Pen-Elayne on the Web

“So That’s Where He Got the Crown of Thorns!”

Now that Hallowe’en is past (and sadly, not a single trick-or-treater came to our door, another reason to step up our search for a house in a nice normal suburban neighborhood) and the leaves around us are finally turning and falling, I’m slipping once again into seasonal nostalgia mode. When I was a kid, we didn’t do Christmas of course, but even then it was becoming a de facto secular holiday thanks in large part to special holiday programming on TV. In those days before VCRs and the Cartoon Network you pretty much had to wait all year to see this kind of cool stuff, and it was even more interesting to me because it celebrated the most important day in a culture that was both alien to me and right next door.

[I could probably write at least one essay on growing up Jewish in a pretty fundamentally Catholic neighborhood, and maybe I will someday, but I’ll just digress into one anecdote. When the movie 1776 premiered at Radio City Music Hall, I was in 9th grade in an all-girl religious high school, and we went to see it as a class trip. But we weren’t allowed take our seats before the movie started because – as astute readers may have already guessed – the preceding stage show featured a Nativity scene. Naturally, this made us all the more curious, as we took turns pressing our noses to the small windows in the theatre doors and being shooed away by the rabbis who God forbid couldn’t be bothered to explain that there were other religions in the world. But then, I was the smart kid who was put in the dumb class because her parents weren’t Orthodox and her best friend was a shiksa, who eventually escaped to a secular high school despite everyone telling me I’d never last, I’d be back, and one rabbi even making a nasty response to my rote answer of a rote essay question that I recall read something like “How do we encourage our children to partake in Jewish culture?” Right next to the part of my response where I wrote “build more schools” he’d written in angry red pen, “AND MAKE SURE STUDENTS GO TO THEM, RIGHT MISS WECHSLER?” It was the first time I ever confronted a teacher over a major philosophical difference, and it felt great because I knew I was right and he was totally out of line sticking his little sarky opinion into his grading; it also sealed my decision to leave both the school and the organized religion and never look back. And aside from the occasional Yom Kippur fast or other personal cultural marker, I never have. Oh dear, that’s two anecdotes, isn’t it?]

My first viewing of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer – and this had to be ’64 or so when it was initially broadcast, sponsored by the Norelco company which featured Santa (and at least a couple elves, the hefty one and the one with the glasses as I recall, although nobody else on a brief web search seems to share that memory) sledding down snow-covered hills on their razors – is not only fondly remembered to this day (yes, a sob still occasionally escapes at hearing “There’s Always Tomorrow” and “Island of Misfit Toys”) but opened my eyes a bit to, erm, as it says on their website, “the enchanted world” of Rankin/Bass. What’s always fascinated me most this world is the writer of apparently most of it, Romeo Muller.

Fool that I am, I’ve always considered myths and folktales to be basically immutable things. Certainly, plot points and themes undergo variations and metamorphoses as they’re handed down through the generations and are translated and reinterpreted, but that’s to be expected, it’s in the nature of storytelling. However, modern media being such a cannibalistic beast, well, I don’t have to tell you about all the discussion that ensues on websites and message boards every time Disney “updates” a “timeless fairy tale.” Many folks go with the flow, others consider the studio’s inevitable softening to be close to blasphemy. For whatever reason, Disney never really bothered me in this respect but Rankin/Bass did. I think it’s partly because a number of their TV specials contradict each other, and kids naturally expect every story that has the “house look” of a particular company will take place in the same world and therefore have the same internal rules. But it’s also because of the smarmy, condescending way in which R/B specials twisted and presented the “facts.” The best example of this involved the conceit that made me grit my teeth, the old story-within-a-story device, where the storyteller (I think he may have been an “Animagic” version of Fred Astaire, voiced by him, as happened with a few of the other R/B specials, most notably the Easter ones) takes turns spinning the myth and fielding comments from the treacly kids surrounding him, who nod their heads at his gospel and make matter-of-fact remarks like “So that’s why he comes down the chimneys!” and “So that’s why he gives out toys!” One of my favorite jokes goes, if R/B ever tackled the life story of Jesus (they did the Nativity with Nestor the Christmas Donkey, I kid you not), doubtless there would be kids gathered ‘round an Animagical Fred pronouncing revelations like “So that’s where He got the Crown of Thorns!”

Yeah, I got issues with R/B. As I recall (and bear in mind, I don’t have any of these specials on tape any more, my ex-husband inherited them along with all the various versions of A Christmas Carol that we’d taped so I’m working from a somewhat faulty memory) the Santa in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (based on the Baum book) and Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town and Year Without A Santa Claus and even Rudolph had the same look but wildly divergent origin stories. I felt somehow cheated that Rankin/Bass couldn’t keep their stories straight with pretty much the same writing team for everything – and that, moreover, their version (whichever they chose at the moment) of holiday stories was the one that came to be remembered as The Real Version, supplanting all other myths that had been handed down through the generations.

And yet, it’s a love/hate kinda deal, part of me still can’t get enough of the stop-motion and the silly songs and the guest voices by celebs (for whom R/B created look-alikes) long before it was in vogue to do it for The Simpsons or South Park and even the asinine sequels. Rankin/Bass specials are as fondly remembered from my childhood as are the shows of Sid & Marty Krofft (hey, I first learned about Cockney rhyming slang from watching The Bugaloos!) and hand-clapping games. So I expect when Rudolph comes around again this year I’ll be right there again, missing the Norelco Santa and rooting for Clarice. Because, you know, there’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true; tomorrow is not far away…