18. CREEPETITION: Rewatch the first movie you ever saw that really made your skin crawl. Don’t be scared, we got you.
After Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town and Frosty the Snowman proved that Rankin and Bass were essentially running a stop-motion sweatshop powered by eggnog, pipe tobacco and other things smoked in a pipe, a sequel to the 1964 crown jewel Rudolph was inevitable.
When it came out, I was four years old and beyond amped up for it. You have no idea how much I loved the red-nosed dude and how much I wanted to be Hermey the elf. Like, I was obsessed, doing elf cosplay, fat four-year-old long-haired me. My poor parents.
Anyways, I’m sure I drove them crazy to watch this.
Rudolph (Billie Mae Richards) gets dispatched by Santa to go meet Father Time (Red Skelton). The mission? Track down Happy, the Baby New Year, before midnight on December 31st. If Happy isn’t back in his clock tower by 12:00 AM, the calendar snaps in half and humanity is trapped in an eternal, inescapable loop of December 31st forever.
Yes, this movie gets all weird with time, and here I am, four years old and rounding off infinity in my bed every night, afraid of being in Heaven forever.
Every single year, a fresh infant ages into an old man in 365 days—a terrifying, rapid-decay lifecycle that feels less like holiday magic and more like a David Cronenberg body-horror concept. And as for this year’s baby, Happy, he ran away because he’s deeply self-conscious about his giant, floppy ears.
Now, Happy is being stalked across the temporal void by Eon the Terrible, a giant, terrifying vulture who wants to kidnap the child. Why? Because Eon is fated to turn into literal ice and snow the moment his assigned eon ends on January 1st. He’s essentially trying to murder time itself to cheat the Grim Reaper. This bird is also terrifying.
To find the baby, Rudolph hops aboard a magical time-traveling boat to navigate the Archipelago of Last Years. Cue a random shark leaping over Rudolph’s dinghy like he’s Fonzie, only for our favorite glowing-nosed deer to be rescued by Big Ben—a massive, benevolent whale with a literal clock embedded in his tail. Along the way, Rudolph builds the ultimate weirdo fantasy party: O.M. (One Million B.C.), a caveman who looks like he got lost on the way to a Planet of the Apes set; Sir 1023, a knight voiced by Frank Gorshin; and 1776, a bird-adjacent Benjamin Franklin clone.
At this point, I asked my parents. “Why does Rudolph look so different?”
After the original 1964 production wrapped, Rankin/Bass famously gifted the original Animagic puppets to random executives like stocking stuffers. A handful survived in an attic and ended up on Antiques Roadshow decades later—missing eyelids, fur and Rudolph’s nose. Because the original molds were scattered to the four winds, you get zero appearances from Hermey the Dentist or Yukon Cornelius in any of these sequels.
If you’re eternally devastated by their absence, I want you to imagine me, chubby and cherubic, on December 10, 1976, sitting inches from the TV, hoping for more of the Hermie Wants to Be a Dentist energy and getting nothing.
Rather than sculpt an exact replica, the studio de-aged Rudolph, painted white patches on his cheeks, and gave him a slightly softer face model. Then it gets confusing, as Santa is Paul Frees, but he’s wearing the character model from The Year Without Santa Claus. It gets even crazier when you realize Mickey Rooney plays Santa in Christmas in July, but Peter Cottontail shows up in The First Easter Bunny using the Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town model (also voiced by Frees). Can Santa do a Doctor Who-style regeneration? Why does Rankin-Bass have more than one Santa?
Here’s the massive temporal plot hole nobody talks about: Rudolph uses a time-machine boat to travel through the centuries, yet he literally visits the island of 1965 and never once tries to pull a Back to the Future to alter his own timeline! Did Rudolph have to live his trauma to get to where we are? Because I lived that life and I’m sorry, reindeer.
When Rudolph hits the Island of 1023 AD, the animators parade out a gallery of classic fairy-tale characters that look suspiciously like recycled models from Rankin/Bass’s Festival of Family Classics. Near the climax, Rudolph gets a quick recap of his origins, but it’s animated in a sleek, Japanese-influenced style courtesy of Mushi Production. Rudolph anime! It’s here!
Rudolph’s Shiny New Year was just the start of me questioning the nature of reality, the slow and fast phantom that is time, why the end of every year feels like another death, the idea of baby new year someday becoming a dead man, an evil bird, and so much more. I cried, I’m sure I did, and asked my parents why this was all so strange and why no one looked the same and why my puppet friends didn’t show up.
This movie taught me fear and that life, even when you looked forward to it, was always ready to not only surprise you, but sadden and disappoint you. This is why, as a six-year-old, I once told my mother that I had a migraine and would be lying down for the rest of the day. Again, my poor parents.
You can download this from the Internet Archive.
