Arthur Rankin, creator of TV's 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' dies at 89

More than five decades ago, Arthur Rankin Jr., a producer-director working in stop-motion animation, had an idea to develop a family-oriented TV special around a popular Christmas song. He hoped a network would like it enough to run it two or three times.

But when “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” aired in 1964, he and partner Jules Bass found they had a blockbuster — one that launched them into TV history as pioneers of the animated holiday special.

Fifty years later, “Rudolph,” with its catchy tunes and charmingly misfit characters, remains the longest-running Christmas TV special, “one of only four 1960s Christmas specials still being telecast,” according to the Archive of American Television. The others are “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and another Rankin-Bass creation, “Frosty the Snowman.”

Rankin, whose projects would later include animated series such as “The Jackson 5ive” and the feature-length stop-motion film “Mad Monster Party,” died of natural causes Thursday in Harrington Sound, Bermuda, where he had retired, said his son, Todd Rankin. He was 89.