John McCoy

A Rankin-Bass Retrospective 3: The Cricket on the Hearth

Previously: Long, long ago, in the pre-Web age of Usenet (i.e. the early 90s), I began a series of silly newsposts about Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, with the intention of making my way through all of them. I swear that at the time, this was a completely original idea. I only made it through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and The Little Drummer Boy (1968) before I set the project aside—although I did rework the two essays for the previous version of this blog back in 2012. These days, of course, there are a metric tonne of essays and videos on the subject, so what better time to resuscitate this?

The Cricket on the Hearth (1967)

Plot: After a four-second animated glimpse of the titular cricket eyeing the titular hearth, a dazed live-action Danny Thomas observes that “Christmas is…sorta special for all of us.” He explains that he’s never actually heard of this lesser Dickens story, and then chides the viewer for their ignorance of the same. Then he launches into the special’s theme song, one of nine (!) musical numbers, if you don’t count reprises (of which there are three).

We return to the animated world, which Thomas calls “Merrie Olde England,” although it should be noted that Victorian London was for most of its destitute population a squalid cesspools, full of criminals who literally called themselves Ripper. Anyway, we join the now-elderly Cricket Crocket, voiced by Roddy McDowall, volunteers the story of his life. Cricket has a ridiculous cockney accent, and say what you will about Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, he’s an American; what’s Roddy’s excuse? Looking for some no-rent housing, he introduces himself to toy seller Caleb Plummer (played without accent by Mr. Thomas), and as crickets are a source of luck, is invited to stay at the shop/home. Personally, my experience with crickets in th house leans less towards good fortune and more towards sleepless nights of chirping, but to each their own.

Toby has a daughter, Bertha, voiced by Thomas’s real-life daughter, Marlo Thomas, i.e. That Girl. Her fiancé Edward (Ed Ames) has a Royal Navy commission that will take him to sea for several years, and he admonishes Bertha to not get up to any funny stuff in his absence with the song “Don’t Give Your Love Away.” After a couple of years tragedy strikes in the form a green, ghoulish messenger (Paul Frees) who looks a bit like the Hatbox Ghost arrives at the Plummers’ with the news that Edward has been lost at sea. The shock of this news induces blindness in Bertha, because that’s how eyes work, right?

A lot of stuff happens, but very slowly, and with a pair of easily forgettable songs (“Smiles go with Tears,” “Through My Eyes”. Caleb goes into debt trying to cure Bertha’s blindness, sells the shop, ends up working for a toymaker named Tackleton, who, being voiced by the inimitable Hans Conried, is easily the best thing in this mess. Tackleton is a villain because he is old and has a nose wart and because he won’t pay for enough paint to make his dolls smile properly. Oh, also he wants to abuse his employer-employee relationship to pressure Bertha into marrying him. Worst of all he has a foul-tempered crow named Uriah (also Frees) who wants to eat the cricket. But to be fair, Crocket has done absolutely nothing up until this point in the story, and has failed in his luck-giving duties entirely.

Two days before Christmas, Caleb is wandering about London carrying a comically tall pile of presents, toodle-pip and all, when he plows into an unhoused old man and invites him home as way of apology. This old man suspiciously knows Bertha’s name (dun-DUN). Caleb gets another song in here, about how there’s not going to be any presents or tree this year, but that’s okay, because Jesus (“The First Christmas”).

Crocket is determined to thwart Tackleton’s attempts at courting Bertha, so he and other assorted household vermin shake pepper into the toymaker’s tea from their perch in the rafters. In case the viewer is confused as to what’s happening, Crocket speaks the one-word sentence “Pepper.” Not one to take a fit of sneezing lying down, Tackleton instructs Uriah to remove the cricket “once and for all” and to enlist “professional help,” which implies that there is a market of cricket hit-men. As in, hit-men for crickets, not hit-men who are crickets. But maybe those as well.

Uriah visits a seedy dive bar for anthropomorphic animals where a cut-rate Peggy Lee cat sings about “Fish and Chips.” Eventually he does succeed in hiring a an unsavory monkey (Frees again) and bulldog. The trio seizes and bind Crocket in tiny rope, but instead of simply murdering the cricket like they should they attempt to sell him to a sea-captain (Frees once more) for export to China. And then the sea-captain draws a revolver and kills the trio dead. No, really. He straight-up shoots them. Happy Christmas, kids!

