9 / 10
Official trailer
Billie Mae Richards voices Rudolph, and Burl Ives voices Sam the Snowman, who narrates the special. Paul Soles voices Hermey, Larry D. Mann voices Yukon Cornelius and Stan Francis voices Santa Claus.
Romeo Muller wrote the teleplay from the Robert L. May 1939 Montgomery Ward Christmas-promotional story and the later Johnny Marks song. Videocraft International produced the special and NBC broadcast it on December 6, 1964.
There’s a sadness running under Rudolph that most kids’ specials wouldn’t dare, and it’s why I rate it a 9. A reindeer gets shut out of Santa’s team, an elf wants to be a dentist, and an island full of unwanted toys waits for somebody to come for them. I find it sweet in all the right places and a little heartbreaking in the rest, and Burl Ives makes the special feel like a story told by a friend.
The special is technically stop-motion puppet animation instead of claymation, executed by Tadahito Mochinaga’s animation team at MOM Production in Tokyo. Rankin/Bass called the technique ‘Animagic’ and used it for later productions including Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town and The Year Without a Santa Claus. The hand-crafted figures, painted backgrounds, and frame-by-frame animation produce a look entirely different from cel animation or modern computer animation.
The medium has aged into something close to outsider art, with the limited frame rates and visible craftsmanship now reading as real warmth that later technologies have struggled to replicate.
The Animagic Technique
Tadahito Mochinaga’s Tokyo studio handled the production with techniques he’d developed in Japanese stop-motion since the 1950s. The figures were constructed with wire armatures, fabric clothing, and carved wooden heads with painted features.
Each frame required moving each figure incrementally and photographing the new position. A single minute of finished animation required hundreds of individual photographs.
The visible craftsmanship has become part of the special’s appeal. Modern viewers can see the puppet seams, the slight imperfections of frame-to-frame movement, the painterly backgrounds. I think those flaws are a big part of the charm. The jerky little puppets look like somebody built them by hand, because somebody did, and I find that warmer than anything a computer has produced since.
For Writers
Production techniques that show their craftsmanship age differently than techniques that hide it. Animagic’s visible hand-craft has become a virtue with time.
Burl Ives’s Narration
Burl Ives’s Sam the Snowman frames the story with a warm folksy narration that holds the special’s structure together. Ives sings ‘A Holly Jolly Christmas’ and ‘Silver and Gold’ in the special, and both became holiday standards through the broadcast exposure. His relaxed delivery and that gentle banjo are my favorite part of Rudolph, and I’d happily listen to Ives narrate a phone book.
Ives was an established folk singer instead of a television professional, and his casting in the narrator role brought real American-folk weight to the special’s musical sequences. The choice was Rankin/Bass’s signature production decision: every later Animagic special had a similar singer-narrator framing the story with a folk-music presence instead of conventional cartoon narration.
For Writers
Narrator casting in family productions can carry the work’s tonal identity more than the surrounding dialogue does. Ives’s folk-singer warmth set the Rankin/Bass template for the later fifteen years of holiday productions.
The Island of Misfit Toys
The Island of Misfit Toys is the most inspired idea in the special and the part I think about most. The island holds toys rejected for manufacturing or design flaws: a Charlie-in-the-Box, a train with square wheels, a swimming bird, a cowboy who rides an ostrich. Those toys get to me more than a children’s special has any right to, and the film lets its acceptance theme land without belaboring it.
The original 1964 broadcast didn’t show Santa rescuing the Misfit Toys in the closing sequence.
After viewer mail noted the omission, Rankin/Bass produced an additional sequence in 1965 showing Santa picking up the toys from the island and delivering them to children. The addition has remained in all later broadcasts. The special’s most famous later element was a viewer-driven correction to the original production.
For Writers
Audience response can reshape productions through later additions. The Misfit Toys rescue scene is a textbook example of post-release correction driven by viewer feedback instead of commercial calculation.
Craft Note
The special’s annual broadcast began on NBC in 1964 and continued there until 1972, moved to CBS from 1972 through 2024, and is currently part of the CBS holiday rotation. The Johnny Marks songs include ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ (originally a Gene Autry hit in 1949), ‘A Holly Jolly Christmas’, ‘Silver and Gold’, and ‘There’s Always Tomorrow’. The special won no major awards on initial broadcast but has accumulated heavy cultural standing through six decades of annual exposure.
Does Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer still hold up?
Rudolph gets a 9 from me. The Animagic puppets, Burl Ives, Romeo Muller’s script and the Misfit Toys add up to the Christmas special I’d put above all the others, sad where it needs to be and warm everywhere else. My one small complaint is that the original needed viewer mail to remind it to rescue the Misfit Toys at all. Any family building a Christmas canon should start here.
