Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment

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Rankin/Bass Productions, Inc. (formerly Videocraft International, Ltd.) is an American production company, known for its seasonal television specials.

The company origins

The company was founded by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass in the early-1960s as Videocraft International. One of Rankin/Bass's first projects was an independently produced series based on the character Pinocchio. It was done using "Animagic", a stop motion animation process using figurines (a process already pioneered by George Pal's "Puppetoons" and Art Clokey's Gumby and Davey and Goliath). This was followed by another independently produced series using more traditional cel animation and based on already established characters, Tales of the Wizard of Oz in 1961.

Along came Rudolph

But it was in 1964 that the company really took off with a special produced for NBC and sponsor (and later owner of NBC) General Electric. It was a stop-motion animated adaptation of the Johnny Marks song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (which had been made into a Max Fleischer traditional animated short almost two decades before). Propelled by the talent of narrator Burl Ives in the role of Sam the Snowman, along with an original orchestral score composed by Marks himself, Rudolph became one of the most popular and longest-running Christmas specials in television history: it remained with NBC until around 1972, and currently runs annually on CBS. The special contained seven original songs, however GE had one additional song, "Fame And Fortune" added in 1965.

More holiday tales

Throughout the decade of the 1960s, Rankin/Bass produced other stop motion and traditional animation specials and films, some of which were non-holiday stories. For example, 1965 produced Rankin/Bass's first theatrical film, Willy McBean and his Magic Machine, the first of four films produced in association with Joseph E. Levine's Embassy Pictures. 1966 brought to life The Ballad of Smokey the Bear (narrated by James Cagney), the story of the famous forest fire-fighting animal seen in numerous public service announcements.

This was followed by two Thanksgiving specials, Cricket on the Hearth (narrated by Danny Thomas), and The Mouse on the Mayflower (told by Tennessee Ernie Ford). Rankin/Bass also tacked Halloween with the cult favorite Mad Monster Party?, featuring one of the last performances of Boris Karloff.

In 1971, Rankin/Bass did its own Easter special, Here Comes Peter Cottontail, with the voices of narrator Danny Kaye, Vincent Price, and Casey Kasem (as the title character). It was based not on the title song, but on a 1957 novel by Priscilla and Otto Friedrich entitled The Easter Bunny That Overslept.

But Rankin/Bass never forgot the Christmas holidays. Many of their specials, like Rudolph, were based on popular Christmas songs. In 1968, Greer Garson's dramatic narration carried through The Little Drummer Boy, set against the birth of the baby Jesus.

The following year (1969), Jimmy Durante sung and told the story of Frosty The Snowman, with Jackie Vernon voicing the title character of a snowman magically brought to life.

1970 brought the last of the "classic four" Rankin/Bass Christmas specials with Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town. Rankin/Bass was able to enlist the talents of Fred Astaire as narrator S.D. (Special Delivery) Kruger, a mailman answering the many questions about Santa Claus (and in turn, telling his origin). Of all their specials this was perhaps their most topical --- the year of Woodstock --- with the story revolving around a young hippy-like Kris Kringle taking on the establishment represented by the Burghermeister MeisterBurgher.

Throughout the 1970s, Rankin/Bass, in addition to its Saturday-morning output (which included animated adventures of The Jackson 5ive and The Osmonds), created animated sequels to its classic specials, including a historic teaming of Rudolph and Frosty in 1979. One of the most popular Rankin/Bass specials is The Year Without a Santa Claus, which featured supporting characters Snow Miser and Heat Miser. The Miser Brothers remain the most unusual fictional characters in the annals of classic television; several of their fans have devoted entire websites to them, and even Snow Miser's song was paid tribute in a scene from Batman and Robin (1997).

Among Rankin/Bass's original specials was 1975's The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow. Though only a half-hour long (as opposed to the standard hour time slot), it was critically acclaimed, telling the story of a blind shepherd boy who longs to experience Christmas.

Many of these classic specials are still shown on American TV stations in the present day (2005) around Easter and Christmas, and some have even been released to video and DVD. Rankin/Bass stop-motion features are recognizable by their visual style of doll-like characters with spheroid body parts, and ubiquitous powdery snow. Often, traditional cel animation scenes of falling snow would be projected over top of the action to create the effect of a snowfall.

Rankin/Bass's non-holiday output

In 1977, Rankin/Bass produced an animated version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. It was followed in 1980 by an animated version of The Return of the King, the final book of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. (The animation rights to the first two books in the series were held by Saul Zaentz, producer of Ralph Bakshi's cartoon adaptation of the first half of the trilogy. See The Lord of the Rings on film.)

