THE 2000s saw many action figure crazes flare up and flame out over time, but perhaps none more profound (and overdue!) as the race to create articulated action figures based on the Christmas specials produced by the team of Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass. Once Playing Mantis, a small Midwest toymaker, hit a home run with the Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer line, it was game on. Companies looking (and some not looking) to make inroads into the holiday merchandise scene would have their chance to snap up licenses related to some of the most beloved animated specials of the season.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Rudolph kick-started the movement toward articulated action figures based on the Rankin/Bass catalog, so let’s start there.
LONG before A Christmas Story became the holiday tradition that earned a 24-hour rotation on the Superstation over Christmas Eve. Well before the debate over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie and earned contrarian viewings in the days before Santa’s arrival. Even (just) ahead of that lunkhead Charlie Brown, tasked with getting a tree for the school’s Christmas play, returns from the lot with a sad sprig of a sapling. Before all of that, there was Rudolph — everyone’s favorite rosy-nosed reindeer.
Rudolph sprang from the mind of Robert May. He made his debut in a 1939 booklet distributed by the Montgomery Ward department store chain entitled Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which laid out the crux of the origin story we are all familiar with. The song came along ten years later when May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, adapted the story into a song. Gene Autry’s recording of the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard pop singles chart the week of Christmas 1949.
However, ask anyone today about Rudolph and the memories quickly turn to Rankin/Bass’ 1964 stop-motion animation classic. The special was adapted not from the original May book but the Marks song, as Arthur Rankin Jr., Jules Bass and their team did not have a copy of the book to reference. Much of the storyline — Rudolph running away with Hermey, encountering Yukon Cornelius and the Island of Misfit Toys — were all added to the teleplay by writer Romeo Muller.
The animated special has aired in the States every year since 1964, making it the longest continuously-running Christmas TV special in the U.S. Today, it often airs more than once during the holiday season. Over the years, a small avalanche of Rudolph merchandise moved through stores throughout the Christmas season, from ornaments and coloring books to snow globes and plushies. However, it was the occurrence of a successful line of bean-style plushies at a drugstore around the turn of the millennia that would lead to the property getting its first treatment as highly articulated action figures.
Toward the end of the 1990s, pharmacy chain CVS held a direct-to-retail license for Rudolph merchandise. Opting to cash in on the current bean plush craze started by Ty’s Beanie Babies, the chain manufactured a series of Rudolph-themed plushies and staggered their release to drive anticipation. The line was a hit, with the beanie crowd eager to add licensed characters to their growing collections.
“That got our attention,” recalls Bob Plant, former art director at Playing Mantis/Memory Lane. “Everyone who worked at that company kept their ear to the ground. We brought back Johnny Lightning, Aurora-style Polar Lights model kits. We were targeting these nostalgic toys and properties and playing off those warm fuzzies we old guys had for our childhood. I was collecting those things. Tom Lowe, the company owner, always had his ear to the ground as far as new and different licenses we could pick up for nostalgic properties, and that (Rudolph) was one that we kind of encouraged him to take a look at.”
It wasn’t long before Playing Mantis struck up a formal conversation with CVS about potentially participating in the Rudolph license. Ultimately, Playing Mantis agreed to dip its toe into the market and teamed up with CVS on Rudolph-themed key chains with PVC characters attached. The campaign was successful. The following year, Playing Mantis would acquire the Rudolph license with plans to take product to the mass market.
“Me being an action figure guy, I wanted to do posable figures,” confesses Plant. “I will say, people don’t necessarily associate action figures with a holiday license. So that was a little bit unusual. I looked at that Rudolph TV special, and part of the charm of that is that you saw these little physical puppets moving across the screen… and you knew they were real. They were something physical. It wasn’t just the lines on a page. These were painstakingly handcrafted and moved frame by frame to create this. So for me, those things lent themselves perfectly to a 3D interpretation. The way we looked at the line was: These could be toys. If kids wanted to play with them, great, that’s awesome, but we also knew there was a huge adult audience for this, people like me who had grown up with that property and remembered it fondly and would love to have something like that in our homes either to commemorate it or to use as holiday decorations.”
