What, they couldn’t play footie?
The one I feel most sorry for is Howe, the gay reindeer who was secretly in love with Rudolph. Like in the the song where it said that “Howe the reindeer loved him”. It must have broken Howe’s heart when Rudolph hooked up with Clarice.
If the call and response version is canon, then it would seem to be board games, “like Monopoly.”
(As a kid, I actually changed that to “like Take-Off” per the special.
He’s also presented in the original book at being young, and so probably not experienced enough to be on the sleigh team until they needed a light.
But what really is naughty? What really is nice?
Does Santa use an absolute timeless moral compass or does society and its norms play a role? Does the child have to understand he is being naughty to actually be naughty? And how do we, or Santa for that matter, decide whether human standards of behavior should apply to different species such as reindeer?
If a child steals bread from a neighbor to feed a starving sister, is he/she naughty or nice? If a child hits another child because he/she has seen a parent act violently, is that child naughty? Now imagine applying this to animals. Is the lion naughty for killing a gazelle? Is the preying mantis naughty for eating the head off its lover? How about the kitten catching a bird or the puppy peeing in the house?
Or maybe Santa knows who is naughty or nice because Santa is godlike and gets to decide that for himself. If so, we are not able to question him because he is the authority by definition of just being Santa. We just have to believe in Santa Claus, which is what we are asked to do anyway.
Groan. <slow clap.>
The story of Rudolf is meant to be a hopeful tail for kids being bullied in the real world. We all know bullying happens, even if it shouldn’t. Kids get bullied for all kinds of things, and being different is one of them. So what is a kid who is being bullied going to want to see? A story about how accepting everyone else is in the world and where differences are celebrated and accepted while he is tortured on a regular basis and the torturing is ignored by those in authority? Do you think he wants to be told that his world is unique and put him even further into despair feeling isolated and alone? Of course not. He wants to see a story that reflect his own situation and then see that yes, in the end, the very difference that makes him the target of ridicule will allow him to excel, to be the leader and celebrated hero he knows he can be. In other words, a bullied kid wants to know they aren’t alone. There are others out there experiencing the same things and in the end they will triumph.
Well, you know, he makes a list. And checks it twice. With that kind of dedication to detail, I’m sure he must be making the right decisions.
I bet Mrs. Clause does all the “checking it twice” business. We all know she’s a stickler for the details.
Thinking the same thing!
Does checking it twice mean he actually does the list three times. The first time he makes the list, he checks it, and then checks it again?
What happens if a kid is particularly naughty or nice during the time he is checking and rechecking the list? There must be a cut-off date, like say December 20th, and any actions committed after that time would reflect on next year’s list.
What goes around, comes around. Here’s SNL on Rudolph’s big night: Rudolph's Big Night - SNL - YouTube
lol If only life had that much justice sometimes.
I always thought that was pretty obvious.
Thanks! That annoys me whenever I hear the intro.
Fame is fleeting. Yesterday’s big news is forgotten because of today’s minute trivia. The problem is Rudolph doesn’t appear in A Visit from St. Nicholas. That’s the list of deer stuck in everyone’s head before the song was written. But none of those particular reindeer did anything more noteworthy other than show up. It is even possible Rudolph was there in the incident described in AVFSN. Just Santa didn’t need to prod Rudolph with an “on…!” because Rudolph already was “on.”
Rudolph was the most famous because of his brave Christmas-saving journey. However, many humans couldn’t recall that one incident because of the Moore poem. But if you asked any of the reindeer themselves who was the most famous, they’d surely say Rudolph in a heartbeat. That’s my take.
Maybe he’s the reindeer equivalent of the killer guitar player who’s well known and highly respected within the industry and with ultra hardcore fans but not so much with the general public.
+1
I don’t recall any authoritative reference work (such as a TV Christmas special) addressing this issue. However it would be straightforward to set up an experiment to test this. We recruit 576 children of a similar age. Starting tomorrow, Christmas day, they all behave themselves for the majority of 2019 (that is, behave “nicely”). At midnight on the morning of 1 December 2019, a predetermined child does something naughty. An hour later at 1:00am, another child does something naughty. And so on, every hour until midnight Christmas morning, which I think it’s clear that the cutoff has passed and it’s too late for a child’s behavior to change her gifts. By examining the gifts of all the children, we should see a clear cutoff date/time, where all the children who did something naughty before that point got statistically significantly worse presents than the ones whose naughtiness fell after the cutoff (and whose coal or whatever would appear the following year). If no differences are found, the explanation must be that the cutoff is surprisingly early (before 1 December) or late (after midnight on Christmas Eve). A followup experiment in 2020 could address this if necessary. (We can of course dismiss far-fetched explanations such as “Santa’s gifts are not actually correlated with naughty/nice behavior” or even more extreme “Santa does not exist”.) Alas, in reality it is too late to execute this experiment in 2019, so it will have to wait until 2020. I’ll start preparing the grant proposal.