Rankin on Bass

Rankin on Bass

Welcome to Rankin on Bass, an offhanded joke that became a short-lived podcast where we discuss the stopmotion and animated works of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass. Your hosts: Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast podcast, Richard Hatem of DC's Titans, and Mike White of The Projection Booth podcast. Artwork by Abbie Stabby - https://www.instagram.com/abbiestabby Music by The Great Octopus - http://thegreatoctopus.bandcamp.com

Episodes

Farewell from Rankin on Bass

December 31, 2023 • 55 mins
Live from the Island of Misfit Toys we record our last episode of Rankin on Bass where Mike, Chris, and Richard recount the bizarre trip they've been on for the last three years going from animagic to animated to live action fare that ranged from the sublime to the bizarre.

Thank you to everyone who took this trip with us.
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Episode 38: Pinocchio's Christmas and The New Adventures of Pinocchio

December 15, 2023 • 46 mins
We conclude our discussion of Rankin & Bass works properly with a double dose of animagic for the holidays - Pinocchio's Christmas in which the little wooden boy learns the magic of the season and some of R&B's earliest work, the New Adventures of Pinocchio.
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Episode 36: The Stingiest Man in Town and The First Christmas

December 8, 2023 • 52 mins
Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White are back in Christmas-town and looking at two more holiday specials from Rankin & Bass; The Stingiest Man in Town -- a re-telling of A Christmas Carol starring the voice of Walter Matthau -- and The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow which features Angela Lansbury and a poor blind shepherd.
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Episode 37: Santa, Baby! and The Comic Strip

November 25, 2023 • 63 mins
It's Santa, Baby an animated special from 2001 starring Gregory Hines as a frustrated songwriter and Patti Labelle as the patridge from the pear tree(!).

We also discuss "Comic Strip" - a two hour block of cartoons featuring The Mini-Monsters, Street Frogs, Karate Kat and TigerSharks. This would be the last animated TV series produced by Rankin & Bass.

You can watch Santa, Baby via Amazon: https://amzn.to/3R7I2MW
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Episode 35: The Coneheads (1983)

October 27, 2023 • 56 mins
It's time to consume mass quantities of Coneheads with this 1983 pilot produced by Rankin & Bass for a Coneheads half-hour animated television show. Richard Hatem, Mike White, and Chris Stachiw discuss the strange choices made when trying to bring the Coneheads into America's living room on a weekly basis.
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Episode 34: That Girl in Wonderland (1973)

September 21, 2023 • 48 mins
Marlo Thomas returns as "That Girl" in a very "not cannon" episode. Here she's in a Rankin & Bass cartoon where she seems to be having delusions about being inside several familiar fairy tales.
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Episode 33: Willie Mays and The Say Hey Kid (1972)

August 18, 2023 • 47 mins
One of the more rare Rankin & Bass specials we've covered, Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid was the sixth episode of the first season of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie. It's a bizarre story of Willie Mays being saddled with an orphaned child and her guardian angel, KC.
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Episode 32: The Red Baron (1972)

July 28, 2023 • 42 mins
One of the episodes of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie, The Red Baron (1972) is a canine interpretation of the story of Baron Manfred von Richthofen who, for whatever reason, was having a real resurgence in the late '60s/early '70s (lest we forget the General Mills Baron von Redberry cereal). We get off-target very easily and very quickly in this one. Forgive us, but this one was a real dog!
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Episode 31: The Emperor's New Clothes (1972)

June 23, 2023 • 46 mins
The pilot for a proposed series called "The Enchanted World of Danny Kaye," The Emperor's New Clothes tells a version of Hans Christian Anderson's classic fable wherein a emperor gets swindled by a pair of slick scammers who appeal to his vanity, selling him a suit made of "invisible" thread.

Mike, Richard, and Chris discuss this uneven fable and the amazing year Rankin/Bass had in 1972.
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Episode 30: The Saga of Smokey the Bear

May 26, 2023 • 50 mins
Mike, Chris, and Richard discuss both 1966's The Ballad of Smokey the Bear wherein we learn the traumatic origin story of the ursine fire-fighter as well as the 1969 cartoon series, The Smokey Bear Show, which was Saturday morning pablum for a much simpler age.
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Episode 29: The Wind in the Willows

April 28, 2023 • 50 mins
We look at the idle rich via Kenneth Grahame's children's classic, The Wind in the WIllows and the 1987 Rankin/Bass animated adaptation. This is a proper bookend for Rankin/Bass's animated features as one of their earliest animates series, The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show also brought Grahame's characters to life (albeit in 1970).

Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White discuss both incarnations of Mr. Toad on this fin...
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Episode 28: The Mad Mad Mad Comedians (1970)

March 31, 2023 • 59 mins
Pepsico presents The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians, an animated special that played before the Academy Awards ceremony in 1970. The cast includes contemporary (Flip Wilson) and older (George Burns, Henny Youngman, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, etc.) comedians as well as the voice talent of Paul Frees in an uneven TV event.

Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White discuss the state of stand-up comedy in the early '70s as well as what a ser...
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Episode 27: The King and I (1999)

March 10, 2023 • 64 mins
One of the final Rankin/Bass animated features fuses the grandeur and romance of Rodgers and Hammerstein with some sub-par kiddie far including funny monkeys, elephants, and a horribly racist caricature of an Asian man voiced by Darrell Hammond. Possibly released to cash in on the Anna & The King film from the same year, The King and I suffers from an inconsistent tone.

Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White discuss the ...
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Episode 26: Return to Oz (1964)

February 10, 2023 • 63 mins
Though we don't remember going there the first time, Richard, Chris, and Mike return to Oz to discuss some of Rankin & Bass's earliest work, the 1961 series Tales of the Wizard of Oz and the 1964 follow-up, Return to Oz. Based on two of the later L. Frank Baum books, it's the story of Dorothy going back to Oz and finding that her old friends aren't what they used to be. Of course, we also discuss the 1985 Walter Murch freaky ...
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Episode 25: Cricket on the Night Before Christmas

December 20, 2022 • 62 mins
'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring except for a mouse who has seen The Year Without a Santa Claus too many times.

Richard, Mike, and Chris discuss 1974's Twas the Night Before Christmas and 1967's Cricket on the Hearth, a Rankin/Bass special inspired by Charles Dickens.
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Episode 24: The Wacky World of Mother Goose

November 23, 2022 • 46 mins
We're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel here, folks, with Rankin & Bass's first feature film, the animated interpretation of Charles Perrault’s many nursery rhymes wherein the titular Mother Goose skips town, leaving Old King Cole in charge. The hapless dupe is usurped by the Crooked Man who kidnaps all of the adults in Cole's kingdom, leaving little Jack and Mary to try and save the day.

Listen to Richard Hatem, Chris St...
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Episode 23: Marco (1973)

October 21, 2022 • 70 mins
Are you ready for the heart-stopping action of the totally true tale of Italian tradesman Marco Polo? Are you ready for Desi Arnaz Jr. riding on a kite? Or how about Zero Mostel as Kublai Khan? If you're not ready for all of that then you definitely can't handle the Rankin & Bass-produced epic MARCO from 1973.
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Episode 22: The Ivory Ape (1980)

July 29, 2022 • 48 mins
Something of a retread of The Last Dinosaur, the usual gang is back -- "Tom" Kotani directing, William Overgard writing, Benni Korzen producing, Maury Laws providing music, and all under the auspices of Rankin & Bass. It's also something of a King Kong story where the titular ape is taken from his home in Africa to Bermuda where he's feared by the local authorities who hire a big game hunter (Jack Palance) to stop the ape from kil...
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Episode 21: The Bushido Blade (1981)

July 7, 2022 • 87 mins
We're discussing "Tom" Kotani's The Bushido Blade. Written by William Overgard, it's the fictionalized account of Admiral Perry (Richard Boone) and his crew making a treaty with Japan. The film fractures into essentially three storylines featuring Frank Converse, Timothy Patrick Murphy, and Mike Starr in his first film role.

Interviews include a snippet of an earlier interview with Starr as well as a new interview with producer Be...
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Episode 20: The Last Dinosaur (1977)

May 12, 2022 • 61 mins
Richard Boone IS The Last Dinosaur in Rankin & Bass's take on Edgar Rice Burroughs's
The Land That Time Forgot in which an eclectic group of explorers find a pocket of primeval creatures. Co-directed by Alexander Grasshoff and Shusei Kotani, this is yet another of the Rankin/Bass Kaiju films.
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