jwblogofrandomness:

*Johnny Marks, who wrote the original “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” song, also wrote the songs and score for the special.

*Producer of the special Arthur Rakin Jr. was able to make a deal with Johnny Marks to turn the song into a special because they happened to be neighbors.

*The voice of Hermey the Elf, Paul Soles was also the voice of Spider-Man in the 1967 cartoon series of the same name, thus making him the first actor to portray the web slinging hero.

*One question about the special often asked by viewers is what exactly made the girl doll a misfit as nothing appears to be wrong with her. According to producer Arthur Rankin Jr. “she had psychiatric problems.”

*Salt was used for some of the “splashing” effects (salt might have been also used for the snow but I’m not completely sure about this).

*While the Bumble appears gigantic in the special, the actual puppet used for him is around the same size as the rest of the characters. The reason why is creating a larger puppet that would be in scale with the regular characters would be too complex and too expensive to do. Thus whenever the rest of the characters are seen with Bumble on screen, smaller, less detailed versions of the characters are used (this is why none of them have mouth movements in those scenes).

*The Bumbles legs were the only parts of the character made in full scale to be used in certain scenes, (one of them can be seen towards the left in the second pic shown below).

*While bigger and smaller versions of the characters were made for certain scenes the same can’t be said for the sets. Compare these next two screenshots and it looks like Yukon Cornelius has drastically grown in size.

*While the special was written and mostly designed in America, the voice cast was almost entirely Canadian, and the puppet building and the animation was done in Japan (which technically makes Rudolph an anime XD).