Hired at ABC, he was a graphic designer and art director on dramatic series such as “Tales of Tomorrow” and “Schlitz Playhouse.” He returned to civilian life as the television industry was forming. At 18 he joined the Navy, surviving two sinkings by enemy forces during World War II. He moved to New York at age 12.ĭuring high school he worked at Radio City Music Hall as a page and backstage hand. grew up on his grandparents’ farm outside Baltimore, where he was born on July 19, 1924.
His parents, Mignon Klemm and Arthur Rankin Sr., were vaudevillians, and Ethel Barrymore was a distant relation. Rankin grew up in a family attuned to pleasing audiences. “It’s the story, the characters, the music. “Rudolph” took more than a year to make because of the painstakingly slow pace of stop-motion production, “but the show is not just the technique,” Rankin told the Washington Post in 2004. Among the villains is the Abominable Snowman, who ultimately changes his menacing ways. In “Rudolph,” the underdogs were the title character with the flashing red nose and an elf named Hermey, who wants to be a dentist. “In all our pictures we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy,” Rankin said in a 2005 interview for the Archive of American Television, “and the underdog fulfills his quest.” Other well-known Rankin-Bass stop-motion works include “The Little Drummer Boy” (1968), “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (1971) and “The Year Without a Santa Claus” (1974).įollowing the pattern established in “Rudolph,” which features Burl Ives’ singing and narration, Rankin and Bass broadened the appeal of the programs by using famous voices, including those of Greer Garson, Danny Kaye and Jimmy Durante.Ī time-tested theme was also a Rankin-Bass hallmark. Burgermeister, after a character in Rankin-Bass’ “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” (1970). In homage to his childhood inspirations, Burton even named a character in his 1984 film “Frankenweenie” Mr.
Burton, who told The Times last year that he had “a fond burning feeling” for the Rankin-Bass holiday specials he watched as a child, created movies such as “Nightmare Before Christmas” using the same style of jointed figurines.
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