks,
so that style of it, Like like, I mean, you
know what, I think we both like this for the
same reason, but come at it from different angles. You
like it because the art form is antiquated and it
has no business existing anymore. I like it because just
the style of it. It's not like anything you see
on TV anymore, and I'm.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Shocked to see it. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean it's
one of those things where it's like I'm sure that
there's already like I don't even know where it's at,
where people are, because you know, like South Park was
made with like construction paper cutouts and is now using
extraordinarily sophisticated animation and rendering software to maintain it. Yeah, yeah,

(07:18):
I'm sure that. I'm sure that people are doing similar
things with stop motion. But yeah, I mean, it is
such a specific way of working with things that's constantly
fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Like Robot Chickens the only show I can think of
right now, Oh yeah's still on, But yeah, I just
love how wildly goofy this Rudolph special is. And I
think we're just we're also used to it nearly, you know,
six decades after premiered, but I think we've forgotten just
how random it is. I mean, there's no explanation why
Rudolph has a red nose. There's no explanation in my

(07:51):
memory at least, why this elf wants to be a dentist.
You've got the misfit toys, You've got an abominable snowman,
You've got this snowman with the voice of burl Ives.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
It's weird. It's really weird. Yeah, the dentist thing always
shook me. Yeah, I was like, surely there were other
avenues for you, because now you're kind of begging the question,
like do elves get cancer like elves? You know what
are they? There? STDs like dentists, presupposes an entire range
of medical issues. Does it not merry Christmas? Everyone?

Speaker 1 (08:23):
From Hiko and me? I mean, yeah, what other career
do you think Hermie who is not Herbie? By the way,
a lot of websites got out of their way to
specify that it's Hermie for some reason, But yeah, what
do you think Hermie seems a meth lab.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
I mean, everyone wants to say it's magic, but like
you know, they've got to be tweaking. And if you
bring that like Walter White level of like technical know
how to make in meth especially I mean, God in
the fifties would have been top. They would be out
of their minds on dexdren right in the elf version
of On the Road on a single unbroken ream of paper.

(09:05):
Can you imagine elf beat poetry? How much that would
have sucked? All kind of racist, like Jack car Rek
was like weird fetishizing black people kind of stuff. Writing
about jazz just gacked out of their little minds. That's
going into our pitch our pitch shows doesn't exist, and

(09:27):
that's how we get the Perry Coma Christmas alvel.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Well, I'm not sure I'm an editor on that probably
will from the devastating in real life origin story of
the titular reindeer, which is so much sadder than all
of the other reindeer laughing and calling them names, but
controversy surrounding his red nose and the irl reason this
could occur in the first place, to the insane lengths

(09:53):
producers went to create these puppets and the insane amounts
that fans paid for them decades later.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Here is everything I didn't know about Rudolph the Red
Nose Reindeer. Wow. Yeah, we're just gonna do We're gonna
do the whole the whole history of Rudolph. Even before
the TV special Good Good. The people should know they should.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Rudolph's story began appropriately enough with the Jewish Man. I
have to say Jewish people were responsible for the best
Christmas stuff. You got Irving Berlin's White Christmas. You got
Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, which is written by Johnny Marx,
who also wrote Rudolph Redno's Reindeer of the song as
We'll talk About, And we got the Phil Spector Christmas
Album which say what you will bout Phil Spector Great

(10:37):
Christmas Album. Robert May is the man who created Rudolph
while working as a copywriter for Montgomery Ward. The department
store chain was in the habit of giving away pre
bought coloring books to kids around Christmas time, but for
Christmas nineteen thirty nine, they planned something special. A cheery,
soft cover story book for children.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Making something themselves was deemed cheaper than by pre existing
coloring books. Capitalism is the mother of invention in this case.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
To write the original story, they tapped Robert May, who
chiefly worked as a copywriter from Montgomery Ward's mail order
catalog division. Imagine, I mean what must have that been? Like, Hey, yeah,
can you come here all right? Stop stop writing about
underwear for six seconds. We got a job for you.
Can you write like some limericks or something about some animals?
The company Brass specifically said that they wanted an animal,

(11:26):
and they wanted it to be like Ferdinand the Bull,
that children's book, because I think Disney had recently made
it into a short film. Uh huh, which I don't. Yeah,
I don't really remember that.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
But you know who does? Who? Leana donom just got
that big Ferdinand tattoo.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
I shocked how how quickly you pulled that up? Is
it because people confuse you for Jack Antonov as you were, okay,
let's tape in an interview with somebody, and they said
that looked like Tim the Toolman, Taylor's co host.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Oh, yeah, which I don't.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
I don't see I have a beard and sort of
that hair, but I don't.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Yeah, No, it's kind of hurtful.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah, it was, yeah, you Billy Bush.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
That's what it was. That's who it was, folks. It
was Billy Bush. The second worst thing Billy Bush has done.
I don't know if I'll keep that, but have it
on tape though, Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, second thing he's got on tape EO golf swing?

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Where are we?

Speaker 4 (12:32):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah, so the brass they wanted.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
They wanted this copywriter, Robert May, to write a Christmas
story about an animal, and May chose a reindeer, which
is not only Christmas y, but it was a favorite
of his four year old daughter. He would often take
her to Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo on Saturday mornings and
they would look at the deer together, which is sweet.
Savor that sweet moment because things are about to get really,

(12:54):
really sad.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
You see. Robert May was not in a good place.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
When he first received the assignment to write what would
become Rudolph in early nineteen thirty nine. He would later
recall here, I was heavily in debt at nearly thirty five,
still grinding out catalog copy instead of writing the great
American novels I'd once hoped. I was describing men's white
shirts too real on the eve of my thirty sixth birthday.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, that's uh, that's pretty heavy, hey, But it worked
out for him.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
It did work well, we'll get to that. It didn't
work out for him in the way that it should have.
As if these professional dissatisfactions weren't bad enough. He was
writing the descriptions of a weeping lonesome reindeer as his
wife was dying. In a nineteen seventy five article for
the Gettysburg Times, he described going to work on a

(13:45):
cold January day soon after receiving this assignment and feeling
quote relieved that holiday street decorations had been taken down,
saying my wife was suffering from a long illness, and
I didn't feel very festive. His wife, Evelyn, died on
July twenty eighth, nineteen thirty nine, leaving Robert May a widower.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
With his four year old daughter.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Those boss tried to reassign the project, May insisted on
finishing it himself. He would say, I needed Rudolph more
than ever.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, right, tough, real tough stuff.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
And now we're going to pull ourselves out of it
by getting pedantic at this phase.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yes, it's entry. You should take this, Yeah, yeah, why not.
But at this phase the deer was not yet called Rudolph.
Santra's reindeer already had names Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner,
and Blitzen. Nixon was one of them, Henri, never mind,

