Rudolph Revisited

My daughter is 2 and a half this Christmas. This is when the holiday season becomes magic again for me, but as a parent this time around. Everything is twice as exciting and cool as usual. I've always been a fan of Christmas time, but over the years it has lost some luster. I no longer get to relish every hour of December leading up until the big day. It seems in recent years I just fight to survive the holiday season and maybe take a few hours on Christmas Eve to partake in some revelry...which usually involves some Scotch or Bourbon.

So in the true spirit of the Christmas season, we watched for the Christmas specials to make their rounds on the networks. You know the ones, Frosty the Snowman, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, It's Called Kwanzaa Charlie Brown, etc. And then there is the pinnacle of Christmas shows...Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. This Rankin-Bass classic of old school stop frame animation including questionable mouth-voice synchronization, weird sound effects, awkward puppets, man this thing has everything. This is one of those shows you swore was about 2 hours long as a kid. It seemed to go on forever. Come to find out around age 15, it is only 1 hour. What a jip!

Well, I sat down and watched Rudolph with my daughter. It was her first time ever seeing it. She was hooked. They had her at "Now you know dasher and dancer..." And thank you to DVRs, we have now seen it an amazing, magical 25 times since then. And this time around, something just didn't seem right. I started to notice a few differences between the original and the one aired recently. I was able to confirm with a co-worker that it did indeed change this year. (As a side note, said co-worker has seen Rudolph every year since he was a wee lad. Never misses it. So, he is my resident expert on the subject of reindeer with non-conformities of the nose.)

For anyone who is an expert on the show will know, the scene with Hermie and Rudolph singing the misfits song used to include them building a snowman that looked like the evil elf boss. Then, Hermie would punch the snowman in the nose. If you watched it this year, you saw that they neither build the snowman, nor punch it in the nose. Instead the snowman is already there and they walk over it without destroying it, mind you. So there was finally someone at CBS that said, "You know, maybe Rudolph is too violent. Let's cut the snowman punch." (And in case you were wondering the 'snowman punch' has nothing to do with the 'donkey punch.')

My resident expert and I both started thinking, what would be the next things to get cut? How about when Rudolph's mother wants to accompany his father, Donner, in finding their runaway son. Donner tells her she should stay in the cave because "this is man's work." Yeah that's the next thing to go, we're pretty sure.

Just a sign of the times, I guess. I'm surprised it has taken this long to edit such a classic piece of television. And it is clear I am officially outside of the age range that enjoys Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on its own, but I've just entered the point in my life where I get to enjoy it with my daughter in a whole new way. Touching eh? Now, if I can just get her to give me the remote. Changing channels is man's work, after all.