On December 1, Rick Goldschmidt got home just in time to catch the 40th-anniversary broadcast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Facing a two-hour commute from the north-side SBC office where he works to his apartment in southwest-suburban Worth, he’d flown out the door as soon as the clock struck five. For Goldschmidt, missing the special, produced in 1964 by the team of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, would have been unthinkable. But watching it was bittersweet.
Goldschmidt had an artistic bent. He played guitar from a young age and drew superheroes popular on TV shows of the 60s and 70s, mostly Batman and Spider-Man. In 1983, after getting an associate’s degree at a suburban community college, he enrolled at Columbia College as an art major. By 1987, the year he graduated with an illustration degree, he’d developed a serious memorabilia habit. “I collected things from the I Spy and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV shows and the Martin and Lewis movies, ’cause I liked those a lot,” he says. At a movie convention that year he stumbled across a lobby card from a little-known 1966 Rankin/Bass feature called The Daydreamer. “I thought, ‘What is this? A full-length movie with stop-motion Animagic? I’d love to see this!’” he says. “I never realized how large their body of work was–they’d done everything from Rudolph to the Jackson Five cartoons in the 70s.” One late night he happened to catch a broadcast of Willy McBean & His Magic Machine, the first theatrical feature Rankin/Bass produced, and was again surprised. “I knew there had to be a lot more stuff out there,” he says.
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Goldschmidt widened his search for Rankin/Bass material, and at a collectors’ convention not long after he happened upon a comic book spun off from Mad Monster Party, a 1967 theatrical Animagic release featuring the voices of Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller. The artist behind the comic was Mad magazine’s Jack Davis, one of Goldschmidt’s longtime idols. Goldschmidt had specialized in realistic drawing in school, but at that moment, he says, he realized that what he really liked was humorous illustration. “Of course, that’s my bridge to Rankin/Bass right there,” he says.
Coker, another Mad magazine alum, had worked extensively as an art director and illustrator on Rankin/Bass projects including Frosty the Snowman and The Year Without a Santa Claus. Though Goldschmidt also sent samples of his work to Coker, he was mostly interested in learning more about the history of Rankin/Bass. Says Coker, “Rick, of course, is a nut about Rankin/Bass and all the various shows they did, and he apparently is the only one who really knows the entire history. I know Rankin didn’t know half the things that Rick knew–or at least he’d forgotten them, and I certainly had.” After several months of contact with both Davis and Coker, Goldschmidt began to think about writing a definitive history of the production team. “It was surprising to me that they weren’t a household name like Hanna-Barbera or Walt Disney, because they had so many shows,” he says. “I thought they deserved a book.”
Rankin happened to live next door to Marks in New York, and in 1962, when General Electric asked Rankin and Bass to produce a Christmas special, he persuaded Marks and May to authorize the use of the character and song. The resulting special, narrated by Burl Ives, originally aired alongside commercials that featured the elves cavorting around with an iron, an electric skillet, a coffee percolator, and other GE products.
Jerry Beck is a contemporary of Goldschmidt’s and an expert on Looney Tunes cartoons. He’s written several well-received books and works closely with Warner Bros. on their DVD releases of the classics, providing commentary, consultation, and memorabilia from his archives. In short, he has the kind of relationship with Warners that Goldschmidt thinks he should have with Classic Media.
