Some thoughts on the 1964 Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer special.
I've written on this show here at this time of year before. I was six years old when I saw the show, and it moved me in a way that I could not understand. I identified both with Rudolph and Hermy the elf. both sentient beings who couldn't fit in. Hermy the Elf wanted to be a dentist. Most likely it would be a better job than working in Santa’s sweatshop. To the sweatshop boss, that made Hermy some sort of a dangerous desperado. Rudolf had this radioactive looking nose that would flash bright red. One would think the red nose would go well with the Christmas décor, but Santa, along with the Reindeer coach and reindeer team all came off as bigots that wanted nothing to do with some freak with a red nose. But Santa came around later, and so did the sweatshop boss and the reindeer boss and were happy to have both Rudolf and Hermy. But that’s when they needed Rudolph to get them through the storm. (I know GPS wasn’t a thing back then, but what about LORAN?)
Looking back on this as an adult, the show was much more sophisticated than most of the kiddie Christmas shows. Santa was shown as a human being with flaws, but yet someone who could see his failings and apologize, and likewise for the elf boss. The songs were better quality then most of those shows. In a way, it was almost like one of those YA stories of later decades. You see this young person who finds himself in crisis, and seemingly alone, other than his talking reindeer friend. They go off into the wilderness against impossible odds. The survive a dangerous beast. They meet a kindred spirit on the way, the prospector. They meet a god on a lost island. The rejected duo come back as conquering heroes along with their prospector friend. They even managed to tame the beast. This wasn’t just YA, it’s the Odyssey.
I didn't quite fit in either, and I didn't know why at the time. I had this neurological quirk nobody back then knew about that decades later would be known as Asperger syndrome and then Autistic Spectrum Disorder. I was a bit nerdy from day one. I was in the first grade. I didn’t go to kindergarten. My parents apparently had other priorities. It most likely wasn’t mandatory back then. Somehow, I showed up in the first grade being able to read. Aspies have a way of picking up reading on their own I have heard. My home life was a combination of abuse and neglect. Catholic parish schools varied drastically in quality back then. Some were pretty decent schools, some OK, and some terrible. Mine was a bit south of mediocre for the first four years. (After that, it had degraded to the worst levels of hell.) But my bookworm tendencies caused me to be a quite good student, which kept the nuns from coming down hard on me. But if they were impatient with less than stellar students, they didn’t really like the smart students either. Probably was better to be a B student in that environment, but I didn’t know that. The combination of abuse/neglect at home, and my different brain truly left me as an outlier. I tested three years ahead on reading and comprehension. But my verbal communication skills most likely weren’t at that level, probably because I didn’t have adults that would have conversations with me. Practice makes perfect. Little Practice makes… Despite that fact I did well in school, I did not have a lot of confidence in myself.
I saw a lot of myself in Hermie and Rudolph. I don’t know if I would have been so forgiving of Santa if I had been in Hermie’s shoes or Rudolph’s hooves.