WonderCafe Advent Calendar - December 1, 2008

About the WonderCafe Advent Calendar.

For the first day of December we have an old favourite...

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

If you grew up in 1960s or later, chances are this special, produced by the now-legendary stop motion animators Rankin /Bass, is a part of your pop culture landscape. This special has aired continuously on network television since it was first broadcast in 1964.

What’s amazing is that it continues on while other Christmas specials-- many of them produced by Rankin/Bass; many of them actual sequels to this special-- have disappeared without trace, only to resurface on Teletoon or YTV.

What is the enduring appeal, then, of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer? It’s a catchy song to be sure, predating the special by a good quarter century, but I think the genius of the special is that it takes the picked-on ‘different’ loser-made-good moral of the song and brings it to life in brutal, unflinching terms.

There’s a creepy quality of Rudolph that haunts you as a kid. The characters are all the sort of grotesques that are scary but appeal to one on a primal level, like something from Grimm’s fairy tales, and the situations are similarly unpleasant. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer’s lot is a miserable one to be sure. He has a condition that makes him different-- his father is ashamed of him and forces him to hide his difference from others; his peers are cruel, even more so when they discover his glowing protuberance. Eventually things get so bad he exiles himself with a similarly ostracized would-be Dentist of an elf in tow. They even make a defiant song about their lives as misfits.

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It’s no wonder why kids love this. Pathos is the engine that feeds kids imagination: ask Harry Potter, or James (of “and the Giant Peach”) or Charlie (of “and the Chocolate Factory”). Nothing gets a kid more on-side than a hero who has a miserable lot in life. Add in the injustice of being someone who is different and you have a concoction that is almost impossible to resist.

As with any of these stories, the next step in the journey is to struggle amid a community of acceptance, whether that be Hogwarts, a giant peach or the land of Oz. Here, it’s an Island of Misfit Toys, which may be the purest metaphor for a child’s life ever invented. It captures the aspirations and heartbreak every child faces as they grow up.

Eventually, Rudolph and his friends accept their difference and use it to save their friends and return to their own community where they help the people who once rejected them. The harshness of the early part of the story makes the victory even sweeter, even if--after all these years--I still want to see Coach Comet and Rudolph’s Dad, Donner, permanently benched from the line-up of Santa Claus’s reindeer.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is ultimately an archetypal story. I think it’s been this popular for 47 years because it touches something deep within us. Not bad for a special narrated by Burl Ives as a snowman.

WonderCafe Advent Calendar - December 1, 2008

Posted on: 12/01/2008 12:07

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