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One of the things I talked about with my sister-in-law was a fresh horror I'd discovered in watching Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Rankin-Bass take, this year. Rankin-Bass specials are surprisingly fertile nightmare fuel, considering what warm nostalgia they induce in people, but when you actually get to looking at them ... well. Here's one I hadn't noticed before.

In the tag, Santa returns to the Island of Misfit Toys, picks them up, and brings them to promising new homes. This is shown under the closing credits with a toy squirming out of the bag, and one of the elves giving him an umbrella, and helping him jump overboard to float down to wherever his new home is. There's the spotted elephant, cute, and then, aw, the bird comes out and the elf starts giving the umbrella, then shakes his head, and tosses the bird overboard. Cute and funny, right?

Except. Why was the bird doll on the Island of Misfit Toys?

Because it was a bird that couldn't fly!

It was one that swam, not flew. So it logically plummeted to horrible death.

You might say maybe they weren't that high up? No, they're shown, just above, the cloud cover, and it's on a night of the most horrible weather in years. Above water, so it could swim? What kid has a home in the water?

My sister-in-law was suitably horrified, the moreseo because she's been noticing how many horrible things lurk not so far under the surface of many of the classic Christmas specials. A Charlie Brown Christmas particularly worried her as everyone was so horrible to each other in it. Her daughter wasn't so worried. I do like, though, that there are all these rough edges in the older generation of Christmas specials; newer ones just feel so thoroughly thought-out there's no room to notice things that shock you later. Good stuff often has a few jagged edges.

Trivia: Max Fleischer produced the 1944 cartoon version of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer for the Jam Handy organization of Detroit. Source: The Fleischer Story, Leslie Cabarga. Come to think of it, I still wonder why Jam Handy, which mostly made educational films, did a purely entertainment cartoon. Who did they figure to sell it to?

Currently Reading: The Zipper: An Exploration In Novelty, Robert Friedel. And, against my expectations, the tailor/cobbler at the mall was so able to fix my broken zipper tab. But she warned the zipper, not just the tabs, would likely break soon, so be careful.

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I will, um, yikes, uh... watch for that the next time I see this... which may be a LONG time....

It's worth seeing, I think. Even with the shocking moments and the other stuff that doesn't quite make sense. (How did Rudolph track his parents and Clarice to the Abominable Snow Monster's lair?)

And I am not going to answer this as it may not be appropriate. Honestly Clarice, Rudolph you didn't think there was some sort of rutting going on? Okay that's as far as I am going to go.

Ah ... I'd be surprised if the relative ages worked out.

Hmmm. Now, the video shows the bird "Doesn't fly, I swim!" Now, that doesn't necessarily mean he cannot fly, though that's certainly the implication. I think that he has a strong preference for swimming whenever possible and just doesn't fly to get around if he can at all help it seems a bit of a stretch.

That's optimistic, but I think we have to rule it out on the grounds that he wouldn't have been grabbed by the griffin king as an unwanted toy if he had flown, and he'd have to know that a little flying would keep him away from that perilous fate.

You know honestly I did always think the bird got delivered to an island hence splashed into water and floated like a bottle to the nearby island where they don't use chimneys, to the surprise and joy to the children. Thinking the bird could fly but they found out it couldn't fly but actually swim. Santa tricked me, but this gift is so perfect.

Probably it would go well enough on an island, but if everything's going into the water to wash ashore, why were the umbrellas given to the other gifts dropped off mere seconds earlier and no more capable of flight than the bird was?

Much as I liked the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer special I kept wondering why nearly every single reindeer was such a jerk. Sure you expect kids to ostracize "the freak", but the adults seemed to be right along with them. Hey, now there's a family value.

That's often how it works, though...parents always tend to support their kids at the expense of other kids. I think part of the reason kids are so cruel in older specials is that's kinda how kids really are. We like to think of them as sweet and guileless but they're really pretty horrible to each other most of the time. They haven't learned the social niceties that usually keep, say, one adult from calling another adult "fatso" to his face.

The really awful thing, though, is that even Santa is a jerk about it until he discovers it's useful! I like many of the Rankin-Bass specials, but I can't get into this one for that reason. (Santa is portrayed with a quite different personality in subsequent R-B films.)

Santa's a prime jerk in the start, yes --- there must be a SantaDickery site to compete with Superman's personality disorders --- but he, like the rest, gets awfully ashamed of his part in driving Rudolph off and talks about wanting him and Herbie back before it's realized Rudolph's nose is useful. The rest of the reindeer and elves seem ashamed too; it's like they didn't realize they were being utterly horrible people until five people's lives were at stake. That order does also soften the ``you should be nice to the freaks because in weird circumstances they might have economic value'' moral to something nearer to ``you should be nice because you hurt people when you're not''.

You know, hundred of years of always giving, can make folks cranky at times. It might of been a bad year for Santa, the bratty reindeer and especially with all that darn overcast weather. Grey skies make folks gloomy and there is scientific evidence that proves this point.

Edited Date: 2011-12-28 06:02 am (UTC)

If we go by the specials, every year is a bad year for Santa. Sally Forth, whose author's thoughts on this have been mentioned below, (http://content.comicskingdom.net/Sally_Forth/Sally_Forth.20111218.gif) described it pretty sharply on the 18th of December.

I had, through elementary school, good interactions with other kids. I think the worst I ever suffered at my classmates' hands was being told I laughed too much, which, as the cruelty of children goes, doesn't rate.

Middle school, that was unlimited horrors, but I can't be sure whether that was my being the new kid in class or whether it's just middle school is a deranged psychotic nightmare state.

There's good reason why most middle schools/ students are physically separated from the rest of the community...

