Rankin/Bass Productions: Difference between revisions

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{{quote|''Just in the Christmas special subgenre alone, Rankin/Bass made 18 specials, of varying length and ambition, between 1964 and 1985. Nearly all of these films revolve around the performance of some Christmas song or another. Nearly all of them deal with the crippling scars of childhood shame.''
''And nearly all of them are completely off-the-rails insane.''
|Emily Todd VanDerWerff|vox.com, [https://www.vox.com/2014/12/24/7446181/worst-christmas-specials https://www.vox.com/2014/12/24/7446181/worstThe makers of Rudolph also created some of the most off-christmasthe-wall Christmas specials ever]}}
 
If you had a childhood (in an English-speaking country during the middle-late 20th century, at least), you know '''Rankin/Bass Productions'''. Founded by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass as Videocraft International, the company is responsible for a series of (usually) [[Stop Motion]] puppet animated (called "Animagic") holiday specials that are virtual fixtures of seasonal television programming. Works such as ''[[Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer]]'', ''[[Santa Claus is Comin' to Town]]'', ''[[Frosty the Snowman]]'' and ''[[Here Comes Peter Cottontail]]'' have been airing almost continuously since the early 1960s, when they were first produced. Many subsequent holiday specials produced by other companies will contain salutes to these shows.
 
The general formula of these holiday specials was to take one or more classic holiday songs and to build a script (usually by staff writer Romeo Muller) around the music, featuring a celebrity narrator as an [[Ink Suit Actor]] in the story and interspersing it with original songs with music by Maury Laws and lyrics by co-producer Jules Bass. Very likely a majority of the characters will be voiced by [[Paul Frees (Creator)|Paul Frees]].
 
Rankin/Bass also produced non-holiday [[Animated Shows]]. Best known is probably ''[[ThundercatsThunderCats (1985 series)|ThundercatsThunderCats]]''; its other series included ''King Kong'', ''[[The Jackson 5ive]]'' and ''The Osmonds''. The popularity of ''ThundercatsThunderCats'' resulted in two follow-up series, ''[[Silverhawks]]'' and ''Tigersharks'' (the third appearing along with three other shows as ''[[The Comic Strip]]''.
 
Its most ambitious projects were animated adaptations of [[J. R. R. Tolkien|JRR Tolkien]]'s books, with ''[[The Hobbit (novel)|The Hobbit]]'' and ''[[The Lord of the Rings|The Return of the King]]''. (Not to be confused with [[Ralph Bakshi]]'s [[So Bad It's Good|ill-fated]] [[The Lord of the Rings (animation)|attempt]], which bridged the series.)
 
Along with ''[[The Last Unicorn (animation)|The Last Unicorn]]'' and ''[[The Flight of Dragons]]'', these films were the first major [[Animesque|U.S.-Japanese]] animation production crossovers. Many of the animators of ''The Hobbit'' went on to work for [[Studio Ghibli]].
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* ''Kid Power'' (1972)
* ''Festival of Family Classics'' (1972)
* ''[[ThundercatsThunderCats (1985 series)|ThundercatsThunderCats]]'' (1985)
* ''[[Silverhawks]]'' (1986)
* ''[[The Comic Strip]]'' (1987)