The Rudolph special; Canadian content and the lighter side of a Christmas classic.

Christmas hits the nostalgic heart and antiquarian mind hard.  I just took a brief break from other tasks and turned on the television.  CBC-TV was showing the classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special.  Along with that other tear-inducing classic A Charlie Brown Christmas, it is one of the earliest Christmas specials I remember seeing on television when I was three or four years old.  By that time, it had already been airing each Christmas since 1964 and was likely being considered old then!  This year’s showing, whether it be on CBC-TV in Canada, or on NBC, its original network in the US, marked its 51^st anniversary.  Grandchildren of the original viewers are now watching Rudolph.

Although it is an American production with narration by singer Burl Ives, all of the stop-motion animation work was completely done in Japan.  The Japanese names on the closing credits indicate this.  The rest of the work—the sound recording was actually done in Toronto!  The CBC can justifiably claim this annual special as Canadian content.  And furthermore, at least three of the individuals involved with the sound recording were Canadians and regular personalities on CBC Television and Radio during the 1960’s.  These include voices by Paul Soles (Take 30, The Amazing Spiderman, This Is The Law) and Alfie Scopp, and the recording producer was Bernard Cowan, a familiar announcer on many television and radio programs of the era, including Wayne and Shuster. 

In the wistful 20 minutes I spent watching the final scenes of the program, I also considered deeper meanings and a possible lighter side to this televised Christmas tradition.  The Rudolph story is set in and around Santa Claus’ home, the elves workshop, and various caves where is reindeer live at the North Pole, dubbed Christmastown.  Of course this makes complete sense from a Canadian perspective.  Our country does after all have sovereignty over the high arctic and the North Pole!  Canadian children send letters to Santa Claus at the North Pole, Canada, postal code H0H 0H0 after all.

Christmastown and the vicinity seems remarkably well developed for such an inhospitable location.  Prior to 1964, there had been an aggressive northern development policy by the government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to exploit resources and develop infrastructure in Canada’s far north.  Could the obviously good standard of living enjoyed by Santa and his Christmastown neighbours be the result of extensive federal funding?  Was Rudolph’s nose given federal funding as part of a Department of Transport initiative to ensure air traffic safety in the often harsh northern climate?  Hermy the elf aspires to become a dentist.  Did he receive funding from the Department of National Health and Welfare (as it was then known) to set up a dental practice in a remote community?  And of course in the unfortunate fashion of 1960’s Canada, no attention is given to the presence of indigenous peoples in Canada’s arctic, except for a brief shot of two small Inuit characters being blown out of their igloo when a blizzard strikes.  They are never seen again.  No Inuit are employed as elves either.  Such racism and discrimination!  I demand a public inquiry!

There’s dark a Cold War dimension to the Rudolph too.  How could a reindeer be born with a nose that is really a bright, electric red light bulb?  The answer is birth defects as the result of nuclear weapons testing by the Soviet Union in Siberia.  If things had gone really wrong, we could instead be hearing a song every Christmas about a two-headed or three-eyed reindeer.  And there’s that abominable snow monster who makes routine appearances throughout the production.  He probably started out as an ordinary polar bear but severely mutated after exposure to fallout from nuclear testing.  And, could there possibly be an element of geographic assertion in the story?  Showing English speaking people and animals living at the North Pole is an obvious demonstration that the location is under North American domain and under Canadian sovereignty.  Was anyone in 1964 concerned about Santa Claus falling under Soviet domination?  His suit is red after all!  And imagine the shoddy quality and inefficiency of the elves workshop if it had become a state-owned Soviet enterprise!  Reindeer who live on a collective farm would doubtlessly be malnourished and unhealthy and thus unfit to lift that sleigh off of the ground for one night a year.  Of course if the North Pole had fallen into Soviet hands, the sleigh would have been made by Lada and operated as a division of Aeroflot and been highly unreliable mechanically anyway!