Rankin on Bass

Live from the Island of Misfit Toys we record our last episode of Rankin on Bass where Mike, Chris, and Richard recount the bizarre trip they've been on for the last three years going from animagic to animated to live action fare that ranged from the sublime to the bizarre.

Thank you to everyone who took this trip with us.

We conclude our discussion of Rankin & Bass works properly with a double dose of animagic for the holidays - Pinocchio's Christmas in which the little wooden boy learns the magic of the season and some of R&B's earliest work, the New Adventures of Pinocchio.

Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White are back in Christmas-town and looking at two more holiday specials from Rankin & Bass; The Stingiest Man in Town -- a re-telling of A Christmas Carol starring the voice of Walter Matthau -- and The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow which features Angela Lansbury and a poor blind shepherd.

It's Santa, Baby an animated special from 2001 starring Gregory Hines as a frustrated songwriter and Patti Labelle as the patridge from the pear tree(!).

We also discuss "Comic Strip" - a two hour block of cartoons featuring The Mini-Monsters, Street Frogs, Karate Kat and TigerSharks. This would be the last animated TV series produced by Rankin & Bass.

You can watch Santa, Baby via Amazon: https://amzn.to/3R7I2MW

It's time to consume mass quantities of Coneheads with this 1983 pilot produced by Rankin & Bass for a Coneheads half-hour animated television show. Richard Hatem, Mike White, and Chris Stachiw discuss the strange choices made when trying to bring the Coneheads into America's living room on a weekly basis.

Marlo Thomas returns as "That Girl" in a very "not cannon" episode. Here she's in a Rankin & Bass cartoon where she seems to be having delusions about being inside several familiar fairy tales.

One of the more rare Rankin & Bass specials we've covered, Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid was the sixth episode of the first season of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie. It's a bizarre story of Willie Mays being saddled with an orphaned child and her guardian angel, KC.

One of the episodes of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie, The Red Baron (1972) is a canine interpretation of the story of Baron Manfred von Richthofen who, for whatever reason, was having a real resurgence in the late '60s/early '70s (lest we forget the General Mills Baron von Redberry cereal). We get off-target very easily and very quickly in this one. Forgive us, but this one was a real dog!

The pilot for a proposed series called "The Enchanted World of Danny Kaye," The Emperor's New Clothes tells a version of Hans Christian Anderson's classic fable wherein a emperor gets swindled by a pair of slick scammers who appeal to his vanity, selling him a suit made of "invisible" thread.

Mike, Richard, and Chris discuss this uneven fable and the amazing year Rankin/Bass had in 1972.

Mike, Chris, and Richard discuss both 1966's The Ballad of Smokey the Bear wherein we learn the traumatic origin story of the ursine fire-fighter as well as the 1969 cartoon series, The Smokey Bear Show, which was Saturday morning pablum for a much simpler age.