Rudolph's Shiny New Year.

Hey kids (of all ages), it's Saturday Morning Cartoon time again!

Okay... Not *exactly* a cartoon. But still animation.

If anything is worse than the ever-earlier start to the Christmas season stepping all over Hallowe'en and Thanksgiving, it's the sudden, whiplash END of the whole holly-jolly business by the afternoon of the 25th! From September-on it's been an escalating wave of Grinch and reindeer and Scrooge and Frosty and carols and Santa and then WHAM! Nothing but tattered wrapping paper and ordinary TV...

There have been a few attempts to create a sort of Holiday TV Special Methadone to ease us out of the season... I covered FROSTY'S WINTER WONDERLAND last year. This one has "New Year" explicitly in the freakin' title, but the morons at the network missed the whole point and ran these post-Christmas specials in early December anyway.

While this is a direct sequel to the 1964 Rudolph special, with its narrative starting the very next day, it used character designs similar to more recent productions like THE YEAR WITHOUT A SANTA CLAUS. As a result, Rudolph went from being a fully-developed buck to looking like a fawn with little antlers overnight. But that wasn't the only thing I found ridiculous when this show first aired...

Rudy is out in the snow with a clockwork soldier and complains about the cold. ("You live at the North Freakin' Pole, Rudolph!!!")

Rudy looks out across a vast dessert and doesn't know how to cross it. ("You are a goddamned FLYING reindeer who can lead a team pulling a sleigh all over the planet in one night!!!")

Also: "Why is that camel trotting rather than pacing?"

Still, it's a pretty decent addition to the Rankin-Bass third-string holiday canon. And one of the few post-Christmas entries.

Note the Bicentennial aspects, as this was first aired in December 1976, despite being produced a year earlier.

.