Every year at this time, TV networks unveil a raft of new holiday-themed movies and specials. Most are looked at once and then quietly discarded like the unwanted necktie you received for Christmas.
Thankfully there is another holiday tradition, that of pulling out the old keepsakes and passing them around. This week and next mark the return of three animated classics that are among TV's longest-running and best-loved specials, regardless of the season. "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" turn 33, 34 and 35 years old, respectively, this month.
Each is a one-of-a-kind program that has never quite been duplicated since. One was so unusual that network executives predicted viewers would hate it. All three featured memorable musical scores and animation styles. And even though they have been available on home video for years, their telecasts never fail to draw rapt audiences made up mostly of young children and their parents.
The earliest of the three almost didn't make it to television. In 1949, songwriter Johnny Marks took the popular story of Santa's shiny-nosed helper - written by his brother-in-law, Robert May - and set it to music as "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Thanks to a recording by cowboy singer Gene Autry, "Rudolph" quickly became the most-requested Christmas song on the radio.
Fourteen years later a producer named Arthur Rankin approached Marks with the idea of turning the song into a half-hour TV special. To his surprise, the composer said no thanks.
"Marks was protective of his song," says Rick Goldschmidt, author of The Enchanted World of Rankin/Bass, a history of the animation shop created by Rankin and his partner Jules Bass. "It was a major source of income for him, and he was afraid overexposure would kill it."
After some persuading, Marks finally leaped into the project, composing several more tunes for the special.
The show's sponsor, worried that the project didn't have enough star power, signed on the well-known folk singer Burl Ives to play Sam the Snowman - essentially the narrator - with top billing over Santa and Rudy. Ives was also given this song to sing:
Have a holly, jolly Christmas;
It's the best time of the year
I don't know if there'll be snow
But have a cup of cheer
"Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" premiered on a Sunday afternoon, Dec. 6, 1964, on NBC. It drew a 50 share of the audience, which was astounding even in a three-channel universe. "Rudolph" aired in following years in prime time and "Holly, Jolly Christmas" became an immediate holiday staple on the radio. Presumably Marks did not regret the overexposure. A surprise hit
Music had an even more defining quality on "A Charlie Brown Christmas," though few guessed it would at the time. Lee Mendelson, a TV producer with exactly one network credit to his name, had made a documentary on Schulz in 1963, but it never aired.
Though "Peanuts" had already established itself as one of the country's best-read comic strips, it took a Time magazine cover story on Charles Schulz in 1965 to get the ball rolling - and even then only because a sponsor, not the networks, showed interest.
"Coca-Cola called on a Thursday and said, 'We're looking for a new Christmas special,' " recalls Mendelson. "I lied and said we'd been working on one for months. After I hung up I called Schulz and said, 'I think I just sold them "A Charlie Brown Christmas." ' He said, 'What's that?' And I said,'I don't know yet, but they need it Monday.' "
With animator Bill Melendez, Mendelson and Schulz created a show that departed from every cartoon convention of the day. The characters were voiced by children, not adults as usually was done. Conversely the dialogue was grown-up-sounding; the humor was subtle and verbal, not slapsticky.
But above all there was the soundtrack, which sounded unlike anything ever heard on an animated program. Mendelson, a longtime jazz buff, had commissioned pianist Vince Guaraldi to compose a tune for the unaired Schulz documentary.
In just two weeks Guaraldi had come up with "Linus and Lucy," an energetic piano solo that would herald every "Peanuts" special to come.
For "A Charlie Brown Christmas," Guaraldi composed all the tunes for bass, drum and piano. The melancholic "Christmastime Is Here," with its chorus of young singers straining for the high notes, served as the perfect counterpoint to the joyous virtuosity of "Linus and Lucy." Both songs have since become jazz standards.
After Guaraldi's death in 1976, a number of musicians wrote songs for subsequent specials, including pianist George Winston and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, both of whom had been inspired as children watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas."
"It was completely unexpected in a holiday special, a jazz trio," says Jon Burlingame, an authority on film and television scores and author of TV's Biggest Hits. "But one of the reasons 'Christmastime Is Here' is so effective is that it accurately reflects Charlie Brown's mood over the holidays."
Time's critic, who was given an advance screening, loved it. But executives at CBS, which had agreed to carry the special, sight unseen, were appalled. Too unorthodox, they thought, for prime time. Mendelson recalls one network suit predicting the special would air once and then never again.
Instead "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was an instant sensation and wound up winning Emmy and Peabody awards.
"Gentleness is a quality that is seldom understood by television," the Peabody citation read. "A notable exception ... was a little gem of a show that faithfully and sensitively introduced to television the 'Peanuts' collection of newspaper characters."
Within a week the network had done an about-face, signing Schulz to a long-term deal for more specials. Mendelson is still producing them, including the 50-year retrospective on Schulz's career he's working on now for CBS. Give a Grinch an inch
Perhaps because the memory of "Charlie Brown Christmas" was still fresh in the network's collective mind, the production of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" for the following holiday season, also on CBS, went through without a hitch.
Chuck Jones, the famed animation director who had brought countless "Looney Tunes" characters to life, was teamed with Dr. Seuss, a.k.a. Ted Geisel.
The chief problem, Jones later said in interviews, was that anyone could read Geisel's book in less than 30 minutes, even someone with the drawn-out delivery of the program's narrator, Boris Karloff. (Karloff was also the voice of the Grinch, but his vocal tracks were mechanically altered to produce a richer sound for the narration.)
To stretch the story out, Jones expanded the character of Max the Dog, who is forced to tow the enormous sleigh filled with plunder from the Grinch's overnight visit to Whoville.
"I think the audience felt his sense of frustration," Jones said of Max. "He wasn't only a slave, he kind of represented the viewpoint of a small child." The dog, then, was Snoopy and Charlie Brown rolled into one.
Once again music helped define "Grinch" as a Christmas classic.
Broadway composer Albert Hague, winner of the 1959 Tony Award for "Redhead," set several of Geisel's verses to music, including this ghoulish tune sung by Thurl Ravenscroft (better known as the voice of Tony the Tiger):
*You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch*
*You really are a heel*
*You're as cuddly as a cactus*
*You're as charming as an eel*
*Mr. Grinch, you're a bad banana*
*With a ... greasy black peel!*
"You had a Tony Award-winning composer doing this bizarre soundtrack for a television special," Burlingame says. "Yet it was perfectly in keeping with the unorthodox nature of the special itself, and in a funny kind of way it's why the Grinch has continued to resonate. I think people today identify with the Grinch more with Max the Dog or Cindy-Lou Who."
Apparently so. Director Ron Howard is currently filming a live-action movie version of "Grinch" to be released next November. The movie's marquee star, Jim Carrey, plays the Grinch.
This story originally appeared Dec. 1, 1999, in the Kansas City Star.