The initial series of Rudolph figures would focus on six characters: Rudolph, Santa Claus, Sam the Snowman, Hermey, Yukon Cornelius and Clarice. Limited by the restrictions of small PVC figurines the first time around, Plant’s goal with the action figure line was to make them look as close to stop-motion puppets as possible. However, he was left a bit hamstrung by the lack of materials from Rankin/Bass. The VHS tape of the 1964 special became his most trusted ally in developing the figure line.
“I was doing screen grabs off of it, and I finagled a way to connect a VCR to my Macintosh computer,” says Plant. “When it finally came out on DVD, boy, I was thrilled because I had better quality screen grabs to get off of that. My life depended on being able to do screen grabs from that TV special. I analyzed those to death. When we sent turnarounds to the sculptor, it was a series of heavily annotated screen grabs.”
Many sculptors would come to work on the Rudolph line over the years, but the initial six were tasked to a relative newcomer when it came to toy sculpting — James Groman. While a fresh face on the sculpting scene, Groman, the artist, had long been in the toy industry. He previously worked on designing and developing brands like Care Bears, Popples, Madballs, Blurp Balls and My Pet Monster as a part of Those Characters From Cleveland, a spin-off of American Greetings. He also conceived and designed the Barnyard Commandos toy line for Playmates Toys in the late 1980s.
“I had heard they had gotten the Godzilla license for the 1998 movie with Matthew Broderick,” recalls Groman. “I liked the design, and no one knew what the movie would be like. Back in those days, I was very tenacious. If I wanted a job, if I was interested in something, I would just cold-call and go after it. I wanted that job so badly. I did a sculpture of a bust of the creature to show them that I could do it. I got the job, did it and became one of their go-to sculptors. I did a couple of model kits for them, and then Rudolph came along. They pitched that to me and I gave him a bid. I think the first characters we did were Rudolph and Yukon Cornelius, and they liked them. Then I got to do the rest in the (initial) line. They each took me maybe a week or so to sculpt. I was sculpting traditionally, not doing it digitally back in those days. It was one of my first real action figure sculpting jobs where I actually sculpted an entire series. It’s got a nice place in history for me, as far as my career.”
Well, almost the entire first series. Michael Parks would sculpt Hermey to take some deadline pressure off Groman.
As product was added to the line, more sculptors were brought on, including the crew at Anaglyph Studios, led by Scott Hensey. Brian Sullivan’s Protos — a development house overseas — was also brought in for some later figures.
“We did Rudolph — small ones, mid-sized, large ones, talking ones for probably four years,” recalls Hensey. “So it was like perpetual Christmas in my shop. You know that ‘We Are Santa’s Elves’ song? I tried to get that thing out of my head. Back then, the only way we could get any kind of reference was to watch the tape over and over again… or try and screen grab it.”
Year 2 consisted of the Abominable Snowman of the North (a.k.a. the Bumble), Comet, Mrs. Claus, Skinny Santa, Charlie-in-the-Box, Foreman Elf, King Moonracer and Young Buck Rudolph, along with reissues of the first Rudolph, Hermey and Yukon.
The following year, Series 3 saw the introduction of Tall Elf, Girl Elf and Boy Elf to the line, along with some reissues of earlier characters. Series 4 added Aviator Elf and The Eskimo’s Christmas.
Hensey specifically recalled sculpting the Tall Elf and adding a magnet in his head to help hold his hat on.
“That was interesting,” he says. “We didn’t do that for all of them.”
These were single-carded figures, but the line was much more than that. There were also smaller PVCs with additional characters and various box sets and playsets that included Santa’s sleigh and the full team of reindeer, Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys, Humble Bumble and Friends, Elves Toy Shop and more. Deluxe versions of Rudolph, Santa, Charlie-in-the-Box and the Bumble were also released.
In June 2004, RC2 purchased Playing Mantis for around $17 million. The Rudolph line was in its fourth year and was coming to an end. It also was not a big focus of the new owners.
