The complicated man who made 'Rudolph' | Hacker News Reader

The complicated man who made 'Rudolph'

animationobsessive.substack.com

78 pointszdw10 comments

Just to clarify: this is about the maker of the stop motion film about Rudolph. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was originally created in 1939 as a book for the Chicago-based Montgomery Ward department store:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer

All jokes aside, I have to wonder if Tadahito Mochinaga pondered at all the story and characters through the lens of his own political beliefs.

First, there's the obvious "Red" part of the film's title character, which one might see as amusing or ironic given the term was used in the west for communists.

Or in any way did he look at the story line of Santa's whole socioeconomic model centering around both pseudo (slave?) labor of the elves, combined with the socialist "toys for all" message of Santa. Should the workers rise up, or accept that their labor allows for socialism (of toys to children) to flourish?

Do not want to know. Just like do not want to know Santa Claus exist…

Merry X’mas And a Happy New Year.

Amazing story. So inspiring.

Does this mean it qualifies as anime?

Bah! Gene Autry made Rudolph [1]. He was a singing cowboy who also made science fiction crossover serials [2], so I suppose that's complicated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Empire

It's an animation blog. With context it's obvious the blog is going to discuss the "Rudolph" animation, not the song, since the latter has no place on such a blog.

Who knows how far back the chain of inspiration and influence goes, but Robert Lewis May’s book predates Gene Autry [1]. The wiki link you shared actually mentions the inspiration for Gene was a children’s book.

[1] https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2011/12/rudolph-red-nosed-re...

>The wiki link you shared actually mentions the inspiration for Gene was a children's book.

And even mentions May, specifically:

>In 1939, Marks' brother-in-law, Robert L. May, created the character Rudolph as an assignment for Montgomery Ward, and Marks decided to adapt the story of Rudolph into a song.

Johnny Marks (who worked on the stop-motion show) was credited with writing the Autry song (and his brother-in-law created the character itself).

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