(14:50):
I'm not not going there, just a reindeer being like,
you know, the real problem with the Jews is Henry,
Henry h Jesus. I paced, yeah, right, best in piss somebody.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
There's somebody listening now, who's angry that we said something
not nice about it? M.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Kissinger, Yeah, of course there is. They were named in
the eighteen twenties poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas. But
May found himself stuck coming up with the name of
this new ninth reindeer that he was grafting onto the
pre existing legend for alliterative purposes, which are the best purposes.
He dreamed of a list of names that began with R,

(15:38):
which include Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick, and Reggie. In a
nineteen sixty three interview, he said that Rollo seemed too
happy for a reindeer with an unhappy problem. Reginald seemed
too sophisticated, but Rudolph rolled off the tongue nicely, does it.
I don't think it well. I mean, I guess they
would have been not that far out from like Rudy Valentino,

(16:00):
and like I associate that with like a sort of
silent Star era name. I also would take Reggie. I
love Reggie the Reindeer. That's great.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Reggie the Red Nose Reindeer. Yeah, well, it's kind of
hard to say Reggie the Red Nose.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Reindeer, Roddy Roddy the Red Nose Reindeer, Roddy the Red
Nose Reindeer, because then you have a Roddy McDowell kind
of kind of connection, which that was pre that though. Yeah,
it's true, rod Roddy rod Roddy the Red Nose Reindeer.
What you know, what are you saying at this point
to each other? Anyone listening to this would would be like,

(16:38):
those men are insane, they are not dealing well with
the realities of life. And I would say, you're correct, sir,
imaginary listener, Sir Maddon uh okay. With the name in place,
May kept working on the story, drawing on some elements
of his past. The character Rudolph was loosely inspired by
the story of the Ugly Duckling, which was a favorite
of Mays as a young boy, a time when he

(16:59):
was shy and small and knew what it was like
to be an underdog. Later, May majored in psychology at Dartmouth,
where he was exposed to the work of Alfred Adler.
Adler theorized that humans are motivated by a search for
perfection and self assertion, stemming from a desire to overcome
feelings of inferiority. How do you feel about that? The

(17:20):
tracks which was this kind of Nazi let's see later career. Oh,
he was pissed that he thought Freud plagiarized from him. Oh. Oh, no,
he was Jewish, He was not a Nazi. Oh, here
you go. Adler was concerned with the overcoming of the
superiority inferiority dynamic, and was one of the first psychotherapists

(17:41):
to discard the analytic couch in favor of two chairs,
allowing the clinician and patient to sit together more or
less as equals. So there you go. There's a tenuous connection.
That's the TMI promise. There's a tenuous connection. To the
guy who got rid of the therapy couch to root
Alf the red nose reindeer. We gotta come up with
a stinger like a sound like a Charlie Brown. But uh,

(18:06):
the more you.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Wrote in brackets further down insert, the more you know
the theme here.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Yeah, yeah, that's the t M. I guarantee. Several of
the stories that May wrote for children involved a hero
striving to overcome a physical handicap that had produced a
deep sense of inferiority. One of them had a real
small dick too. Tell you right now, how did you

(18:35):
say Christmas with that? Is that?

Speaker 1 (18:38):
Where is that the design for where Christmas tree lights
came from?

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Glad? That's good. That's good. Keep that in. I beg
of you. Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
Your parents ever ever tell you the Ugly Duckling story
as a kid to try to cheer you up when
when something was going wrong and you're feeling weird.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
No, no, all my childhood inferiority things came from just
people like making fun of my precociousness, which is justified
because precocious children are awful and turn into unbearable adults.
I can't imagine getting teased for that. Oh my mom,
my mom is will endlessly talk about the time when
I came home from school in tears because a child

(19:23):
had called me a dictionary. Oh as a he said,
Alex's mom didn't give birth to a child, she gave
birth to an eight nine pound dictionary, which was like
a relatively sophisticated burn for like a ten year old. Anyway,
a kid might be dead. Now I was.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
I was famous for like the first time I went
to the dentist when I was like three, I wouldn't
open my mouth until he showed me is the plumb
on the wall? Which is a story that my dad
loves to tell. And whenever we would go to restaurants
that were named after somebody like Denny's or Michael's or
Wendy's or something thing, I would always when the server
would come by, I would insist on speaking to said

(20:06):
name of the place.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
So I was the kind of kid I was. Okay, well,
did you ask to see did you ask to speak
to the chef afterwards? No? They would bring me. And
this this says so much.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
I don't know if I'll keep this because it might
not be interesting to anyone other than you. But they
would bring me, and I don't know who's how this started.
A glass of Maraschino cherries and a calculator, and I
would just punch the calculator while scowling. I called it
my gubba gubba, and I just would punch the calculator
as if I was Scrooge, just like entering data into

(20:38):
this thing, and while popping Marachino cherries.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
All right, just goes another thing that goes into my
rich tapestry of you as you meditate on that, We'll
be right back with more too much information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
And from Maraschino cherries to red noses kind of looks
like a Machino cherry right in my transitions.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
I'm trying. I'm really trying.

Speaker 1 (21:14):
So in this case, said physical handicap for this reindeer
was his red nose so shiny. In fact, you could
probably get away with saying that it glows.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
One could. One could.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
The idea supposedly came to writer Robert May when he
was staring out his office window in downtown Chicago. A
thick fog had swept in across Lake Michigan, blocking his
view but providing a flash of inspiration. He recalled suddenly
I had it a nose, a bright red nose that
would shine through the fog like a spotlight.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
This was not his first idea.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
May considered giving Rudolph large headlight like eyes. That was
like the way, which is both horrifying and so.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Metal it actually that's yeah, that's really frightening. Yeah, just
for in dear turning its enormous glowing orbs. Here. It's
funny because in the in the uh in the Mike
Flanagan series The Haunting of Lithe Manner, the main character

(22:20):
is haunted by a vision of her uh spoiler alert
deceased boyfriend who has like these enormous glowing eyes, and
what it is eventually revealed to be is that she
saw him get hit by a car and the last
thing she saw was the headlights illuminating his glasses.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
That's really good, yeah, wow nice, yeah nice, But yeah,
he ended up changing it to noses because you figure
that kids would be much more apt to pick on
somebody's nose rather than their eyes, which is fair.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Hilariously, Robert May's bosses feared that the distinctive red nose
feature was a liability because red noses at that time
were generally associated with stereotypes of drunkards.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, like W. C. Fields, right right, Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
May responded to these concerns by taking Denver Gillen, a
friend from Montgomery Ward's art department, to the Lincoln Park
Zoo to sketch some deer, and these preliminary sketches of
a red nose reindeer were enough to cal any fears
that the public would think that Rudolph struggled with alcoholism.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Well, you know that's where the band Jim Blossoms got
their name. That was like an archaic term for having
the burst capillaries in your cheek. They were called jin Blossoms. Hey, jealousy,
great song. Didn't think we get there tonight? Yeah, you
know it's the team, I guarantee, Baby. My favorite Christmas song.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Kind of works Christmas Morning under a tree, your sister
gets something that's way better than what you got.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
I prefer to think of my nineties Grinch song of
Christmas's Black Hole Sun. What's the best Christmas present you
ever got? Heigel? The one that I was most excited
about probably would have been like a like a PlayStation
or something like a video game system, or like a

