[ The world is bleak enough as it is. Of all the disturbing things
in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, nothing competes with Donner’s
rejection of his son. Donner is horrified by the nose.]
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DON’T SUBJECT YOUR KIDS TO RUDOLPH  
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Caitlin Flanagan
December 1, 2020
The Atlantic
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_ The world is bleak enough as it is. Of all the disturbing things in
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, nothing competes with Donner’s
rejection of his son. Donner is horrified by the nose. _

Illustration: Oliver Munday; NBC / Getty // The Atlantic,

 

At the dawn of the 1960s, a couple of New York admen named Arthur
Rankin Jr.
[[link removed]] and
Jules Bass created the Christmas special. Before that, the networks
hadn’t been sure exactly how they should entertain children during
the holiday season. They had largely come down on the side of
edification, as seen in NBC’s 1951 commission of a children’s
opera,_ Amahl and the Night Visitors_, broadcast live on Christmas
Eve, after which the show lived on in reruns, and—also on
NBC—_Babes in Toyland_, a turn-of-the-last-century operetta based on
the Mother Goose tales.

But American children of the 1960s weren’t going to put up with
operas and nursery rhymes. We had grown strong on orange juice,
casseroles, and chewable vitamins. We weren’t afraid of polio or
tuberculosis—we had the Salk vaccine and the tine test. We had had
one small step for mankind, 31 flavors, and 101 dalmatians. The
previous decade had already established the whims of children as a
legitimate market force; in two years, Wham-O had made $45 million on
the Hula-Hoop. Rich guys in office buildings were taking us seriously.
What did we want next?

Apparently what we wanted next was 55 minutes of Christmas-crushing
despair: _Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer_. For more than half a
century, generations of children have taken the show, which debuted in
1964, into their hearts, and for just about as long, I’ve been
trying to avoid it. From my earliest days, the special produced in me
only a fretful anxiety, leading to an eventual refusal to watch it. I
couldn’t really explain the problem. I knew only that the show
didn’t make me feel very Christmassy.

There’s a lot in _Rudolph_ that people don’t seem to remember.
At one point, the Abominable Snowmonster tries to murder Rudolph in
front of his parents by smashing a giant stalactite on his head. As
our gentle hero lies facedown, concussed and unresponsive, his own
girlfriend—the beautiful, long-lashed Clarice—wonders aloud why
the snowman won’t put the little reindeer out of his misery: “Why
doesn’t he get it over with?” This was _Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer_, not_ The Third Man_. Meanwhile, back at Santa’s
workshop—a phrase that should connote only the jolliest of
associations—a dark tale is unfolding. Santa, it turns out, presides
over a nonunion shop where underproducing elves are deprived of breaks
and humiliated; they dream not of Christmas, but of escape. Poorly
constructed toys are thrown onto a bare and frozen island, where they
cry and wander. How long have they been there? A year? A thousand
years? One of the toys, A Dolly for Sue, looks perfectly fine—why
has she been stuck with the misfits? Rankin finally admitted the
nature of Dolly’s flaw in 2005, when he revealed
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she suffered from “psychiatric problems.” The Island of Misfit
Toys, it turns out, is but another atoll in the gulag archipelago.

The source material for the show was the work of a grieving man:
Robert May, a copywriter at Montgomery Ward in Chicago who, in 1939,
had been asked to write a Christmas story
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the department store could give away during the holiday season. While
he was working on it, his young wife died of cancer. The story he
wrote
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relationship to _The Night Before Christmas_ (properly called _A
Visit From St. Nicholas_) falling somewhere between homage and armed
robbery, but who could blame him, under such circumstances?—contains
a powerful evocation of loneliness. Rejected by the other reindeer,
Rudolph weeps, creating a growing puddle of tears; one of the pages of
the storybook is stained with his teardrops. And yet the book was a
hit. May remarried and suggested to his brother-in-law, a Brill
Building songwriter named Johnny Marks
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that he turn it into a song, and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”
became one of the most popular Christmas carols of all time. Marks
lived next door to Rankin, who optioned the song, and—with money
from General Electric, which had commissioned him
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make a one-hour holiday special for its GE Fantasy Hour on NBC—the
work reached its ultimate realization
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Neil J. Young: Baby, Christmas songs have always been controversial
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_Rudolph_ is a beautiful show, a bright box full of toys that have
come to life. The puppets were created in the Japanese animation
studio of Tadahito Mochinaga
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who traveled to a deer sanctuary in Nara to study and sketch a herd of
deer before Ichiro Komuro, an artist in the studio, began to work. The
reindeer puppets had long legs, felt hides, and huge, anime eyes. Snow
is piled in drifts, the sky is a piercing blue, and everything has a
solid, touchable quality. Just as important are the voices that the
Canadian actor Billie Mae Richards created for Rudolph. There was a
voice for his infancy, his boyhood, and his adolescence, all of them
unguarded and gentle—a sweet vulnerability that slayed me. (It also
slayed Richards: After she realized why Rankin and Bass had gone with
a Canadian—to avoid paying residuals
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a work that would become a monster hit—she became so angry that she
rarely gave press interviews about the special.) I couldn’t stand
for anything bad to happen to Rudolph, but very soon it does.

