It is practically impossible to think of Christmas without thinking of Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In many ways, the memories that many of us have of those fictional characters come from two individuals: Arthur Rankin Jr. (1924–2014) and Jules Bass (1935–2022).
Arthur Rankin Jr. grew up in show business. Both his father and stepmother, Arthur Rankin and Marian Mansfield, were actors, as well as his grandfather, Harry Davenport. Rankin began his career in the late 1940s with ABC, first as a graphic designer and then as an art director. In back-to-back years (1950 and 1951), he won art direction awards. The following year, he started his own advertising company, Videocraft International, which is how he came to meet his future business partner, Jules Bass.
Bass, 11 years Rankin’s junior, did not grow up in show business; his father, Max Bass, was a beer salesman, and his mother, Bernice, was a homemaker. At the time Rankin launched his advertising company, Bass was studying marketing at New York University. He dropped out in 1954.
Rankin and Bass met in Manhattan through Rankin’s client, Gardner Advertising. Bass joined Videocraft, and the two shot commercials for clients, often using animation. Eventually, Rankin and Bass surmised that their creative potential was being stifled by solely producing commercials. The two turned their attention to the film industry.
Bass had studied the work of Japanese animators who created tiny figurines out of wood, wire, and wool, and animated them through stop-motion—the craft of shooting thousands of photos of the figurines’ movements and playing them at 24 frames per second. The duo’s first production was in 1960 with the TV series “The New Adventures of Pinocchio,'' followed by another series in 1961 called “Tales of the Wizard of Oz.” It was not until 1964 that Rankin/Bass Productions hit it big with the now Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
Rankin and Bass knew they had hit on a formula and followed it for numerous hit films. The creative formula was to take a famous Christmas song or songs and create a script from them. The two would create numerous memorable characters as well as additional songs to go into the films. A few years after “Rudolph,” Rankin and Bass produced three holiday hits in succession with “The Little Drummer Boy” (1968), “Frosty the Snowman” (1969), and “Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town” (1970). Along with the catchy tunes, entertaining story lines, and the exhaustively detailed artwork, the films’ characters were often voiced by the biggest names in Hollywood, like Jimmy Durante, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Booth, Andy Griffith, and Angela Lansbury.
Altogether, Rankin/Bass Productions produced more than 50 films, TV specials, and TV series, including “The Hobbit,” “The Last Unicorn,” and “ThunderCats.”
Several of the Christmas films are shown annually on the major television networks, like ABC and CBS. When asked about the importance of the Rankin/Bass films on the holidays, George Schweitzer, the former president of marketing for CBS, said: “They’re the fabric of our Christmas hearth, the wood in the Christmas fire. You knew Christmas was coming when Rudolph and Frosty showed up on CBS.”
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