The red-nosed blog.

I read in the papers that tonight’s airing of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer represents the show’s 40th anniversary, making it nearly as old as me. I have a sneaking feeling it will be more durable than me, playing for a good many more decades before it finally peters out, but that isn’t because I like it. No, I never cared for it.

For one thing, I don’t like its curious stop-action animation. I’m sure it represents an artistic achievement of some kind, and is the toil of a lot of people, but I still don’t like it. Then there’s the matter of Rudolph’s redemption in the eyes of the other reindeer, a problem that of course goes back to the source-material song.

These are cartoon reindeer, so I suppose you could make them do anything and chalk it up to make-believe. Still, they’re anthropomorphic reindeer, and I expect them to act something like people. The problem is in the line of the song that goes: “And then all the reindeer loved him…” Wrong. They mocked and hated him before. After his heroic feat, the other reindeer would hate him more. Maybe enough to trick him into a hunter’s trap, so that he ends up as reindeer pate. (Yum.)

Now here’s a story: Adolph, the Red-Baiting Reindeer. Though deft political maneuvering and a fanatical obsession with destroying the North Pole Communist Party, a nobody of a reindeer assumes absolute power over the boreal nation, with Santa Claus as a pathetic figurehead. Subsequent events are, as you’d imagine, quite bloody, decimating the animals of the arctic.