Rankin on Bass (Weirding Way Media)

We kick off the series with a look at Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, talking a bit about the history of character before he appeared on Rankin & Bass's beloved holiday special. We also discuss the sequel wherein Rudolph has to save Baby New Year from the clutches of an evil bird.

What's the story behind the Ho Ho Ho? We talk about how Santa came to be in Rankin & Bass's Santa Claus Is Coming to Town and the time when Santa got sick and lost hope in The Year Without a Santa Claus.

We head to the Middle East to look at the The Little Drummer boy story -- along with its sequel -- and Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. It's something of a re-telling of the Nativity Story via side-characters.

Happy Birthday! We’re talking about the animated adventures of Frosty the Snowman and Jack Frost as we look at Frosty the Snowman, Frosty’s Winter Wonderland, and the Animagic stoy of Jack Frost. Somehow this episode gets into Cossacks, ventriloquism, and Groundhog Day.

We talked about this back on our second episode... It's a discussion of the live action Year Without a Santa Claus and A Miser Brothers Christmas. Ever want to see Harvey Fierstein as the Heat Miser and Michael McKean as Snow Miser? Here's your chance.

We wrap up the first season of Rankin on Bass with a look at the meeting of two titans: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer meets Frosty the Snowman in a Christmas special set in July where we learn about the origins of the North Pole and tie together several of the other Rankin & Bass shows.

Welcome to the second season of Rankin on Bass where we're looking at other holiday-themed specials. The Leprechaun's Christmas gold wasn't a St. Patrick's Day special but it is as much that as a Christmas special where Blarney Kilakilarney (Art Carney) relates a story within a story within a story about the Leprechauns' eternal struggle against an evil banshee who wants their gold.

Chris Stachiw and Mike White (Richard Hatem was on assignment to the North Pole) talk about the Rankin/Bass-produced King Kong Escapes which is part sequel to the Japanese animated TV-series, part re-telling of the Kong story, and part sequel to the Toho King Kong vs. Godzilla movie from 1962.

Ah, spring is here! Nothing better than to celebrate the martyrdom of Jesus by discussing the origins of the Easter Bunny! Chris, Richard, and Mike delve into Rankin/Bass's three Easter specials: Here Comes Peter Cottontail, The First Easter Rabbit, and The Easter Bunny Is Comin' to Town. They're essentially Santa Claus stories but with a rabbit playing the Santa part. We learn about the importance of bonnets, the Scarlet Fever epidemic, and why we roll Easter eggs across these three celebrity-voiced specials.

Directed by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, The Last Unicorn was adapted for the screen by Peter S. Beagle and based on his book. It's an offbeat look at legacy, legend, and immortality. It's the story of a unicorn (Mia Farrow) who thinks she may be the last of her kind and her quest to find the truth.

In 1977 Rankin & Bass did one of the first successful adaptation of JRR Tolkien's work with their adaptation of The Hobbit. In 1979 they tried again with The Return of the King. Between those two, Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings complicated matters. We discuss these animated specials in a post Peter Jackson LOTR world.

We're going back to the first Rankin & Bass animagic feature, Willy McBean & His Magic Machine in which Willy is joined by talking monkey Pablo to defeat the evil Professor Von Rotten by traveling time and making sure history is not rewritten.

Rankin & Bass combine live action and animagic in the secret bio-pic of Hans Christian Andersen, The Daydreamer (1966) in which Paul O'Keefe plays the titular role along with a cavalcade of voice talent.

Based on the first book of Gordon R. Dickson's series, The Flight of Dragons, stars Harry Morgan as a disgruntled wizard whose way of life is threatened. He travels through time to retrieve John Ritter to help defeat James Earl Jones.

We really wanted to like Mad Monster Party? and Mad, Mad, Mad Monsters but just couldn't We discuss the lame voices of both spooky specials which celebrate Friday the 13th far more than Halloween.

Did you know that there are Native American mice? We learned this and other fun facts about the pilgrims coming over on the Mayflower in this Rankin & Bass animated Thanksgiving special.

We're scraping the bottom of the Rankin & Bass Christmas barrel with a look at the 1974 animated special 'Twas the Night Before Christmas and 1985 animagic story The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus which re-tells the Santa story by way of L. Frank Baum. Did you know that Santa suckled at the teat of a lioness?

On this episode Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White discuss the Rankin & Bass film The Bermuda Depths. It's a live action (and stop motion) film about a man, a mysterious woman, and a giant turtle.

We continue to hop around in the filmography of Rankin & Bass as we look at the last live-action film they produced with the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Sins of Dorian Gray, a gender-swapped version of Oscar Wilde's tale wherein Dorian (Belinda Bauer) is a model/actress whose screen test weathers the storm of her myriad sins while Anthony Perkins plays a Mephistophelian character.

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.

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 Benni Korzen who worked on the live action Rankin & Bass pictures going all the way back to The Enchanted World of Danny Kaye.

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 killing innocent victims.

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.

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 Stachiw, and Mike White lose their minds.

'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.

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 feature film as well.

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 film and begin planning their exit strategy from the world of Rankin and Bass.

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 series of Mad Mad Mad Comedians might have looked like.

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 final season of Rankin on Bass.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.