The following year, former Playing Mantis boss Thomas Lowe started up Round 2, focusing on model cars, die-cast and other hobby products. Like the Playing Mantis/Memory Lane structure, Lowe’s new company would add the Forever Fun business unit to handle its more nostalgia-driven products. They brought over the Rudolph license and produced a series of reissued figures with talking bases and standard reissues of many of the previously released figures and PVCs over the next few years. Ultimately, after almost a decade, the line lost steam at retail, and Round 2/Forever Fun stopped producing Rudolph figures after 2008… until 2015, when a limited amount of reissued product was released in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the animated classic.
Rudolph Hot Toys?
While the Rudolph line was under development, there were always wheels turning in the background about taking the product to the next level. It never happened, but there were real ambitions inside Playing Mantis/Memory Lane to produce a museum-quality Rudolph range that would be 1:1 replicas of the stop-motion puppets used in the original Rankin/Bass special. Japanese puppet-maker Ichiro Komuro created the original puppet figurines in the special. The actual Rudolph puppet stood about 6 inches tall, while Santa was closer to 10 to 11 inches.
“There were some interesting ideas on the table there that I wish we could have done,” recalls Plant. “I really wanted our product to look as close to those original stop-motion puppets as possible. One of the ideas I’d had and proposed back at Playing Mantis was to re-create the stop-motion puppets as closely as possible — a Legacy or Ultimate edition.”
Plant was a big fan of what Sideshow was doing at the time with their one-sixth scale figures, raising the bar for anyone looking to produce higher-end, larger-scale figures.
“It was even before Hot Toys took it to another level,” says Plant. “I wanted to research to find out what the puppets were made of. I believe these puppets had a wooden body understructure, probably some brass joints, which I think are typical in stop-motion puppets.”
Plant knew he couldn’t access the originals, so he clung to what information he could scare up and dove deeper into research, all the while hoping something meaningful would surface.
“Once I got the company behind me on that, I put that proposal out there,” recalls Plant. “This would have been a costly item, and that was not the kind of thing that Playing Mantis really did. So I don’t want to say it was frowned on, but given that Playing Mantis was a profit-driven company like most businesses, we wanted to make money.”
Ultimately, the company decided against pursuing the project. It would have been costly and not just for the development and manufacturing of the replicas. Playing Mantis was not set up with distribution channels that supported high-end collectibles, and it would have been the equivalent of entering into a whole new business.
“It ended up going nowhere, which always made me really sad,” says Plant. “To me, that would have been the ultimate Rudolph. I would love to have seen that, as a collector and someone who was a huge fan of that TV special. It would have meant the world to me to work on that.”
The story of the original Rudolph puppets is quite a roller-coaster ride itself. They bounced around a bit in the late 1960s, but sometime in the 1970s, many came to Barbara Adams, a longtime secretary at the production company that made the film. She used them as decorations around the Christmas tree and let her nieces and nephews play with them. Most of the puppets ended up melting in a hot attic, but Santa and Rudolph survived and were eventually purchased in the mid-2000s by Keith Kreiss, owner of Time and Space Toys. He invested additional funds in restoring the puppets — a new nose for Rudolph and a new mustache for Santa, among other things. Kreiss later sold the restored puppets to a collector in New York.
THE YEAR WITHOUT A SANTA CLAUS
Riding the wave of nostalgia for Rankin/Bass Christmas specials and in the throes of its uber-successful line of Jim Henson’s Muppets figures in the early 2000s, Palisades Toys found itself in a position to create an action figure line based on 1974’s
The Year Without a Santa Claus. You might be wondering why I phrased it like that. Didn’t Palisades go out to the licensor and seek to obtain rights to the property so it could make the toys? Nope. Not at all.
“It was a DTR (direct-to-retail) license that Musicland held,” recalls former Palisades Toys boss Michael Horn. “We had a great working relationship with them, and I am sure that we agreed to the project on the spot. It was also the fastest that we had done tooled product. They (Musicland) approached us at Toy Fair in February with the opportunity/challenge of creating the line in time for that year’s holiday season. By removing the sales part of the cycle, we only had to develop and execute the product. Still, it was a very tight timeline since we had to get the goods out the door in China by early fall.”
