We look at the idle rich via Kenneth Grahame's children's classic, The Wind in the WIllows and the 1987 Rankin/Bass animated adaptation. This is a proper bookend for Rankin/Bass's animated features as one of their earliest animates series, The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show also brought Grahame's characters to life (albeit in 1970).

Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White discuss both incarnations of Mr. Toad on this final season of Rankin on Bass.

Pepsico presents The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians, an animated special that played before the Academy Awards ceremony in 1970. The cast includes contemporary (Flip Wilson) and older (George Burns, Henny Youngman, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, etc.) comedians as well as the voice talent of Paul Frees in an uneven TV event.

Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White discuss the state of stand-up comedy in the early '70s as well as what a series of Mad Mad Mad Comedians might have looked like.

One of the final Rankin/Bass animated features fuses the grandeur and romance of Rodgers and Hammerstein with some sub-par kiddie far including funny monkeys, elephants, and a horribly racist caricature of an Asian man voiced by Darrell Hammond. Possibly released to cash in on the Anna & The King film from the same year, The King and I suffers from an inconsistent tone.

Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White discuss the film and begin planning their exit strategy from the world of Rankin and Bass.

Though we don't remember going there the first time, Richard, Chris, and Mike return to Oz to discuss some of Rankin & Bass's earliest work, the 1961 series Tales of the Wizard of Oz and the 1964 follow-up, Return to Oz. Based on two of the later L. Frank Baum books, it's the story of Dorothy going back to Oz and finding that her old friends aren't what they used to be. Of course, we also discuss the 1985 Walter Murch freaky feature film as well.

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring except for a mouse who has seen The Year Without a Santa Claus too many times.

Richard, Mike, and Chris discuss 1974's Twas the Night Before Christmas and 1967's Cricket on the Hearth, a Rankin/Bass special inspired by Charles Dickens.

We're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel here, folks, with Rankin & Bass's first feature film, the animated interpretation of Charles Perrault’s many nursery rhymes wherein the titular Mother Goose skips town, leaving Old King Cole in charge. The hapless dupe is usurped by the Crooked Man who kidnaps all of the adults in Cole's kingdom, leaving little Jack and Mary to try and save the day.

Listen to Richard Hatem, Chris Stachiw, and Mike White lose their minds.

Are you ready for the heart-stopping action of the totally true tale of Italian tradesman Marco Polo? Are you ready for Desi Arnaz Jr. riding on a kite? Or how about Zero Mostel as Kublai Khan? If you're not ready for all of that then you definitely can't handle the Rankin & Bass-produced epic MARCO from 1973.

Something of a retread of The Last Dinosaur, the usual gang is back -- "Tom" Kotani directing, William Overgard writing, Benni Korzen producing, Maury Laws providing music, and all under the auspices of Rankin & Bass. It's also something of a King Kong story where the titular ape is taken from his home in Africa to Bermuda where he's feared by the local authorities who hire a big game hunter (Jack Palance) to stop the ape from killing innocent victims.

We're discussing "Tom" Kotani's The Bushido Blade. Written by William Overgard, it's the fictionalized account of Admiral Perry (Richard Boone) and his crew making a treaty with Japan. The film fractures into essentially three storylines featuring Frank Converse, Timothy Patrick Murphy, and Mike Starr in his first film role.

Interviews include a snippet of an earlier interview with Starr as well as a new interview with producer Benni Korzen who worked on the live action Rankin & Bass pictures going all the way back to The Enchanted World of Danny Kaye.

Richard Boone IS The Last Dinosaur in Rankin & Bass's take on Edgar Rice Burroughs's
The Land That Time Forgot in which an eclectic group of explorers find a pocket of primeval creatures. Co-directed by Alexander Grasshoff and Shusei Kotani, this is yet another of the Rankin/Bass Kaiju films.