In 1950, singing cowboy Gene Autry teamed up with the Cass County Boys to record a new song from Walter “Jack” Rollins and Steve Nelson. Frosty the Snowman was a follow-up to Autry’s hit of the previous year, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and, like the earlier recording, became an indelible Christmas favourite – though in the original version of the song, Christmas isn’t mentioned at all. Subsequently covered by artists as diverse as The Canadian Brass and Cocteau Twins have kept the song alive for very different generations and demographics.

Rudolph had been adapted into a stop-motion animated short television film by Rankin/Bass (founded by producers Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass) in 1964 and the company was soon looking for a follow-up. Frosty had made it to the screen in 1950 when UPA made a three-minute short but it has been Rankin/Bass’s version that has stood the test of time, being broadcast annually on American television since it’s first appearance on CBS on 7 December 1969. Rankin/Bass are largely associated with stop-motion but made more than their fair share of traditional animated works, of which Frosty, a forerunner of the equally beloved The Snowman (1982) perhaps, is one.

Inevitably, to fill up a 30-minute timeslot, a good deal of padding was required, and the tale told in the song forms only the barest bones of this new version. Jimmy Durante appears in animated form as the narrator, telling the story of how, one Christmas Eve, inept magician Professor Hinkle (Billy De Wolfe) fails to engage his audience at a small school and the kids wander out into the snow instead, building a snowman that they name Frosty. Hinkle’s hat, blown away by the wind, is placed on Frosty’s head and he comes to life (now voiced by Jackie Vernon). As the weather starts to change, Frosty fears that he will melt unless he can get to the North Pole and the children march through the town on their way to the railway station where Frosty, Hinkle’s rabbit Hocus Pocus and young Karen (June Foray in the original version, though Suzanne Davidson redubbed the part for later broadcasts) stow away aboard a train heading north. With Hinkle in hot pursuit, determined to reclaim his hat, the group face several adversities before Santa Claus turns up to save the day. There’s tragedy, some laughs and a happy ending that alters the song’s final line so that Frosty can promise that “I’ll be back on Christmas Day!”

In truth, the animation seen in Frosty the Snowman is limited to say the least, the often static style that had rapidly become the norm for cash-strapped small screen productions of the day. Rankin/Bass had wanted the special to have the feel of a Christmas card come to life, but the animation is too uninspired for that to have really worked. Detail is sparse, movement implied as much as it’s shown and there’s a surfeit of those annoying, Hanna-Barbera-style “comedy” sound effects.

Like so many of Rankin/Bass’ films, Frosty the Snowman was an American/Japanese co-production, and the sub-standard animation was actually handled by Mushi Production in Tokyo. By the time they made Frosty, Rankin/Bass had flirted with the kaiju eiga genre, co-producing Kingu Kongu no Gyakushū/King Kong Escapes (1967) with Toho and they would go on to make a trilogy of monster/adventure television films with Tsuburaya Productions – The Last Dinosaur (1977), The Bermuda Depths (1978) and The Ivory Ape (1980).

And yet for all the crudity of Frosty‘s animation, it still works. It exudes charm, as successive generations of new young viewers will attest, and that’s down in no small part to the impressive voice cast. Rankin/Bass often managed to lure interesting talent to their shorts – Burl Ives lent his voice to another snowman in Rudolph, Vincent Price can be heard in Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971), Richard Boone, Hans Conried, John Huston and Otto Preminger were among those voicing characters in The Hobbit (1977), they got Walter Matthau in to play Scrooge in The Stingiest Man in Town (1978) and so on. Here, they got a late career performance from Jimmy Durante, who had also recorded a version of the song in 1950.

The special was such a hit that a couple of sequels followed – Frosty’s Winter Wonderland (1976) and Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July (1979). In 1992, CBS commissioned a new Frosty film, Frosty Returns (1992) (Rankin/Bass had closed its doors for the last time in 1987) and Classic Media, then the rights holders to the earlier works by Rankin/Bass, made Legend of Frosty the Snowman in 2005. They were all popular enough with youngsters, but none has had the peculiar staying power of the original which remains as loved and anticipated every winter as it always has. It may not be as good as Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, not is it as tautly plotted or visually interesting, but it’s always been hugely popular and it’s really not hard to see why – it’s short, pretty sweet and just the thing for the kids to enjoy after the post-present-opening frenzy on Christmas morning.