Look, this recap is going long, so I’ll spare you the sea journey and escape, and jump ahead to Crocket making his way back to the Plummers, where he discovers that the old man Caleb took in is actually…Edward in disguise! Oh, wait, you guessed that already. Having survived the shipwreck in which he was thought to have perished, Edward has been hanging around town mooning at Bertha. Edward explains that he wears the disguise because he feels guilty for Bertha being blind and all, but it seems far more likely that this is all some weird avoidant fetish. Crocket convinces Edward to just tell Bertha he’s alive already, and so he does, and they go ahead and get married using the wedding dress that Bertha was going to use to marry the old toy maker, and that’s just tacky. Tackleton is understandably upset, but Bertha calls him handsome, so apparently she has her sight back, or is just lying, but now everyone is super happy and it’s Christmas so nothing will ever go wrong again.

Notes: Hoo boy, this is a weird one. Remember how I said that Little Drummer Boy was the second Rankin-Bass Christmas Special? Well, I lied. Or rather, I completely overlooked this 1967 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “other” Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home. Actually, Dickens wrote five Christmas books, but no one remembers the other three. And to be honest, few viewers remember this overlong, tedious, weirdly dark adaptation. I certainly don’t remember it being in the rotation of reruns every December in the 1970s when I was a kid. In fact, I only became aware of it when there was a wave of commercialize Gen-X nostalgia in the 2000s and all the Rankin-Bass specials made their way to home video.

This was Rankin-Bass’s first 2D animated Christmas special and the start of a long collaboration with Paul Coker, Jr., who was the production designer for this and all following Christmas cel animations, and for most of the following stop motion projects as well. Coker’s janky, expressive drawings were a mainstay of the Mad Magazines of my youth, where he was a contributor starting in 1961. However, the animation in this special—by the Television Corporation of Japan—sand-blasts out all of Coker’s stylistic quirks, with the end result being strange, dull, and bulbous character designs.

As for the content of the special: this adaptation removes the main characters and action of Dickens’ novella to focus on a peripheral love story, plus it adds a lot of goofy talking animals. In Dickens’ original, Bertha and her father start in poverty, and she herself is blind to begin with. Today Dickens is often seen as a sentimentalist who relies heavily upon unlikely plot twists, but in his day he was a social reformer. He wrote of the plight of the destitute and the unfairness of their working conditions. For Victorians, blindness was thought to be congenital, and the disabled were not supposed to wed, so having Bertha find love was a political statement. All of which is to say, this special captures none of the spirit, or tone, or, you know, actual plot of the story.

The live-action framing featuring Danny Thomas is an oddity for Rankin-Bass, and makes a big deal out of the celebrity voices—a long and unnecessary coda has Thomas list all the actors over stills of their headshots. All of the Christmas specials featured players who were famous in their day but mostly forgotten now; in this way they were, in a manner, the progenitor to the modern DreamWorks approach to stunt-casting. Thomas and Ames sleepwalk through their dialog. Marlo Thomas is slightly better, bringing her charming squeak to a nothing of a character. And anything with Paul Frees and Hans Conried in it can’t be all bad.

It can get close, though.

Know Your Typefaces: ITC Benguiat

Netflix’s Stranger Things firmly displays its retro intentions by using International Typeface Corporation’s Benguiat, a face by Ed Benguiat that was released in 1978. Although obviously inspired by Art Nouveau typography, Benguiat was very much a product of its time and of ITC, with its typically large x-height (the height of a lowercase “x” when compared to a capital) and the bold contrast between thick and thin strokes.

ITC Benguiat Bold (1978)

It’s informative to look at Benguiat in comparison with a well-known Art Nouveau typeface, Desdemona (1886), from which it cribs a few features, including the upward slanting bowls of the P and the R; the high beams of the E, F, and H; and how the slanted beam of the N connects two-thirds of the way down the right stem. But true Nouveau fonts would never have the extreme stroke variation of Benguiat, as they drew their inspiration from vegetal forms.