(24:20):
like a play set of some kind. Yeah, I'm gonna
say the PlayStation that was being into video games, what
about you. Yeah, probably something like that. I got a
Do you remember Virtual Boys? Was that like the like
the game Boy? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
They were only made for like eighteen months, and then
they were ticking off the market. I think because they
gave kids seizures. But my parents had no problem. I'm
sure they I'm sure they got it cheap for that reason.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
But yeah, it was the weirdest thing.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
It was like a virtual reality like Oculus thing that
was on a stands and you just would kind of
sit next to it and put your head in. Yeah,
and it was just all in red and and they
only had like a couple of games for it, but
it was just the coolest thing.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
They had a bowling game, so I really love that.
Oh of course you did. Cute.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, but in real life. Back to Rudolph, a red
nose on a reindeer is no laughing matter. According to
Norwegian scientists, Rudolph's red nose is likely the result of
a parasitic infection of the respiratory system. This is christ
parasitic infection of the respiratory system. Insert. The more you

(25:29):
know themes Mary Christmas everyone.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Parasitic infection.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Off the red nose reindeer parasitic infection, and if you
ever saw it, you'd probably say you should get that
looked at.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Rudolph loved a woman who wasn't clean, and men had
to care the doctor for recurring shots of penicillin, and
as the syphilis eighta waite his brain, Rudolf used to say,

(26:12):
they're coming to get me, I'll throw feces. And then
he died one day.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Not before crashing his sleigh into the White House.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
That this all goes into that book program to kill
that I'm reading where it's like, did you know Rudolph
was a deep State CI eight rogue agent gone awry?
It was actually programmed to drive that sleigh into the
White House. Wait, who wrote is that any Jacobs' book? No,
it's the it's David McGowan.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
Oh right, Oh my gosh. Who fans of TMI will know.
He wrote the book Strange Scenes in the Canyon, which
is all about conspiracy theories involving the sixties early seventies
Lowl Canyon music scene, which is very compelling, and some
very kind people suggested we should do a series on that,
and you better believe I've been trying to make that

(27:07):
happen for years.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
Yeah, and I'm still trying. I watched the John Lennon
assassination documentary last night. Oh yeah, pick up any good tips.
I heard the Catcher in the Ries pretty good.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah, it's on Apple Plus.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Really, John Lennon Murder without a Trial. I remember them
hyping that they discovered his last words, And wasn't it
just I got shot? No people knew that. Oh, okay,
great then, yeah, there wasn't really.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, it was just there was interesting footage, interviews with
people would never talk before. But it was stuff like
a guy in a cab next to the shooting site
and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
I wasn't like anything great. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
The thing that I found really interesting that they didn't
talk about, and I was really sad, was because he
left the recording studio and the producer at the recording
studio was this guy, Jack Douglas, and he'd Double Fantasy,
which was John's last album, and he was shot within
like twenty minutes to leave in the recording studio, and
Jack Douglas later said on the last night he was
alive when he was in the studio we had the

(28:12):
mics were open and we were recording, and he said something,
and he said that it was so upsetting.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
Oh you've told me about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
That He ended up, following John's death, erasing the tape
and never speaking about it again. There are all these
theories about what John said, you know, in the hours
before his death, ranging from you know, just a joke
about like, you know, what's my legacy going to be
after I'm gone? To him having a terminal illness, to
him saying that he was going to divorce Yoko, to

(28:43):
all sorts of theories about what was going on with
him in those last hours and we'll never know, and
they didn't probe him on that, and I'm sad that
was a missed opportunity in the documentary.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Where were we.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Uh writing Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. So Robert May,
the copywriter from Montgomery Ward the Department story he's writing
his copy for this freebe softcover book for kids, which
will become Ruto off the Red Nose Reindeer. And he
wrote the text in about fifty hours, which is about
as much time as I spend on an episode of

(29:16):
TMI he would make a lot more for his fifty
hours free linguistic nerds out there. His story of Rootolf
the Red Nose Reindeer is written as a poem an
anapestic tetrameter.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
What did you say to me? Watch your math? Yeah,
kiss your mother with that mouth.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
It's it's the same meter as the twas the Night
before Christmas?

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Okay, yeah, No, I mean the last thing I remember
about any kind of poetry was that guy that other
than my reading about the Last days of John Berryman,
which I do late at night, tell me about that,
I don't know anything about that. Oh. I mean, he
was just a classic miserable drunk. But my faavorite detail
is that he supposedly, uh someone saw him jumping off

(30:04):
the bridge in Minneapolis, and uh he waved on the
way down and also failed to hit the water and
hit the banks and like broke both of his legs
and died from exposure not hitting the water. So that's
all very grim. But I remember when the when that
guy in the at the zoom meeting at the La
City Council or whatever that that was like, uh, he

(30:29):
got famous for saying telling the police chief to suck
my can choke on it. I yield my time few.
I remember that. No, no, do not know. I became
like a folk hero anyway. Uh, that's a niambic pentameter.
Can you beat it up for me? Yeah, suck, I
can choke on it. I yield my time few. Shakespeare

(30:52):
with Piso prout, He truly would. I mean, finally somebody
got something out of out of him. Took fucking hundreds
of years. Oh we got the Lion King too, So
it's Lion King and the guy telling the La County
Chief police to go himself. Two things out of Shakespeare,
worth it, worth it? Ten things I hate about you?

(31:14):
Eh ooh, you're just too good too, too weird thing
about twas the night before Christmas. The authorship is up
for debate. There's a whole whole theory about who actually
wrote it.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
It's generally credited to Clement Moore, who wasn't federalist in
the early eighteen hundreds, sick and he wrote a whole
pamphlet which I guess was the preferred media back then,
against Thomas Jefferson because he thought Thomas Jefferson didn't like
black people and correct, yes, yes, anyway, Robert May's story

(31:56):
original story. I should say Ruth read those reindeer very
fair him out from the one more Familiar song. For example,
in May's story told in his original book, Santa finds
Rudolph while delivering presence to the reindeer village. Santa he
had problems delivering gifts because no one remembered to leave
the lights on for him.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
It's just really funny.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
And in Rudolph's dark house, Santa quote tripped on a
rug and fell flat on his back, and he discovers
Rudolph and he's glowing nose, and he invites him to
help with the rest of the drop offs.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
So Rudolph jumps at the.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
Honor, leaves a note for his parents and takes off.
Not as dramatic. It sounds like a dad problem. Damn
kids trying to turn the light off.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
And then yeah, it does sound yeah it's a pratt fall.
You're describing a Pratt fall, right, Yeah, I mean Chevy
Chase as Santa, So yeah, that's honest.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
Seems more like a first draft idea. But he finished
the text. Robert May did in August nineteen thirty nine,
and he would recall that he called his young daughter
Barbara in and her grandparents into the living room and
read the.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
Story to it.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
And in their eyes, he said, I could see that
the story accomplished what I had hoped misery. The result
was as much of a hit as you could possibly
have for a freebie holiday promotional item. Montgomery Ward distributed
two point four million copies of the Rudolph booklet in
nineteen thirty nine alone, and although during the World War