Of all the disturbing things in _Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer_,
nothing competes with Donner’s rejection of his son. Donner is
horrified by the nose, in a “no son of mine” kind of way. One of
the numerous readings of the show is that it is a parable about the
hardship faced by gay kids in mid-century America, many of whom were
rejected by their fathers, their peers, and their teachers.

This theory is reified back at Santa’s little forced-labor camp. We
are supposed to understand that blond, dreamy-eyed Hermey wants to be
a dentist, not a toy maker. (What he really wants to do, in my
opinion, is join the drama club, but that might have been too much for
NBC.) Foreman Elf—who, come the revolution, will not be dealt with
kindly—humiliates him repeatedly. When Hermey tells him,
tentatively, that he doesn’t want to make toys, Foreman Elf repeats
the phrase in the “sissy” voice that has haunted gay boys down
through the ages. “Shame on you!” cry the other elves, further
demoralizing Hermey. _Rudolph_ thinks it teaches children to be
themselves, and maybe it does. But it also teaches them how to taunt a
boy who seems different. In the time-honored tradition of kids in his
situation, Hermey runs away.

Elves in Santa’s workshop are not supposed to be shamed, gay-bashed,
and forced to run away! What kind of bullshit was this? And how could
the Kool-Aid drinkers look at their Christmas toys in the same way,
knowing that they might be covered in the tears of an exploited and
brokenhearted elf?

But back to Donner, the one who makes the show unbearable. We meet
Rudolph a few minutes after his birth; he and his mother lie resting
on a bed of clean hay. Rudolph looks up, and—in the tiniest,
sweetest baby voice, exactly the voice that a newborn fawn would
have—says, “Pa-pa?” “Ma-ma?” Just then the red nose blinks
on and off, and Santa arrives. “Aren’t you the sturdy little
fellow!” Santa says. (“San-ta?”) He has come not to congratulate
the new parents but to size up their fawn for potential usefulness.
The nose flashes. “I’m sure it’ll stop as soon as he grows
up,” Donner says urgently. “Well let’s hope so if he wants to
make the sleigh team someday,” Santa responds. When Rudolph, now a
bit older, doesn’t want to wear the black rubber nose that Donner
makes for him (“I don’t wanna. Daddy, I don’t like it. It’s
not very comfortable”), Donner replies, sharply, that he’ll wear
it and like it: “There are more important things than comfort!
Self-respect!” Rudolph’s father doesn’t love him! He doesn’t
even … want him.

Rudolph, too, runs away from home, ultimately finding companionship in
Hermey and a prospector named Yukon Cornelius, but he realizes that he
is a danger to them because he draws the attention of the Abominable
Snowmonster. One night, while the other two sleep, he slips away. In
the moonlight, he steps onto an ice floe and sails away from us on the
dark blue water, unloved, unwanted, and alone.

Rankin and Bass went on to make many Christmas specials, not all of
them hits. _Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey_ was
no _Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer_. And even I must admit a debt
to _Rudolph_, because that show paved the way for some of the
greatest holiday specials of the ’60s: _A Charlie Brown
Christmas_,_ Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas_, and (a
lesser planet) _Frosty the Snowman_. I loved those shows and looked
forward to them all fall. No one I knew shared my strong feelings
about _Rudolph_, but that was okay; I was used to being the odd kid
out. And, for once in my life, I knew I wasn’t the one with the
problem.

_[CAITLIN FLANAGAN
[[link removed]] is a staff
writer at The Atlantic. She is the author of Girl Land
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Hell With All That
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_This article appears in the December 2020 print edition with the
headline “The Existential Despair of Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer.”_

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