Indeed, time was not on the side of Palisades or its project manager Ken Lilly when it came to getting product made and in Musicland’s warehouses in time for the holidays. In the early 2000s, Musicland was a big buyer of action figures and other pop culture items. The company owned a handful of entertainment-related retail chains including Sam Goody, Media Play and Suncoast Motion Picture Company. Palisades knew to meet the timeline they would need all hands on deck… and a couple of extra hands wouldn’t hurt.
“It was a hustle given that it was a drop-in line in addition to our regular line,” says Horn. “We were just finding our groove with The Muppets at that stage, as well as the 12-inch figures, and I’m sure we were cranking out resin. Jerry Macaluso and his SOTA Toys team did the sculpting. Since this was a Warner license, I’m guessing he did approvals in person as they were both in Los Angeles at the time.”
In 2002, the SOTA team cracked out special effects and toy projects for others. The company had been launched by Macaluso two years prior and was in the early stages of ramping up its own action figure product.
“To this day, I’m a massive fan of all that old Rankin/Bass stuff,” says Macaluso. “I still watch it all the time, even when it’s not Christmas season. I watch all of them. We were doing tests of House of the Dead and Resident Evil, so we weren’t known for cute stuff. I have a memory of twisting Ken’s arm to give me that project because I wanted to do it so badly because I really, really love those shows. I personally sculpted Heat Miser, but I don’t think I personally sculpted any of the other ones.”
The job was spread out among SOTA’s sculpting department due to the compressed timeline. The crew at the time included people like Justice Joseph and Alexi Bustamante. The job included six larger-scale figures — Santa, Mrs. Claus, elves Jingle and Jangle, Heat Miser and Snow Miser — and a series of smaller PVCs, which some recall were a later addition to the line.
“I do recall that we made changes on the fly,” recalls Horn. “For example, the idea to make non-posable PVC figurines was not in the original plan. I don’t think so, at least. Same with the multipack sets and even the clear variants.”
Palisades packaged the larger figures in gift sets of three — Snow Miser, Civilian Santa and Jangle in one, Heat Miser, Mrs. Claus and Jingle in the other. To spice things up a bit, a limited number of “chase” sets were released. Each contained a translucent version of either Snow Miser, molded in transparent blue, or Heat Miser, molded in transparent red.
One of the smart moves by SOTA when prototyping Heat Miser and Snow Miser was how they went about getting the glitter-like texture of the brothers’ outfits. Are you ready?… they used glitter. Instead of sculpting a glitter pattern into the clay — a tedious task to be sure — the crew decided to simply glue actual glitter to the prototypes. So, when molded, the pattern would transfer.
“That was the fastest and best way to get that kind of texture there because they had those glittery costumes,” confirms Macaluso.
Even with the tight timeline, cases of Palisades’ The Year Without a Santa Claus toys landed safely in the US and were distributed to Musicland warehouses ahead of the Christmas season.
That is where you might think the story would end… but hey, this is the toy business! The same year, NECA was asked to develop giftware based on the Musicland license. The company did some small plush, Heat Miser and Snow Miser as larger electronic plush, bobbleheads and snow globes.
“It was all part of that same program that would have been at retail Christmas 2002,” says Randy Falk, vice president of product development at NECA. “Then I believe it was holiday of 2004 and we were asked if we wanted to continue some of that program with the SKUs that did well, which, at that point, for us were the bobbleheads and the large feature plush and we were asked to bring the action figures back. I don’t remember the particulars… whether Palisades had lost the tooling from the factory they were dealing with or what their situation was, but they did not have the molds anymore. So we basically remade those same figures that SOTA did for Palisades. We remade and retooled those figures, creating our own new tooling to bring them back. I think it was two years after the fact when it was no longer Musicland’s license. We were just asked I think at that point by Warner Brothers, who holds the license, to see if it could be an evergreen project in the way that Rudolph and some of the other Rankin/Bass stuff is brought out every Christmas.”
