Arthur Rankin Jr., seen in 1966, an animator and producer...

Arthur Rankin Jr., seen in 1966, an animator and producer who, with his partner Jules Bass, created the stop-motion Christmas special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" in 1966, died of natural causes on Jan. 30, 2014. He was 89. Newsday's obituary for Arthur Rankin Jr.
Credit: Rankin Bass Productions

More than five decades ago, Arthur Rankin Jr., a producer-director working in stop-motion animation, had an idea to develop a family-oriented TV special around a popular Christmas song. He hoped a network would like it enough to run it two or three times.

But when "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" aired in 1964, he and partner Jules Bass found they had a blockbuster -- one that launched them into TV history as pioneers of the animated holiday special.

Fifty years later, "Rudolph," with its catchy tunes and charmingly misfit characters, remains the longest-running Christmas TV special, "one of only four 1960s Christmas specials still being telecast," according to the Archive of American Television.

The others are "A Charlie Brown Christmas," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and another Rankin-Bass creation, "Frosty the Snowman."

Rankin, whose projects would later include animated series such as "The Jackson 5ive" and the feature-length stop-motion film "Mad Monster Party," died of natural causes Jan. 30 in Harrington Sound, Bermuda, where he had retired, said his son, Todd Rankin. He was 89.

"Arthur was the Walt Disney of stop-motion animation," said Rick Goldschmidt, who chronicled the history of Rankin-Bass productions in books and a website. "He was a great influence on the Tim Burton films and even more so on Pixar."

Although Rankin-Bass also produced traditional, hand-drawn animation, it was best known for its stop-motion technique called Animagic, which differed from clay motion in its use of small, wire-jointed dolls.

Other well-known Rankin-Bass stop-motion works include "The Little Drummer Boy" (1968), "Here Comes Peter Cottontail" (1971) and "The Year Without a Santa Claus" (1974).

A time-tested theme was a Rankin-Bass hallmark. "In all our pictures we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy," Rankin said in a 2005 interview for the Archive of American Television, "and the underdog fulfills his quest."

In "Rudolph," the underdogs were the title character with the flashing red nose and an elf named Hermey, who wants to be a dentist. Among the villains is the Abominable Snowman, who ultimately changes his menacing ways.

"Rudolph" took more than a year to make because of the painstaking pace of stop-motion production, "but the show is not just the technique," Rankin once said. "It's the story, the characters, the music. We knew what we needed: warmth. 'Rudolph' showed us that."

NewsdayTV has you covered Credit: Newsday

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