(33:23):
Two there was a paper shortage, by nineteen forty six,
the year after the war, six million.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
Copies had been distributed, which is pretty crazy, dadamn. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
And by the mid nineteen forties there were a serious
demand for Rudolph licensing opportunities. But because Robert May had
done the story as a work for hire project, Montgomery
Ward held the copyright and for many years May received
no royalties for his creation. That's such a twenty first
century move right there.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:54):
Let that be a lesson to all you employees who
do creative work for big corporations.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Try to get a piece of that early on, or
at least ad revenue.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
This just really added insult to injury because Robert May
was still deeply in debt due to his late wife's
medical bills. But then in nineteen forty six, seven years
after Rudolph debuted, he got a Christmas miracle. I cannot
believe this occurred. This would never, in a million years
happen today. Montgomery Ward, the department store company, voluntarily turned

(34:27):
the rights to Rudolph over to Robert May, the creator.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
What an insane thing. That would never happen today. Today,
they would be squeezing more out of him.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
They did wait until January so that they could get
one more Christmas sea out of it.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, that's hilarious. That's nice though, that has somewhat of
a happy ending. At least he got to retire off that. Yeah. No,
actually so.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
At first, Robert May he tried to transform this freebie
soft cover book into a bonafide hardcover release, but he
struggled to find a publisher because six million copies of
his book had already been given away for free, and
he later said, finally I found the publisher, a little
guy with a big nose who said that he knew
what it was like for Rudolph and was willing to

(35:13):
take a chance on printing. This little guy was Harry Elbaum,
head of Maxton Publishers, and Maxton published the first commercial
edition of Rudolph just in time for the nineteen forty
seven Christmas season, printed on a hundred thousand copies of
the hardcover book, and it quickly became a best seller.
But that's not all.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Rudolph didn't take off until it was transformed into a
song by Johnny Marx, who just happened to be It
sounds like the first guy to get killed in a
gangster movie. They got Johnny Marx the other night old
on Claxon Boulevard. Are we going to go to war
over Johnny Marx? Johnny Marx just happened to be Robert
May's brother in law. But this wasn't your average, you know,

(35:58):
run of the mill case of holiday related apotism. No,
Marx actually has several UTAI classics to his name, Rocking
Around the Christmas Tree and a Holly Jolly Christmas, as
well as other songs from the TV special and a
bunch of lesser known Christmas songs. Chuck Berry wrote a
run Rudolph Run song that he got credit for because
he created the Rudolf character. Oh the music industry capitalism.

(36:24):
Marx would eventually publish one hundred and seventy five pieces
of original music, ranging from television scores to radio hits
and commercial jingles, and so he was already a professional
songwriter when his brother in law, Robert May, approached him
to turn his creation into a song. Also, May is
related to Stephen D Levitt, who some of your podcast
listening and or policy wonk friends will know from writing

(36:47):
the enormously popular book Freakonomics. May's sister was the grandmother
of the economists who wrote that, So do with that
what you will. Back to the song, Marx struggled with
the project at first. He would call his first attempt
easily one of the worst songs ever written. He was
eventually able to spruce it up and pitch to singers
like Bing Crosby, who was busy beating his children at

(37:11):
the time, Dinah Shore, and Perry Como, all of whom passed.
Perry Como wanted to tweak the lyrics, though, and Johnny
Mark's refused. Do we know what the nature of those
changes were? I don't know. I was gonna ask you.
Mark's also presented the song to Gene Autry, the so
called singing cowboy, who turned him down at first. But
Autrey's wife, Ina was touched by this underdog tail and

(37:32):
persuaded her husband to record it. Released just in time
for the nineteen forty nine holiday season, Rudolph the Red
Nosed Reindeer shot to the top of Billboard's Country, Western
and Pop charts, sold two million copies that year and
went on to become one of the best selling Christmas
songs of all time, second only to White Christmas, which
if all I want for Christmas is you hasn't toppled
that record, nothing will right? Yeah, I don't think so.

(37:58):
The success of the Christmas song made Autry try again
at Easter with here Comes Peter Cottontail. I hate that song.
Since Auchie recorded it, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer has
sold more than one hundred and fifty million copies, thanks
to versions by the Jackson Five, the California Raisins, Alvin
and the Chipmunks, the Simpsons, the Wiggles, and even old

(38:18):
Bing Crosby, who dusted off his knuckles and when the
mic when do we hone and own onto? This is
images Bing Crosby is solely being known for beating his
children as part of our part of identity, though if
you beat your children. I kind of think this is
what's one of the main things you should maybe be

(38:39):
known for. That's also true, That's totally fair. That's the
TM I promise. Yeah. As we mentioned earlier, an honorable
mention does go to Chuck Berry, who wrote Run Rudolph
Run in nineteen fifty eight and then was sued by
Johnny Marks for copyright infringement and thus had to turn
over a songwriting credit to that song to him. Fun

(39:00):
note about the the Finnish version of the Rudolph song,
not that any of you ask or ever would uh,
It's called pit Terry Peterie. For some reason, the Finnish
legend of Santa Claus aka Juliu Puchy doesn't feature a
named reindeer, so the intro to the song doesn't include Dasher, Danner, Donner,

(39:21):
et cetera. Instead, the Finnish intro to the song translates
to you remember Cinderella, snow White and Sleeping Beauty, Little Red,
riding Hood and the Gray Wolf. But this reindeer is
often forgotten. It's a much more cerebral intro. I feel like, yeah,
and it does the loads work of elevating Rudolph into
the pantheon. You know, yeah, we see. I wouldn't say

(39:43):
he's on par with Sleeping Beauty.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
I know more about Rudolph I do about Sleeping Beauty. Well,
as of now, she was sleeping and there was a
spinning wheel.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
Involved snow White. Would you would you put snow White
on par with her? That's doing a grave disservice snow White.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, they're both wintery. I'll put them on par I've
definitely seen Rudolph stuff more often than I have in
snow White.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Yeah, I guess that's fair. I also never knew. I
never knew Little Red Riding Hood had a specific wolf.
And then I mean I knew that there was a
specific wolf. But is that like a named character in
like the finished version, like the wolf gets yeah, like
the wolf gets like second billing.

Speaker 1 (40:27):
Is it the same big bad wolf that blows down
the three Little BIG's house?

Speaker 2 (40:30):
No, No, different wolf, different wolf. Well, let's take a look.
Let's go to the phones.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
It all Ran Riding It's definitely the big bad wolf
in both because there's that song.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Hey, Little Red Riding Hood got that song? Wolf, Yeah,
it does. Color of the wolf is not specified, nor
is he referred to as big or bad, big or bad,
at least in the Grim. Going back to the Grim Brothers.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
I could see the Norse version of this story elevating
the wolf to to marquee.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Uh where we?

