Danny Kaye was an American actor, comedian, singer, and dancer. His performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire novelty songs.
Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his literary fairy tales.
Hans Christian Andersen is a 1952 Hollywood musical film directed by Charles Vidor and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. The screenplay by Moss Hart and an uncredited Ben Hecht is based on a story by Myles Connolly.
"The Emperor's New Clothes" is a literary folktale written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about a vain emperor who gets exposed before his subjects. The tale has been translated into over 100 languages.
Imogene Coca was an American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Starting out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, she studied ballet and pursued a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret, and summer stock. In her 40s, she began a celebrated career as a comedian on television, starring in six series and guest-starring on successful television programs from the 1940s to the 1990s.
Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment was an American production company located in New York City. It was known for its seasonal television specials, usually done in stop motion animation. Rankin/Bass's stop-motion productions are recognizable by their visual style of doll-like characters with spheroid body parts and ubiquitous powdery snow using an animation technique called Animagic.
Ira J. Stadlen, known professionally as Allen Swift, was an American actor, writer and magician, best known as a voiceover artist who voiced cartoon characters Simon Bar Sinister and Riff-Raff on the Underdog cartoon show. He took his professional name from radio comedian Fred Allen and 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift.
Cyril Joseph Trimnell-Ritchard, known professionally as Cyril Ritchard, was an Australian stage, screen and television actor, and director. He is best remembered today for his performance as Captain Hook in the Mary Martin musical production of Peter Pan. In 1945, he played Gabriele Eisenstein in Gay Rosalinda at the Palace theatre in London, a version of Strauss's Die Fledermaus by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in which he appeared with Peter Graves. The show was conducted by Richard Tauber and ran for almost a year.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a 1964 stop motion Christmas animated television special produced by Videocraft International, Ltd. It first aired December 6, 1964, on the NBC television network in the United States and was sponsored by General Electric under the umbrella title of The General Electric Fantasy Hour. The special was based on the 1949 Johnny Marks song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" which was itself based on the poem of the same name written in 1939 by Marks's brother-in-law, Robert L. May. NBC began airing the special annually in 2024, having previously done so until 1971. From 1972 to 2023, the special aired on CBS, which unveiled a high-definition, digitally remastered version of the program in 2005, re-scanned frame-by-frame from the original 35 mm film elements.
Here Comes Peter Cottontail is a 1971 Japanese-American Easter stop-motion animated television special produced by Rankin/Bass Productions, currently distributed by Universal Television and based on the 1957 novel, The Easter Bunny That Overslept, by Priscilla and Otto Friedrich. The special is narrated by Danny Kaye, and stars Casey Kasem, Vincent Price, Joan Gardner and Paul Frees. The special also features Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins's Easter song, "Here Comes Peter Cottontail".
Robert McFadden was an American singer, impressionist, and voice-over actor perhaps best known for his many contributions to animated cartoons.
Arthur Gardner Rankin Jr. was an American director, producer and screenwriter, who mostly worked in animation. Co-creator of Rankin/Bass Productions with his friend Jules Bass, he created stop-motion and traditional animation features such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, and the 1977 cartoon special of The Hobbit. He is credited on over 1,000 television programs.
"The Emperor's New Clothes" is a Danish fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen, first published in 1837.
The Daydreamer is a 1966 stop motion animated–live action musical fantasy film produced by Videocraft International. Directed by Jules Bass, it was written by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Romeo Muller, based on the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. It features seven original songs by Jules Bass and Maury Laws. The film's opening features the cast in puppet and live form plus caricatures of the cast by Al Hirschfeld. Among the cast were the American actors Paul O'Keefe, Jack Gilford, Ray Bolger and Margaret Hamilton, and the Australian actor Cyril Ritchard as the voice of the Sandman. Three of the voice actors: Burl Ives, and Canadian actors Billie Mae Richards and Larry D. Mann, were the voice suppliers for Videocraft's stop motion Christmas television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). Some of the character voices were recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto, Ontario, under Bernard Cowan's supervision. The "Animagic" puppet sequences were staged by Don Duga at Videocraft in New York, and supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Production in Tokyo, Japan.
Frosty the Snowman is a 1969 American animated Christmas television special produced by Rankin/Bass Productions. It is the first television special featuring the character Frosty the Snowman. The special first aired on December 7, 1969, on the CBS television network in the United States, airing immediately after the fifth showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas; both scored high ratings. The special aired annually for the network's Christmas and holiday season until 2023. In 2024, NBC acquired the broadcast rights to the special..
The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow is a 1975 Christmas stop motion animated television special produced by Rankin/Bass Productions which originally premiered on NBC on December 19, 1975. It is narrated by Angela Lansbury and co-stars Cyril Ritchard.
Maury Laws was an American television and film composer from Burlington, North Carolina.
Pinocchio's Christmas is a 1980 Christmas stop motion television special produced by Rankin/Bass Productions that is a holiday adaptation of the 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The special premiered on ABC on December 3, 1980. It aired annually during the Christmas season on Freeform and as of 2018 airs on AMC.
The Easter Bunny Is Comin' to Town is a 1977 American-Japanese musical Easter television special produced by Rankin/Bass Productions, using their "Animagic" stop motion animation. The special reunites the writer Romeo Muller, designer Paul Coker Jr., and narrator Fred Astaire from Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, and stars the voices of Skip Hinnant, Bob McFadden, Meg Sargent, James Spies and Allen Swift. It premiered on ABC in the United States on April 6, 1977.
The Smokey Bear Show is an American-Japanese animated television series that aired on ABC's Saturday morning schedule, produced by Rankin/Bass Productions. The show features Smokey Bear, the icon of the United States Forest Service, who was well known for his 1947 slogan, "Remember... only YOU can prevent forest fires". It aired for one season of 17 episodes starting on September 6, 1969, then aired in reruns on Sunday mornings for the 1970–71 season, due to the show's inability to compete with CBS' The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour and NBC's The Heckle and Jeckle Show. Copies of all 17 episodes were deposited at the Library of Congress, but only 4 episodes from other sources have been made publicly available as of 2023.