NECA already had Christmas product that performed well, including A Christmas Story and The Nightmare Before Christmas, but agreed to take on the job. NECA’s approach was similar to the Palisades/Musicland model: Larger figures would be packed in gift sets of three with a few added accessories. However, the company did take it a step further by releasing Snow Miser and Heat Miser on single blister cards. They also brought back SKUs from the original run that performed well, but by the end of 2005, the line had run its course.
“I think at the time, Warner Brothers wanted to see if we were interested in developing additional SKUs,” recalls Falk. “We really weren’t interested because the sales didn’t justify it, and I think at that time, they maybe thought they could find another partner or party that maybe would do more, but then obviously there never was anything else.”
SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN
Fresh off the initial success of the Rudolph line, upper management at Playing Mantis was keen to widen its footprint in the niche market they had developed for articulated, Christmas-oriented action figures. With Rudolph selling well, the team decided to revisit the Rankin/Bass catalog and came away with a license to create product for 1970’s Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. Santa Claus Is Coming to Town is an origin story of how Kris Kringle — an orphan abandoned on the front stoop of the mayor of Sombertown — would grow up to become the one and only Santa Claus. While not as popular as Rudolph, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town is still broadcast at least once every Christmas season.
“I think upper management was hoping for the next Rudolph,” recalls Plant. “But there really is no next Rudolph.”
The Memory Lane’s 2004 Santa Claus Is Coming to Town toy line consisted of eight blister-packed figures — Kris Kringle, Tanta Kringle, Grimsley, The Winter Warlock, Winter, Topper the Penguin, Miss Jessica and Burgermeister Meisterburger — and one vehicle set: S.D. Kluger and the North Pole Mail Truck. Kluger was voiced by (and resembled) actor Fred Astaire, who also narrated the story.
“I put my heart and soul behind that line,” recalls Plant. “I’m really proud of some of those figures. The fact that we were able to do that mail truck with the full ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ song as sung by Fred Astaire, with the likeness of that Fred Astaire puppet on that little action figure, I don’t think anything like that’s ever happened. There was so much licensing involved in that. We ended up paying huge, huge royalties on that, because, not only Classic Media, who held that property, we also had to deal with the Astaire estate. From what our legal team told me, they were somewhat challenging to deal with. They understood the value of what they had. We also had to deal with the music company that owned the rights to the song. So there was a lot of licensing involved in that. I think it’s a miracle that single product ever happened.”
While the effort put into the line was no less than that of Rudolph, the Santa Claus Is Coming to Town line did not perform well at retail. Memory Lane may have found the limits of their holiday action figure niche with this offering. Plant and his team had no less fun bringing the line to life, having to make decisions like: What does the Winter Warlock look like under those robes?
“I was hoping we’d at least get a second year out of that,” says Plant. “I was never happy with Kris Kringle’s head sculpt. Something ended up being off about the look and the proportion of that, so I always wanted to go back and redo it.”
For the first few figures in the line, Plant turned to sculptor Chris Dern, who had previously done figures for the Dragon’s Lair video game with his company AnJon. He also previously worked with the crew at ReSaurus.
Brian Sullivan and his firm Protos, based in the Far East, did the remaining figures.
For the aborted second year, Plant says he wanted to produce more of the Kringle family, a reindeer and other versions of Kris Kringle as he moved through the different stages of life before becoming the embodiment of Santa we are all used to seeing. Indeed, there were prototypes made for Dingle Kringle, Mrs. Jessica Claus, Kris Kringle (Outlaw) and Young Kris. These were set to debut both on the traditional blister cards, as well as with talking bases.
There were also plans for a musical playset of the door and ice wall featured in the song ‘Put One Foot in Front of the Other’ sung by Kris (and Winter) after warming the Warlock’s heart with a toy choo-choo train. The set would have measured 14.5 inches wide by 7 inches deep when closed. Some assembly would have been required to install the high piece of the ice wall. Accessories earmarked for the set included a small (articulated, if possible) fawn, a raccoon and a groundhog. The set would have also included the already produced Winter figure.