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Where were we?

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Where were we? How do we talked about?

Speaker 1 (41:08):
How Johnny Marx wrote Rocket around the Christmas Tree in
addition to writing uh, Ruth read those rein there.

Speaker 2 (41:14):
Several times at this point, But would you like to
go deeper on it? Rogging and ron business Jane. You
said she she was thirteen, Yeah, she was thirteen, And
it's amazing how she already sounds like a twenty five
year old drunk cocktail waitress and like you know, Bimigie
Wisconsin ragging. I get you some more coffee. Hun. She

(41:38):
has the number one song in the country today. Good
for her, which is great. Readily everyone, I'm merely remarking
she had a preternaturally wisened voice.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
That is true, That is true. She is our number one.
She took down Mariah Carrey. Mariah Carey's run of a
run of tyranny for as the Queen of Christmas is
now over?

Speaker 2 (41:59):
Is that because it is? It? On TikTok now is
that why? And they made a YouTube video for it too,
Oh okay.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
And because people like it and because she's a sweet
old lady. She just she has the record of being
the oldest person to ever have a number one uh
and the longest gap between number ones, which was like
sixty three years I think two years something.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
Insane. Yeah, good for her. Was she cool? A little
bit racist? Yeah? Interviewed her today? Know she was cool.
I was. I was like, yeah, hey, did Mariah reach
out and say anything, like, did she she seed the
Christmas Queen crown to you? And She's like, no, no,
she has and I haven't heard from her yet. And
you know what, if I don't hear from her soon,
I'm going to go to New York and I'm going
to go take it from her myself. I was like,

(42:41):
bless you. Yeah, I mean, Mariah's probably more likely to
send a subpoena or you know, a horsehead.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
She's had flowers after us, like as soon as the
interview was over, which I'm mad about because I was
going to make the headline seventy eight year old friend
of Lee for Friends, Mariah Carey Ye beat the out
of Christmas out of Riah carey.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Where the hell were we?

Speaker 1 (43:22):
We were at Rudolph the red Hot media property. Ah, yes, well.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
Robert May, the creator of Rudolph, quit his copywriting job
at Montgomery Ward after they gave him the rights to
his creation, and he spent about a decade managing his
newfound franchise. At the end of nineteen fifty the Chicago
Tribune wrote, there is no question but that Rudolph has
become a legend, the first new and accepted Christmas legend
since Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol and Clement Moore's a

(43:46):
visit from Saint Nicholas. During the nineteen fifties, there were
over one hundred different Rudolph products produced, but by nineteen
fifty eight, rudolph sales had declined considerably, and by the
early sixties May found himself asking for his old copywriting
job back, later joking that he reminded his old bosses
of the company policy Montgomery Wards will take anything back Grim.

(44:08):
He would remain with Wards until he retired in nineteen seventy,
at which point he began passing his time bowling, golfing,
and growing fifteen foot tall tomato plants that reached the
second story of his house. May's second wife died in
nineteen seventy one, and the following year he married her sister,
Claire Weird. Five years later. Fittingly, May himself died in
nineteen seventy six, America's bi centennary.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
Year, fitting in to this truly bizarre American story. But thankfully,
Robert May did live to see the beloved TV special
take shape. And yet another fetuitous connection, his brother in law,
Johnny Marx, who wrote the Rude Alpha Redlands Reindeer Song,
lived in New York City's East Village next to Arthur
Rankin junior. Now, in nineteen sixty, rank informed Rank and

(44:52):
Bass Productions with collaborator Jules Bass, and the two began
producing children's TV specials. Rankin's Wikipedia page is kind of nuts.
He's credited on over a thousand TV programs, and he's
also married to I don't know this person.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Do you know her?

Speaker 1 (45:10):
Olga Carlados. She's a Greek actress known for performing in
Italian horror movies. So not very good ones, No something
you'd be into No.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
I mean, all you need to know about the Italian
film industry is that they didn't start shooting the synchronized
sound until like the nineties. So this is this is
the famous thing about why the dubbing is off in
all of those movies is because every actor was speaking
their own language and then they would do all of
the dialogue. ADR. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, that's

(45:44):
why it's always a mess in like those spaghetti westerns
and stuff.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
Arthur Rankin reached out to Johnny Marx, who wrote the
Rudolph Christmas Song, to broach the possibility of putting Rudolph
on television as part of the GE Fantasy Hour, a
branded series of TV specials sponsored by jenf Or Electric.
Robert May's pass with Montgomery Ward was actually helpful with
this because an old executive from Wards now worked at
GE as the vice president of Housewares. A general electrician

(46:11):
engineer named Nick Hollandyak developed the first LED light bulb
around this time, capable emitting visible red light, which was
the same bulb used for Rudolph's bioluminescent nose and the
TV special. So a little little product placement there do it.
I completely didn't know that rankin Bass did that Hobbit.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, the Hobbit animated special. We'll talk more about that later. Yeah,
the one that kind of at memory hold.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
I feel like the Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson called
the adaptation execrable. Yeah, people really hated that. I remember
I'd found memories of it as a kid.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
The completest in me is compelled to mention that Rank
and Bass were not the first to develop a Rudolph cartoon.
That honor goes to Fleischer's Studios, which copyrighted a cartoon
of Rudolph in nineteen forty eight as advertising for Montgomery Ward.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah. They also did the Superman cartoons in the thirties
that were a big influence on the art style of
the Batman, the animated series that very kind of impressionist
Fritz Lang expressionist Fritz Lang Stark shadow Tropolis.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
For a writer for the Rudolph TV special, Rank and
Bass tapped the awesomely named Romeo Mueller, a ringer who'd
previously written for radio shows like The Jack Benny Show.
In an amusing reminder of a pre Internet era, Mueller
later said that he wanted to use May's original poem
as the text for his script, but he couldn't find
a copy of it, and instead he had to use

(47:40):
the song as the source for his story. This would
kind of become a theme with him because he would
write the future Christmas Carol based TV specials for Rank
and Bass, including nineteen sixty nine s Frosty the Snowman
and nineteen sixty eight So the Little Drummer Boy. And
he also wrote nineteen seventies Santa Claus is coming to
town with Is that the one with the heat Miser?

