In 1964, NBC aired a Christmas episode of their weekly anthology series “The General Electric Fantasy Hour.” It was a stop-motion animated adaptation of the book and song “Rudolph, The Red Nosed Reindeer.”
NBC aired the Rudolph hour every year until 1971, when CBS snapped up the rights. And for over half a century, that’s how it was. Every Christmas season, you would watch “Rudolph” on CBS. And yes, for well over twenty of those years you would see this at the beginning.
As the years went on, and networks wanted more time for commercials, poor old Rudolph was snipped and trimmed and sped up. This song was sometimes trimmed down, or cut entirely for many years:
So before we get any further, let us point out the changes that were made to “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”. In its original airing, Santa promises to find homes for all the misfit toys…but we don’t see it, and this resulted in angry letters demanding proof that Santa took care of poor old Charlie In The Box and the cowboy riding an ostrich and the girl doll who appears to have no visible non-conformity. So the following year, they added a newly animated sequence showing the misfit toys riding with Santa, which has aired every year since.
Another change has to do with the song Hermey and Rudolph sing when discovering each other as fellow misfits. The original song was a reprise of the “Misfit” song both characters sing by themselves earlier in the show. But since America demanded seeing the misfit toys’ happy ending, they wrote a shorter song, “Fame And Fortune”, to replace the misfit song. And re-animated the characters to lip sync (sort of) to the new song.
It’s interesting that the show’s producers (legendary Christmas special icons Rankin-Bass) were so willing to make these changes, which certainly had to cost some extra dough. Sponsors and networks had more control in those days. For example–did you know that the little girl Karen in “Frosty The Snowman” was re-voiced after its first airing? The original recording was done by voiceover legend June Foray…but CBS wanted young actress Suzanne Davidson to take the role. Here’s how June Foray sounded as Karen:
Where were we? Oh yes! Rudolph. Eventually, CBS went back to the original Misfit song, but here’s where it gets weird. They just dubbed the Misfit song over the “Fame And Fortune” animation. It looks janky as all get out, with terrible visual and audio editing.
For a while. CBS seemed to take pride in Rudolph, using the show’s characters in clever promos:
For whatever reason, networks make decisions that change things. Which brings us to NBC re-aquiring the rights to “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.” They made a big stink about airing the show in a 75-minute time slot, which lead me to believe that there might be some sort of historical tidbit acknowledging the return to NBC, or maybe even the history of the show. No dice. 23 of those 75 minutes were commercials. Yeesh.
But I will say this: the show’s never looked better on TV…there was obviously some great care taken in that regard. Also, quite a bit of material was re-integrated after decades of CBS’ ham-fisted edits. The elves sing and have a jam session. Yukon Cornelius finally realizes he’s been searching for a peppermint mine. Good stuff! Also, and this is the kind of thing I enjoy..they threw the old-timey peacock animation at the beginning.
NBC is also snatching “Frosty The Snowman” from CBS, and I’ll be watching to see how horribly edited it is. ABC figured out the right way to handle these issues when it had the rights to the Charlie Brown specials. They’d run a beloved special like “It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” uncut, then run a second, much less well-remembered special (Any “You’re Not Elected Charlie Brown” fans out there?) and cut the hell out of it. They get all the commercials they need to cram in there, we get a classic special uncut. It’s a shame the Schulz estate or whoever has their hands in the cookie jar was willing to take the Peanuts specials off over-the-air TV. Perhaps that will change. I never thought Rudolph would change networks!
Rudolph and company do a little selling for their sponsor.