“Deep inside, I knew it wouldn’t be another Rudolph,” confesses Plant. “But I was hoping beyond hope that we would still do well enough to make a profit off it and be able to move forward with it. We were not able to do that. Also, by that point, I think the year those figures came out, RC2 had already purchased Playing Mantis. They were even stricter about what they expected out of the line, what kind of return was expected, retailer response and how they expected consumers to respond in the marketplace. So I’m sure RC2 would never have supported continuing with it.”
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY
Before Playing Mantis was sold to RC2, Bob Plant and his crew of creatives were busy churning out not only its Christmas-related lines to date, but it was also working on a new entry that could have possibly debuted around the 2005 holiday season. The company had returned to the well and licensed Rankin/Bass’s 1968 special The Little Drummer Boy and developed a line plan that included action figures, PVC figurines and more.
The special told the story of Aaron, a young Jewish boy living with his parents on their farm. The farm was also home to a trio of animals: Samson the Donkey, Baba the Lamb and Joshua the Camel. Aaron received a drum for his birthday one year and the animals would dance as he played it. Not long after, bandits descend on the farm, stealing the family’s livestock and killing Aaron’s parents. Aaron is kidnapped and forced to join Ben Haramed’s caravan as an unwilling performer. The troupe meets the traveling Magi following a bright star in the sky. Ben ends up selling them Joshua against Aaron’s will. Aaron seizes the opportunity, takes Baba and Samson and leaves Ben Haramed’s caravan. He tries to find the royal caravan, but when he fails, he opts to follow the star… to Bethlehem. In town, Aaron meets back up with the Kings… and Joshua, but the joy is cut short after a Roman chariot runs over Baba. The Magi suggest that the child in the manger could help. However, Aaron had no gift to give. When he walked over to the baby, he decides that his drumming will be his gift. Baba is healed… and Aaron’s heart is full.
The most mature addition to the Rankin/Bass holiday classics, The Little Drummer Boy may have been a bit of a stretch when it came to toys; however, the special’s unique animal characters made it one of the most toyetic.
Playing Mantis planned an initial run of four articulated figures: Aaron, Joshua, Baba and Samson, as well as PVC sets that would include additional characters. One such set was the nativity scene that would have come with the three kings — Balthasar, Melchior and Gaspar — Aaron and his animals, Mary, Joseph and the manger. The base would play “The Little Drummer Boy” song at the press of a button.
There was also an Ultimate Aaron planned. This figure would have stood 13 inches tall and would play his drum to the music of the song “The Little Drummer Boy,” which would come from his base. He would have also come with his lamb, Baba. The plan was to give him rooted hair that closely duplicated that of the puppet used in the special. He would also have cloth clothing: a hat, a vest, pants and a sash.
The Little Drummer Boy line was far enough along to get it shown at Toy Fair 2004 in New York. Playing Mantis gave it a good spread with prototypes of the PVC nativity scene and Ultimate Aaron front and center. The prototypes for the figure assortment for the first year’s product were also shown, along with sample packaging for most of the line. Ultimately, buyer interest was moderate, possibly due to the much more somber tone of the source material over the standard Rankin/Bass fare. The full fate of the line was sealed after the June acquisition of Playing Mantis by RC2.
“A few of the items were finally released through Round 2 under the Forever Fun brand,” recalls Plant. “The Little Drummer Boy PVC figurine sets, which did not do well enough to justify a rerelease.”
Even then, Round 2 dialed back plans for The Little Drummer Boy releases from the original Playing Mantis conception. For the nativity scene, the molded stable was ditched in favor of a cardboard foldout.