Speaker 2 (48:02):
And now I'm getting confused? Or is that a year
without a Santa Claus? I don't remember. I need to
check this. Which is the one? Did you ever hear
brother Theodore? No, it's a He's the guy who voiced
Galum in that seventy seven movie, and he was a
comedia stand up comic, and his the log line on
his wikipedias he was described as Boris Karloff, Salvador Dali Nijinski,

(48:24):
and Red Skelton simultaneously, which now I'm like, I need
to know everything about this man immediately.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yeah, oh no, okay, so this is not the one
with the heat Miser. That's the year without a Santa Claus.
Santa Claus has Coming to Town is the origin story
of Santa where he starts off young with red Hair's
the one where he sings a song to children called
be prepared to pay If you sit on my lap

(48:50):
today A kiss a toy is the price you'll pay,
which always used to creep me up.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah. I don't like that at all.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
Yeah, yeah, but we have Romeo Mueller, the guy the
Rudolph Christ's Special to thank for that as well. Hell
of a guy, Romeo Mueller, Like Robert May, Romeo Muller
also borrowed elements from his own life when writing the
script for the Rudolph TV special. Hermie the Elf, not Herbie.
Hermie is named after Mueller's childhood friend who is named Herbie.

(49:18):
I don't know why he just didn't name him Herbie. Ah,
Rudolph's girlfriend love interest was named Clarice in honor of
the bride to be of another close friend.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
So that's cute.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Rudolph the Red Noose Randeer was officially in production in
mid nineteen sixty three and continued for eighteen months, which
was a truly overwhelming amount of time for a TV
production in that period. GE spent the modern equivalent of
more than four point five million dollars on the project,
which required some twenty two room size sets. And of

(49:53):
course we cannot forget their innovative animation technique known as AnimagiC,
which gave every rank and bass productionist distinctive and somewhat
unnerving look, which we talked.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
About at the top of the episode.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
It was, as you alluded to earlier, a painstaking process
that involved moving jointed, wooden felt puppets ever so slightly
for each new frame twenty four frames per second of
screen time, So yeah, it's pretty tedious.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
The process was.

Speaker 1 (50:21):
Done by Japanese animators at the mom Studios in Tokyo,
where they were overseen by stop motion pioneer Tatahido Tad.
To his friends Mochinaga, this guy is interesting and unexpectedly hardcore.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Do you know this guy? I was just reading about
him now.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
During World War Two he left Japan for Manchuria, which
was a Japanese occupied puppet state in China, where he
produced propaganda films with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese animators. In
nineteen forty seven, Tad was instructed to create an animated
propaganda film mocking Chinese politician Shanghai Sha and to telegraph

(51:01):
the message that Shanghai Scheck was controlled by the US
Secretary of State on Chinaga created, Tad created literal puppets of.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
The two figures.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
So yeah, it's just like Doctor SEUs and Disney as
a whole proud sort of history of legendary animators getting
their start or at least getting paid during war time
making to make propaganda.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
And this was China's first stop motion puppet animation feature ever.
And nineteen fifty five he returned to Japan and brought
this technique with him, using it to produce a beer commercial,
which became this first stop motion puppet animation ever done
in Japan as well, so he's got two records in
two separate countries.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
This commercial success inspired Tad to.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Form the puppet animation studio in Tokyo. And that's where
the rank and basque people came when I wanted to
make the Rudolph special.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
Yes, uh, did you know about Nara before this? No? Yeah,
my Bodes the Haunted. That's the island of Deer, the
Sacred Deer. And that's the only reason I know about
it is because John Mann, a friend of the pod,
John Mann, who is obsessed with, you know, fawns and deer.
It's like on his bucket list to go to the

(52:15):
island of Sacred Deer in Nara, So prior to filming,
Tad traveled to Nara, Japan, a small city located east
of Osaka, to visit the park there, the famous park there,
which is a deer sanctuary established in eighteen eighty to
protect the area's population of sacred deer. These deer, it's
an incredible part of like Japanese culture because they're so

(52:36):
acclimated to human like, non threatening humans that they approached
as for food. And they've even learned to mimic the
act of bowing, which is pretty incredible. I think if
I had a like a young deer, like a fawn,
bow to me, i'd be I could die happy, I
would I would. Tad and his assistant spent two days

(52:57):
observing the deer, and their attention to detail and the
subsequent crafting of the deer puppets is apparent. It featured
details such as delicate eyelids for the deer crafted from leather.
More than two hundred puppets were carved for the production
of Rudolph. Ichiro Komoro, the puppet maker for the film,
says that each character's puppet was re carved by hand

(53:19):
for various movements and expressions, rather than using plaster and
a mold, because it wouldn't have been exact, and he said,
the plaster head is very heavy for animation, so they
because I'm a nerd, the one of the things that
they did for Nightmare on a Nightmare before Christmas to
streamline this process was basically create a master puppet, a

(53:42):
series of them that were jointed in different ways to
do different things. But they they have like dozens of
these little detachable masks for each character that it mimics
the entire range of mouth, sounds and expressions. So for
every main character, like particularly Jack Skellington, there were dozens

(54:03):
of these things. So they would to animate the speaking,
they would just swap out different faces that were incrementally
making different vowel sounds, and there were also like these
different expressions for him. I mean, it's the depth for
that is really incredible. The dolls for Rudolph and Santa
cost five grand each to make. What is that twenty
twenty three money. I'm gonna suprise this right rules, I'm

(54:26):
gonna say fifty thousand, Okay, I'll say sixty five. We
both went over.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
It's forty eight thousand, five hundred and twenty two.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
Damn that's crazy, dude, forty eight thousand dollars doll.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Yeah, I don't really how, And maybe it was for
the assortment of all the dolls for that character.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Oh sure, because that's like insane. Yeah, I mean, I well,
you know, they have different things, they have different terms
for them, Like there's like hero dolls are like in
miniature work. They have like the hero one or is
like the one that'll be used for most of the
close ups, so it's often the most detailed one, and
then there'll be like action ones that are jointed differently

(55:06):
so that they can do complicated motions and such. So yeah,
I don't know if they were only two of them
and they each cost forty eight grand, or if there
was a series of them that cost forty eight grand.
The ge cigar Smoking Executive is like forty eight grand,
five grand for Santa doll.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
They were also deceptively small, though the puppet used for
Rudolph is only four inches tall. In future.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
So yeah, so wait a minute, if that's five grand, yeah,
can you imagine d grand now getting a line a
line budget for that and be like four inch deer
doll five grand give you a heart attack?

Speaker 2 (55:45):
So like government spending? Is it just like ge right?
So yeah, so yeah the pupp The four inch puppet
for Rudolph featured a twelve volt light bulb painted red
as his all important nose. Santa stood twice tall at
eight inches, and the Abominable Snowman is the tallest puppet
of them, at a wopping fourteen inches tall. In order

(56:07):
to keep the figures clean during production, only the animator
and puppet maker were allowed to touch them in the studio,
and they had to wear gloves no touching. If only
Jeffrey tambour Head adhered to that rule in real life. Unfortunately,
the figures were sprayed with a magnetic flock. Flocking is
like it's like a you use it in Christmas decorations.