Desdemona Black (1886)

The bold readability of Benguiat and its wiff of nostalgia made it a particular favorite for paperback designers of the early-to-mid 1980s, where it displaced fussier, swash-serifed and flourish-heavy faces like Tiffany (1974) (also designed by Ed Benguiat). The simple, wedge serifs were well-suited to embossed titles, which were becoming the vogue, especially for genre fiction such as romance, sci-fi, and horror. Bespoke hand-drawn adaptations of the face eventually became the standard setting for Stephen King’s name in Signet paperback editions and it’s these books that the producers of Stranger Things specifically want to evoke.

Signet King paperbacks showing letterform variation

While researching Benguiat I was struck by the variation I found in the treatment of King’s name on paperback covers. Before desktop publishing, there was no simple way to manipulate letterforms and designers had to draft logos by hand, particularly if they wanted the letter block set close or to add a flair to a serif or swash. This meant long hours with a set of French curves, and I can actually remember as a baby designer back in the late 80s designing some titles this way. I doubt I still could.

Typefaces by Ed Benguiat
Benguiat had a long career at ITC and was responsible for many of its signature faces.

Horror Books of the 1980s
This collection by Will Erikson shows how ubiquitous Benguiat was (Thanks to Phil Gonzales for the link).

Another blog entry about the same thing
After I wrote this I was pointed to this essay by Ryan Britt on Inverse.

Benguiat is also the typeface for the Smiths’ Strangeways Here We Come.

Give us those nice bright colors, give us the greens of summer

By now you’ve had a little time to make your peace with the new Instagram icon. In the accelerated, media-savvy world of Internet 2.0 (or whatever release number we’re on), there have been already been critical essays on how bad the redesign is (for an example, see this Adweek piece) and a backlash about how old farts just hate change of any sort (for an example, see the comments section of the Adweek piece). Instagram themselves shared a statement about the change, with the usual design-speak explanation that skeuomorphism is old news, that the icon is a doorway into the app and that the app GUI is tailored to the way users use the lightweight photo-manipulation / sharing system.

For me, the rationale is depressingly predictable. In the mobile scene, the clinical eye of Jonny Ive has cast its gaze over everything, and we’re told that all users want is an interface that gets out of the way and disappears entirely into a mist of flat gradients and semi-transparencies. Never mind that bright colors and heavily-stroked geometric forms are as invisible as traffic signs—which are, after all, brightly-colored, heavily-stroked geometric forms—in about five years they are going to be as dated as 90s’ bevels and drop shadows.

But I get that Instagram wants to move on. When it first launched (only four years ago) it was known primarily for its filters, which gave a patina of vintage charm to the most ephemeral of digital productions, the smart phone photograph. Instagram was adopted by the hipsters, who delighted in making their locally-sourced artisanal breakfast sandwich look as though it had been photographed in 1973 by a Poloraid Land camera, or as though that afternoon’s thrift-shop find had been kicking around since 1932, as evidenced by the sepia tone of this faux silver print. Of course, everyone hates hipsters, especially hipsters, and Instagram was snapped up by Facebook, which means it’s time to move on and embrace a more generic identity.

But what’s lost in the rebranding is the sense of play. Social media platforms operate on one level as convenient publishing systems for nonspecialists to share information, but on another level they are games whose rules become defined by their user base. Tumblr is technically a lightweight blog platform, but its character comes from the community drawn to it, whose users have developed a protocol for the correct way to appropriate media and repost it. Snapchat’s character arises from the community’s interest in intimacy and immediacy. Twitter is where everyone wants to be the most clever. For its brief life, Instagram’s quirks (square photos, obvious filters) have combined with urbane hipster tastes to encourage an aesthete’s view of the world: photos of alleyways, wrought-iron fences, graffiti on brick walls. No doubt Facebook wants users of all stripes to embrace the application, and your aunt and uncle may have no use for another picture of a manhole cover, but they might consider dropping $40 on a photo book of baby pics.

Still, I had a lot of fondness for the Instagram camera icon. In the iPhone’s sea of flat infographics, it was the one hold-out for charm and play. It was sort of oddball, it was sort of ugly. Mostly, it was distinctive, and that loss of distinction is the saddest part. When I was a child, the Holiday Inn “Great Signs” still dotted highways in the midwest. Incongruous and garish, they spoke to the past futurism of the Atomic Age. I remember looking for them on the horizon under the stars during family road trips. They were weird, they were unique. And when at last Holiday Inn decided to replace them, they went for the most bland, most uninteresting alternative. No child would search the night sky for that sign. And no one will pause and smile before tapping the new Instagram icon.