FROSTY THE SNOWMAN
The 1969 classic Frosty the Snowman was a Rankin/Bass production, though it was done in traditional hand-drawn 2D animation instead of using the stop-motion puppets we’d come to associate with their holiday specials. A sequel, Frosty’s Winter Wonderland, aired in 1976 and was also done in hand-drawn 2D. Another follow-up, Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July, was the first Frosty to be done using the “Animagic” stop-motion style in 1979. If it sounds like I’m getting ahead of myself (again), I’m really not. You see, the Frosty figure line pulls from each of these features… well, at least the last two.
The line was conceived and brought to market by Round 2, a company former Playing Mantis boss Tom Lowe started the year following the sale of Playing Mantis to RC2. Like Playing Mantis had Memory Lane, Round 2 would have Forever Fun for its nostalgia-driven product. Lowe brought former Playing Mantis creative Bob Plant on as art director and Jamie Hood was brought in to help develop the line. Round 2 held discussions with Warner Brothers and came away with the Frosty license, but given the lack of toyetic characters from the first movie, along with some licensing limitations, they knew to make a line work that it would have to pull from multiple sources.
“Round 2 wanted to do the basic kind of 6-inch figures and then do a couple larger pieces,” says Hood. “I think we did a 9- or 10-inch figure with some music and stuff like that. They had a couple other things they wanted to do. I’m not sure we developed all of it. When they brought me in, they said, ‘Watch Frosty’s Winter Wonderland.’ It wasn’t the original Frosty the Snowman that they actually got the license for through Warner Brothers. It was for the second cartoon. So they were able to do things like this is his girlfriend. So we were able to introduce her, but we couldn’t do things like bring in the villain from the original movie like we had hoped. We weren’t able to do the traffic cop. We developed Parson Brown. He was one of the few iconic characters beyond Frosty that we were able to do.”
The first year’s assortment included Frosty, Crystal, Parson Brown and Jack Frost. It wasn’t until the second year that Round 2 introduced the kids — Chilly and Millie. The kids were packaged in a blister pack together, along with Willie the Snow Dog.
“Warner Brothers kind of pushed back on the kids saying, ‘No, you can’t do the kids… you are making that up.’ And we’re like, ‘No, have you watched your own cartoon?’ They had to go back and do their own research to see that they actually did own the rights to those characters.”
Chilly and Millie are introduced in the first few minutes of Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July. This was likely an add-on to the initial rights, but no one could remember for sure. The show itself feels like a bizzaro mix of many of the Rankin/Bass specials that preceded it. The bad guy is another warlock type called Winterbolt. He is the Winter Warlock from Santa Claus Is Coming to Town with better hair and teeth. He is put into a deep sleep early in the special by Lady Boreal, the Queen of the Northern Lights — a character more than a little reminiscent of Mother Nature from The Year Without a Santa Claus. When he awakens after several years, he finds Santa has moved into his territory and plots to run him off. There’s an ice cream man that could be S.D. Kluger’s brother, and a nasty reindeer named Scratcher that tricks Rudolph into stealing money causing his nose to stop glowing. There’s a whale with a clock in its tail. Winterbolt is defeated and turns into a tree… and Frosty and his family all melt. Kids and all. It is pretty bonkers. Of course, Jack Frost arrives in the nick of time to bring Frosty and the snow family back to life, and all’s well that ends well.
Forever Fun also produced a deluxe, motorized Belly Whopper Frosty depicting everyone’s favorite snowman sailing down a snow drift on his stomach with one of the kids from the show astride his back. Magical Frosty was another deluxe product whose top gimmick was removing his magic hat would cause his eyes to roll back to coal, and placing the hat back on his head would roll the eyes forward and bring him to life.
The Frosty line lasted a couple of years before it also ran out of steam at retail. It simply didn’t have the depth of characters that a show like Rudolph had. Once you completed the snow family, it really came down to looking at tertiary characters or generic children, which traditionally don’t make for exciting toys. Round 2 was also hamstrung by the limits of the license.
“The whole line holds a special place in my heart because it was the first line that I was able to work on for Round 2,” says Hood. “I was thrilled to be able to develop a toy line. I had never thought about developing toys until the opportunity came along. And when it did, I was like, ‘Yeah, I should have been trying to find a place to work like this my whole career.’”