(56:28):
It's like the spray on faux snow stuff to diffuse
reflective light from the cameras, and the acid used in
the flocking spray led to the puppets rapid deterioration over time. Yeah,
I'm trying to think of that's why they have that
sort of that goes into their uncanniness, the fact that
their like surface changes with the different pressure from the

(56:49):
different takes that were required of them. Anyway, rankin Basque
co founder Jules Bass kept one of the Rudolph puppets
on his desk, even though wires were coming out of
its legs for the light bulb nose. Sadly, no one
else in production seemed to be as sentimental about these figures.
Most of them went missing soon after a production wrapped,
and it was assumed that they were merely thrown out.
Nine of them were rescued by Rank and Bass secretary,

(57:11):
who let her children use them as toys before relegating
them to the attic. Some forty years later, they were
sold to a collector who took them onto the Your
Beloved Antiques road Show in two thousand and six, where
they were praised for between eight and ten grand. It's
obviously worth saying that they were in extremely poor condition
due to decades of poor storage and years of being
thrown around by kids. Santa disgustingly had mold under his beard,

(57:35):
his eyebrows were missing, his legs were broken and half
of his mustache was gone. He looked like a bowery bum,
like Lost Island, the Misfit Toys version. Rudolph's nose was
also missing and replaced by a ball of red wax.
This new owner showed out four grand to have them

(57:55):
professionally restored an LA based puppet fabrication studio called Screen
Novelties and Good as New. The puppets made the trade
show and convention circuit before being sold at auction in
November of twenty twenty, fetching three hundred and sixty eight
thousand dollars, double the expected return. They are now in
the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia. Didn't know

(58:18):
that was a thing. Love it, you said, You've read
reports that someone listed puppets from the Rudolph Special on
eBay for ten million dollars, which I if that was. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Even somebody who was associated with the production was like,
that's ridiculous, Not even the Smithsonian would pay that for these.
I have no further news as to if they sold
and even who was selling them. I sort of get
the sense that it was a scam.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
Well good, Speaking of mysteries, we have to talk about
the mystery surrounding the scene set on the Island of
Misfit Toys. We are speaking specif about questions surrounding the
rag doll known as Dolly, as in a Dolly for
Sue just asked some questions. We're doing our own research.

(59:12):
Dolly is surrounded by all sorts of odd looking toys,
but there's nothing that appears to be overtly wrong with her,
leading fans to wonder why she was there in the
first place. She actually belonged to Typhoid Mary Ah and
was thus responsible for that. No, I'm kidding, that's the
velveteen rabbit. Other than lacking a nose, there was nothing
wrong with the Dolly that telegraphed Misfit. Arthur Rankin Junior

(59:34):
shed some light on the subject during a two thousand
and seven episode of NPR's Weight Wait Don't Tell Me.
He claimed the doll a last minute edition, presumably for
diversity reasons, was cast off by her mistress and was
clinically depressed. His word is not my mistress, giving her

(59:56):
an origin story similar to that of toy story, adding
to the overall depressing nature of that scene. In the
original version of the special, Rudolph Hermie and Yukon Cornelius,
the minor Gentleman of the pick Axe, promised to return
to the Island of Misfit Toys, and then they never do.
Fans were extremely upset by this, and angry letters poured
into the Rank and Bass offices at such a rate

(01:00:17):
that they eventually added a short scene for the second
broadcast the following year in nineteen sixty five, where Santa
can be seen delivering the misfits to new homes in
order to make room for that new ending, though something
else had to be cut. During that original airing, there
was a storyline about Yukon Cornelius finding a peppermint mine
near Santa's workshop, sadly would go on to the chopping

(01:00:39):
block now creepily. In the special, you can still see
Cornelius licking his pick axe, but without mention of the
peppermint mine, leading to viewers to wonder why this puppet is.
I don't know, let's call it a let's call it
a buffalo bill kind of thing. That's weird behavior. That's
a weird thing to do. Lick your pick axe. And
while we're on the topic of alternate versions, two songs

(01:01:02):
have been swapped in and out of the special over
the years. Both are sung by Rudolph and Hermie. In
the original, the duo sings a song called We're a
couple of Misfits Like Us. After the first airing, it
was replaced with the song Fame in Fortune. So this
is all good, But enough about the puppets.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
It's time to talk about the real people, starting with
the one, the only, the legendary.

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
Mister burrel Ives. Come on, the famous folky.

Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
Writ folky Yeah, folksy, folksy, folksy, thank you. The famous
folksy singer lent his voice to Sam the Snowman, the
narrator of the special, who was model, of course, resemble
the rotund Ives. Before Ives was tapped to narrate. Larry Mann,
the voice of Yukon Cornelius, performed the narration. His version

(01:01:48):
has never been heard publicly, but those who've listened to
the recordings say that man put on a Brooklyn like accent,
which I find hilarious. Release the man tapes. Ives is
the only big name voice in the special, well not
kind of he is. The rest of the parts were
performed by Canadian voiceover actors in the time honored tradition

(01:02:09):
of inexpensive TV production, Rank and Bass ventured to the
Great White.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
North, Are You Afraid of the Dark? In many other.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
Shows also, Canada was one of the last countries still
producing scripted radio dramas at that time in the early sixties.
In America, they'd been kind of phased out, so there
were a lot of vocal pros on call in Canada.
Billy May Richards provided the voice for Rudolph, and you know,
these days, it's not uncommon in animation for female voiceover

(01:02:38):
artists to voice male characters, especially young male characters like
Chucky and Tommy and the Rugrats. But for whatever reason,
Rank and Bass wanted to keep the fact that Rudolph
was voiced by a woman a secret, and so they
credited Billy May Richards as just Billy Richards. Weird Burlives
star power made him the only actor to receive residuals
on the show over the years, and their main cast

(01:03:00):
only received the thousand dollars over a three year period.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
Here it Is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
The special has since gone on to make roughly in
the neighborhood of one hundred million.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
Here it Is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:13):
This was admittedly a sore subject for Billy may Richards,
the voice of Rudolph, but she admitted to feeling quote
so lucky to have something that has made such an
impact on people, because it's all about the story first
and foremost, she says, So that is a generous read
of a not very generous situation. But thankfully there's a

(01:03:34):
cute coda. Oh decades later, I know, thank you. It's Christmas.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
You know, we'll have to have it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
In the early two thousands, Billy may Richards ended up
becoming neighbors with Paul Souls, another voiceover actor who was
the voice of Hermi the Elf. So the voices of
Rudolph and the Elf were living next to each other
at the Performing Arts Lodge in Toronto, a housing development
for artists and actors. I get the sense that it's

(01:04:00):
an old folks home for actors. Yeah, and she told
the Chicago Tribune it's a great place to be the
only place for misfits anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
That is cute. That's cute. I like that a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Rudolph the Red Noose Reindeer. The TV special premiered at
five thirty PM on December sixth, nineteen sixty four. So
that was fifty nine years ago yesterday. Ego eye viewers
will notice that there's actually an error in the end
credits with the Roman numeral copyright date thanks to a
dropped m. It says the special came out in eleven

(01:04:33):
sixty four, and I'm not sure if this caused any
copyright weirdness similar to the Night of the Living Dead
and it's a wonderful life who had?