I haven't noticed them particularly separated around here, at least not more than any other class of school is.

We're not a very progressive State. All of our middle schools were called 'junior high' schools and kept separate from the elementary and high schools. It's only a recent development here to name them 'middle' or try to incorporate them in the high school.

When I first came here in the second grade I was mystified by the fact that our school had two recess areas: separate but equal. These weren't along racial lines but gender. Unlike Schenectady, little girls weren't allowed to play with little boys on the playground equipment.

That was pretty much my experience. But I also moved from very small private schools to a big public school in 6th grade, which probably made it worse.

Yeah, that's got to be a big part of the problem.

Still, if elementary school is basically decent, what happens at the middle school threshold to turn so many experiences into horrible ones?

Starting out, the obsession of the adult reindeer to cover up Rudolph's freak nature is so over-the-top it reads like a parody of 50s Conformism. Now that I have a better understanding of the social mores of the time I'm ... still not sure if it's exaggeration or not.

That's true. I hadn't thought about that. From watching various mental hygiene films I've gotten the distinct impression that people in the 1950s were terrified that society would collapse due to children not being conformist enough.

It was very important in the 50s that everyone think and act the same way. How else were we to withstand the thought controls of Communism?

Less glibly, I wonder how much of the must-conform-more mindset came from the not superficially implausible reasoning that there must be a most efficient way to do anything, and therefore, what's the point of doing anything any other way for any reason, therefore, everyone must do things the same way.

Dana pointed out to me that the 1950s were really the first time that adolescents had unsupervised time together without adult responsibilities, so there was probably some concern that they'd screw themselves up with their new-found freedom.

I'll bet this will glitch and go to my default photo, rather than my squirrel. We'll see.

Anyway, yes, I remember that now. I suspect it was a story writing/editing error. It wouldn't be the first such film with one. And, yes, that is awful.

It was just a story editing error, and I suspect I know why: the tag of Santa returning to the Island of Misfit Toys was not in the original broadcast version; that thread just got forgotten about. After audiences complained Rankin/Bass filmed the new happy ending, and I don't doubt that in the time between the original and filming the tag --- you'll notice Santa doesn't say anything on the Island of Misfit Toys that he didn't say earlier --- they found the models but forgot what each of them was on the Island for.

Interesting... I started imagining Santa was giving them misfit umbrellas anyway, along with dropping them over the ocean :D I also think that maybe he sent them all to the orphanage in "Christmas Comes but Once a Year," another dark little classic.

On a newew DVD, I saw scenes I didn't recall from the VHS. One that stood out was Hermie/Herbie making a snowman of his boss during the "Misfit Song" and then pummeling it. Odd.

The dropping out of the sleigh, unwrapped, seems lackadaisical, but it does make the sense of going to a new place more fun, I think. Wouldn't you like to float into places on an umbrella?

There have been a surprising number of variant scenes between the original airing, later airings, VHS, and DVD. It's hard to pin down a perfectly canonical storyline.

Am I bad for enjoying the dark side of children's entertainment?
:-)

Oh, no. It's just startling to come across a gritty bit.

You really have to go read Medium Large. You'd greatly appreciate it.

http://mediumlarge.wordpress.com/

In particular:

http://mediumlarge.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/kid-reaction-to-misfit-toys-complete.jpg

I'd not seen that one before! Thank you. Silly stuff.

However, I think the jelly gun and the spotted elephant would be winners among any kids I ever heard of.

Good stuff often has a few jagged edges.

liake ann olde kan lid. sharpe, withe tetinss!

Edited Date: 2011-12-27 10:28 pm (UTC)

Hey, you never forget the tetanus shots. If I remember schoolyard lore correctly, they're injected into the stomach directly using an 18-inch-long needle.

yiz, ime prettee shur thetz howe ite iz. thay shud maike a kartoon uv ite!

My #1 Rankin-Bass nightmare fuel moment is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlfBz6kAJd8

I have a vivid memory of seeing this and being struck with utter horror, then running downstairs to where my father was doing something in his workshop area in the basement and sobbing as I tried to tell him what was wrong. Then my mother came home, from the store or something, and my father tried to explain to her what was wrong with me: "Something about someone being turned into a tree."

I didn't see that one again until I was about 30, and I discovered that it still disturbed me.

Oh, wow.

That's one of the specials I had forgotten. The turning-into-a-tree has got kind of a fairy tale resolution to it (is it really worse than the Wicked Witch of the West melting?) but it's also one that'll burn deep in the memory, if it hits the right way.

It is worse, not because the idea of it is worse but because the visuals are so much more nightmarish. To me, anyway. Evidently, not to everyone. The foot turning into spidery roots, and the sudden reappearance of his hand in the form of a spiky branch, still make me uncomfortable. And did they have to throw in the bit where his "hand" breaks off at the very end?

Mm. Yeah, the hand breaking is a bit too much. And looking at it again I suppose he does turn into a dead tree; somehow, turning into a live tree feels to me like it'd be preferable. But I guess that could be a more horrifying fate because of the long-term helplessness of it. (I suppose if a tree were conscious it wouldn't think it moved so very slowly.)

Wow! What an exit!

Gotta say, that is going out with some flair.

I'd never seen that before. ..and I'm glad because WOW that's creepy.

Brrrr... year by year more of these R/B shows surface that I never saw (mainly due to my age at their original release dates). Paul Frees was a busy fellow :o)

You know he was two of the four Beatles, for their Saturday morning cartoon, right? Also at least one of the Marx Brothers in their stop-motion-animated appearance.

I had forgotten that one. Yes, very creepy.

I had forgotten it, but I think that's because it aired so few times in original incarnation.

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