Rankin/Bass also produced the popular cartoon series, ThunderCats (1985), a cartoon and related toy-line about battling cat-like people in a high-tech future. It was followed by two similar cartoons about animal-like people, Silverhawks (1986), and Tigersharks (as part of the series The Comic Strip in 1987) which never enjoyed the same commercial success.

Rankin/Bass also attempted live-action productions, such as 1968's sequel King Kong Escapes, and the 1976 telefilm The Last Dinosaur.

Rankin/Bass's talent

In addition to the all-star talent that provided the narration for the specials, Rankin/Bass had its own company of voice actors. For the studio's early work, this group was based in Toronto, Ontario, where recording was supervised by veteran CBC announcer Bernard Cowan. This group included actors such as Paul Soles, Larry D. Mann, and Paul Kligman.

Later, the most notable voice talent was Paul Frees, who provided the voices for, among others, the three wise men (The Little Drummer Boy), Burgermeister Meisterburger (Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town), the traffic cop (Frosty The Snowman), Jack Frost (Frosty's Winter Wonderland), and even Santa Claus himself (Here Comes Peter Cottontail). Other Rankin/Bass voice actors have included Linda Gary, Mickey Rooney, Marlo Thomas, Angela Lansbury, June Foray, and Shelley Winters.

Maury Laws has served as musical director for almost all of the animated films.

Rankin/Bass' "Animagic" stop-motion productions, as well as many of their animated productions, were animated in Japan. Throughout the 1960s, the Animagic productions were headed by famed Japanese stop-motion animator Tadahito Mochinaga.

Rankin/Bass's library

The Rankin/Bass library is now at the hands of other companies. The pre-1974 library remained under the ownership of General Electric. In 1978, Telepictures Corporation acquired all of the post-1974 Rankin/Bass library. In 1988, Lorne Michaels' production company Broadway Video acquired the rights to the Rankin/Bass television material prior to 1974 (including the "classic four" Christmas specials). In 1995, Broadway Video's children's division became Golden Books Family Entertainment, and in turn became Classic Media (which is where the rights stand today).

The Rankin/Bass feature film library (with the exception of Rudolph and Frosty and The Last Unicorn) is now owned by French production company StudioCanal.

All Rankin/Bass material from 1974-1989 (except The Last Unicorn) are now owned by Warner Bros. (through the studio's eventual acquisition of Telepictures). In terms of DVD releases, however, only Jack Frost (1979) is inexplicably in the public domain.

The Last Unicorn is owned by Carlton/ITC.

Rankin/Bass today

After its last output in 1987, the Rankin/Bass partnership lay dormant, and for many years to come, no new holiday or non-holiday specials or theatrical films were produced. As for the founders, Arthur Rankin Jr. chose to devote his time between New York City, where the company still has its offices, and his summer retreat in Bermuda; whereas Jules Bass also decided to commute, the difference being that Bass made his journeys between New York and Paris. In 1999, Rankin/Bass joined forces with James G. Robinson's Morgan Creek Productions and Nest Entertainment, creators of the animated trilogy The Swan Princess, for the first (and only) animated adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I, based on a treatment conceived by Rankin. Distributed by Warner Bros., the film flopped at the U.S. boxoffice; and many U.S. film critics took it to task for its depictions of "offensive ethnic stereotyping."

After amicably dissolving the Rankin/Bass partnership, Jules Bass became a vegetarian; a decade later, he created Herb, the Vegetarian Dragon --- the first children's book character developed specifically to explore moral issues related to vegetarianism. Herb's original story, along with a follow-up cookbook, became bestsellers for independent publishing house Barefoot Books.

In 2001, the Fox Network aired Rankin/Bass's first new, original Christmas special in sixteen years, Santa Baby! (like so many of its past specials, based on a popular Christmas song), featuring voices by Eartha Kitt and Gregory Hines and featuring primarily African-American characters, a change from its previous specials. Sadly, this has become the last Rankin/Bass material to date.

The spirit of Rankin/Bass is kept alive by a popular Internet website run by Rankin/Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt, who has served as consultant for many of Rankin/Bass's restorations and video releases. Those major restorations of the Christmas Classic specials were supervised by Todd Sokolove, Kirsten Hansen-Love, and Vincent Apollo in the late 1990s and are the currently available versions on home video and broadcast.

Filmography

Feature films

Animated TV specials

Animated series

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