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
Well, what was the Night Living Dead situation?

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
It's just they never filed copyright on the movie so
it can be shown on TV.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
Yeah, I think I think it was something like a
literally like a filing error. Yeah, but all of the
Romera stuff is a mess, you know, I mean, he's
it's basically down to this one of his producers that
he worked with. Yeah, when you do stuff on the
on like the by the skin of your teeth and
hair trigger, you're not really you don't have an eye
on the future. But yeah, man, oh no, it's even better.

(01:05:14):
You know what it was? Well, the original distributor failed
to replace the copy, so the title was originally called
Night of the Flesh Eaters, and they renamed it for
distribution and failed to replace the copyright notice when they
retitled it and recut it. Wow, and several years after
the fact they realized when they were screening it that

(01:05:35):
it had no copyright notice on it. You can't just
add that. I mean, you could probably have sued the
guy who distributed. But good lord, wow, great job guys.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
Yeah, but I would assume that this has been cleared
up somehow because it has been broadcast every year since,
making it the longest running Christmas.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
Special on American television. Bass made numerous children's holiday specials
after this, including two that specifically followed the adventures of Rudolph,
which you probably haven't heard of. First came Rudolph's Shiny
New Year in nineteen seventy six, which was also written
by Romeo Mueller and had music from Johnny Marks. Then,
in nineteen seventy nine came the feature length Rudolph and

(01:06:18):
Frosty's Christmas in July. Wouldn't that just be like Frosty
dies like a snuff film. I don't know. I don't
think Reindeer is supposed to live in hot climates either, anyway.
Even less memorable was ranking Bass's attempt at creating original
ip with a knockoff Rudolph figure called Nestor. The Long

(01:06:40):
Eared Christmas Donkey. That sounds like something that we would
make up on our non existence. It does show, yeah,
it does. I mean the donkey has like a tenuous
connection to Christmas because he's always in the manger, right,
He's a manger animal.

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
With old Jesus, Young Jesus. Yeah, you're right, Yeah, per
Dominic the Donkey.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
Who's that? You don't know? Dominic the Donkey probably do.
I just don't.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
I want to get your live reaction to this right now.
It's just gonna get playfully racist, isn't it kinda? I mean,
as an Italian from Pennsylvania.

Speaker 4 (01:07:22):
Hey, it's Dominic the Donkey. Are you Italian Christmas Donkey?

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
La la la la la la la la la.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
La la la la la. What do you think my
people have suffered so much? Uh? Nest To the Long
Eared Christmas Donkey was released in nineteen seventy seven, based
on Gene Autrey's unsuccessful Christmas follow up to Rudolph And
as you might have gathered, Nestor is a long eared

(01:07:56):
donkey who is ostracized by his peers for a physical
abnormality that helps save Christmas. In Nestor's case, he as
I mentioned earlier, it's a Nativity situation. He protects Mary
during a sandstorm by wrapping her in his ears so
that she and Joseph can safely get to bethlehemb Rank
and Bass took a lot of l's in the in
the late seventies, especially with their poorly received What's that?

(01:08:20):
I just hear the song sands if you Great? If
You're great? If they did like a slow horror like
reverb back slow plus reverbsion of p Yeah. Yeah, for
the for the reboot of Hey, they'll get around to
rebooting Nester at some point. I'm kind of shocked we

(01:08:40):
haven't had like a like a atrocious real life c G.
I rude, all wait, wait the donkey.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
It's going to be related to the donkey from Shrek,
and they're gonna like somehow tie it in with the shop.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Thank god. Yeah, Santa. Santa will be played by Who's
a Who's an old guy? Who's hot right now? Bruce
Dern okay, okay, trying to pick the weirdest oldest guy.
Probably Jeff Bridges is probably yeah, he's aged of that.
Nestor will be voiced by Zendiah uh or possibly Jacob

(01:09:17):
O Lordie of Euphoria, best known for currently playing Elvis
in Sophia Coppola's Elfas movie, currently playing Probably maybe it's
already out of theaters. Who knows. Joseph will be played
by Matthew McConaughey. Mary will also be played by Zendiah.
The Baby Jesus will be played by Jack Black and

(01:09:39):
he will sing a song. But else, we got the
Three the Three Kings, the Three Wise Men will be
played by Kevin Hart, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, and Megan Tryanner.
Jesus Christ. No, that's good because then she can sing too. Yeah,

(01:10:01):
and it'll be a cross It'll be a cross gender.
We'd be doing gender blind casting. That's perfect. And the
rest uh yeah. Rankin Bass's poorly received adaptation of J. R.
Tolkien's The Hobbit and the Return of the King. Yeah,
I think everyone just wants to talk about the unused
or unmade Roth Bakshi version. That was like really intense.

(01:10:24):
But anyway, they shut down after Christmas two thousand, which
is so funny, you know, it's an accurate date. Just
sounded like Christmas two thousand, following the rece of Santa Baby.
It's Santa Baby, which is a course of nod to
Eartha Kit. The movie featured vocal talents of legendary Black performers,

(01:10:46):
including Patti LaBelle as the narrator once again the aforementioned
Eartha Kit, Gregory Hines, Vanessa Williams, and Tom Joyner. And
though the studio is gone, their plethora of TV specials
continue to inspire modern filmmakers, including The aff Format, Henry
Selnick and That's It, and the rest.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
Of the many specials created by Rankinbass. Rudolph is undoubtedly
the most iconic and beloved. In twenty eighteen, The Hollywood
Reporter conducted a poll about holiday movies and specials, and
the winner was Rudolph the Red Nose rein Deer. A
staggering eighty three percent of the people who took part
in the poll how to favor opinion of the film.

(01:11:29):
Rudolph's creator, Robert May, credits the success of his character
with the message at the heart of the story. In
addition to being a modern retelling of the ugly duckling,
it provides a valuable lesson for all children as a
quote story of acceptance with a beautiful moral. In May's words,
tolerance and perseverance can overcome adversity. Allow me to quote

(01:11:51):
from the writer Ronald Lankford from his cultural history of
American Christmas songs, much like the modern Santa Claus song,
Rudolph's stories for children. More specifically, it's a children's story
about overcoming adversity and earning by personal effort respect in
the adult world. As a young deer or child with
a handicap that turns out to be an unrecognized asset,

(01:12:14):
Rudolph comes to the rescue of an adult at the
last minute on Christmas Eve. When Rudolph saves the day,
he gains respect from both his peers and the adult world.
The story of Rudolph, then, is the fantasy story made
to order for American children. Each child has the need
to express and receive approval for his or her individuality

(01:12:35):
and or special qualities. Rudolph's story embodies the American dream
for the child, written large because of the cultural significance
of Christmas.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
That's all fine, Thanks for listening, folks. I'm Alex Hagel
and I'm Jordan run Togg. We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising
producer is Michael Alder. June. The show was researched, written,
and hosted by Jordan Runtalg and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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