Frosty the Snowman (Rankin/Bass Productions, Videocraft International, 1969)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, December 11) my husband Charles and I were watching a Jeopardy! episode on NBC when a promo came on for a holiday-themed (more or less) special called A Motown Christmas, which I decided then and there I wanted to watch. Alas, it wasn’t scheduled to run until 9 p.m., an hour later, so I decided to keep the TV on NBC for the nonce and see what else they were showing in the interim. As it turned out, it was two half-hour children’s TV specials, Frosty the Snowman from 1969 and Shrek the Halls from 2007, and Frosty the Snowman turned out to be quite clever and charming. A product of the animation studios of Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass, the 1969 Frosty the Snowman was narrated by Jimmy Durante (over a decade before his death in January 1980) and featured a charming if predictable plot line involving a little girl named Karen (voice-dubbed by June Foray, best known as the voice of Rocky, the Flying Squirrel, in the original version and by Suzanne Davidson in a later print from 2017, though I think the one we saw had Foray in it) and an inept magician named Professor Hinkle (Billy De Wolfe) who comes to Karen’s classroom and attempts various tricks, all of which fail. But his pet rabbit, Hocus Pocus, escapes from Hinkle’s top hat, which Hinkle throws away in disgust. The hat lands on top of Frosty the Snowman and, as in the song by Walter “Jack” Rollins and Steve Nelson that inspired the little film (and was composed in 1950 and first recorded by Gene Autry after the success of his 1949 first recording of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”), it brings him to life. Alas, Frosty is all too aware of his own mortality and in particular what heat will do to him; he determines to make it to the North Pole because there he will be safe from melting. Alas, without the $3,000.04 needed for the train fare, his only choice is to stow away in a refrigerated boxcar filled with ice cream and frozen Christmas cakes, with Karen and Hocus Pocus accompanying him even though the frozen environment is just fine for Frosty but Karen predictably catches cold and needs to warm up. Also, Hinkle stows away on board the train and seeks out various crooked ways to steal back the hat he threw away, and at one point he locks both Karen and Frosty inside a heated room on the train. Karen is saved but Frosty duly melts, though in this version of the story there’s a sort-of happy ending in which we’re told that Frosty was made from the first day of snow on Christmas Eve, he’ll be reincarnated every year … and he duly is. Frosty the Snowman is a pretty good show within the limits of TV animation at the time – particularly the blocky “limited animation” drawings of the characters – and both writer Romeo Muller and directors Rankin and Bass bring real charm to the character (Frosty is voiced by Jackie Vernon).