How 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' Changed Holiday TV
When Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer flew onto screens 50 years ago, the stop-motion-animated musical did more than charm: It changed how we watch TV at Christmastime.
"Rudolph was indeed the granddaddy of the holiday TV special," says Walter J. Podrazik, coauthor of Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television.
Before Rudolph, holiday TV meant a Yuletide-themed episode of a scripted show, like I Love Lucy. Or, it meant the occasional special event, like Amahl and the Night Visitors, a made-for-TV Nativity opera that NBC staged a handful of times in the 1950s and 1960s. Or, for a time, it meant Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol, a retelling of the Charles Dickens tale through its title character's myopic point of view that premiered on NBC in 1962 as TV's first major animated holiday special, but fell off the network map only a handful of years later.
Most commonly, holiday TV meant variety specials from variety stars, like the bundled-up Andy Williams toasting marshmallows on a soundstage or Bing Crosby popping up to croon "White Christmas."
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