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.
