Why is That Snowman Playing a Banjo?

TV Christmas special hosts explained

I may not be a conventionally religious person, but that doesn’t mean my Christmases aren’t filled with rituals.

Some of them have faded over time, like my insistence on tearing into a Hickory Farms cheese and sausage sampler during the holiday season (see the photo for a low-cholesterol experience).

The fact that the sausage is way too greasy and the cheese is maybe one step beyond Cracker Barrel brand never entered into it. It was Christmastime, so I had to eat this stuff.

I’m also into Christmas TV specials…or four of them, anyway. Even though I very much enjoy the battling Miser brothers, Snow and Heat, anything with more than a hint of Mickey Rooney to it gives me the heebie-jeebies. God only knows what Ava Gardner was thinking. And I don’t need a children’s holiday story framed as a metaphor for Nazi Germany! (I’m lookin’ at you, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.)

---

No, when I say “Christmas specials,” I’m talking about A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Frosty the Snowman. Those are the ones that work. They remind me of my childhood in a big way, and they have varying degrees of wit, both visual and verbal, attached to the jingle-bell repetition.

I already covered my lifelong infatuation with A Charlie Brown Christmas in my piece on Vince Guaraldi. But that one doesn’t suit the purposes of this article. I’m here to talk about the guys who host these things. A Charlie Brown Christmas doesn’t really have a host, unless you count God.

Let’s start with the longest-running Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which was first broadcast on Dec. 6, 1964. This year marks the sixtieth time it’s been aired!

Everybody knows Sam the Snowman. They’ve seen him sliding through the snow and leaving that little slug trail behind him so many times he’s practically entwined in their DNA.

But sixty years was a long time ago. By now, many viewers may have no idea that Sam’s overall appearance and attitude are based on the man who voices him, sings his songs, and generates his folksy vibe.

That would be folk singer and actor Burl Ives. In the 1940s, Ives popularized such songs as “Blue Tail Fly” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” And, yes, like many other folkies, he strummed a guitar and a banjo, which is why Sam the Snowman isn’t playing a Farfisa organ.

Now, you may not sit around the house drinking a martini and listening to old-school folk singalongs—Jimmy crack corn and I really don’t care—but there’s a distinct chance you know those tunes.

Wikipedia tells us that the respected music critic John Rockwell once said Ives’ voice “had the sheen and finesse of opera without its latter-day Puccinian vulgarities and without the pretensions of operatic ritual. It was genteel in expressive impact without being genteel in social conformity. It moved people.”

Minus the overthinking, that means Ives had a warm voice and people liked it.

Ives parlayed his folk popularity into a stage and screen career that, if anything, was even more successful than his music. I wouldn’t say he was an actor of great range, but he held the screen and could be intimidating when a role called for it.

In fact, he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1958 for his work in The Big Country, a movie that not a single person reading this has ever watched from beginning to end.

Burl Ives was a star, which is why Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass, the producers of Rudolph, were excited when they managed to secure his talents late in the special’s production. NBC and General Electric, the show’s sponsor, saw an early cut of Rudolph and asked that a big name be included to draw more viewers.

A stop-action animation Christmas special was still an unproven thing in 1964. These guys were pretty much winging it. So Ives, embodying Rudolph’s snowman host, was added as an afterthought!

In fact, a couple of Sam’s songs, including “Silver and Gold,” which later became a hit single for Ives, were originally sung by the Yukon Cornelius character! Actor Larry D. Mann, who voiced Yukon, said later on that he was fine with the situation. He understood the draw of Burl Ives, and he wanted the special to be a success.

If you’re looking for some bizarre trivia, I’ll close by telling you that Sam the Snowman is the only Christmas special character to have testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the Red Scare in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, Ives named names to save his own hide during his testimony (he was not the only star to be forced into this betrayal, it should be noted.) I can well imagine he didn’t do it gleefully.

Folk legend Pete Seeger—who basically sat down and told the committee to go fuck itself—didn’t forgive Ives for his loquaciousness until the two made up and performed onstage together in 1993. By that point, Ives was in a wheelchair and wouldn’t have been able to get away had Seeger suddenly changed his mind again and decided to come after him.

So I’m glad it worked out.

---

There’s a better chance people know this one, but I’m beyond trying to guess what anyone may or may not “know” nowadays without first looking at their phones.

You might think that’s Frankenstein’s monster pictured above, but he’s actually the guy who narrates How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Say hello to Boris Karloff, who is arguably the single greatest horror film star of all time. Karloff had been a very busy stage and film actor for many years before he appeared in “Frankenstein,” usually playing characters that could best be described as “third gangster from the left.”

But Universal Pictures, the studio that cranked out all those classic 1930s monster movies, changed all that. Karloff was eventually such a name brand that he started being billed in many of his horror roles as simply “KARLOFF,” in all caps! Or, in the case of “The Mummy,” as “KARLOFF the uncanny!”

I defy you to find an old movie poster touting “CAGNEY the uncanny” or “BOGART the uncanny.” Karloff (and Bela Lugosi, although he was nowhere near as formidable a talent as Karloff ) had a unique thing going for a while there.

Karloff’s participation in How the Grinch Stole Christmas was enshrined from the get-go. Chuck Jones, the legendary animator of the special, was very taken with Karloff’s “beautiful, rhythmic, caring” voice on a recording of Rudyard Kipling children’s tales called Just So Stories and immediately wanted Karloff to read The Grinch.

Give it a listen.

Theodore Geisel (aka “Dr. Seuss”) fully agreed that Karloff was the right person to narrate when Jones played him the Kipling record, and they were on their way.

Karloff himself was happy to be involved, as he had been a big Dr. Seuss fan for many years. If you pull yourself from the sheer nostalgia factor while watching “The Grinch” and focus on his reading, you’ll note that he does an absolutely superb job of it.

It’s hard to imagine the special with anyone else but Boris Karloff reading it.

How sweet that an actor who gained fame and fortune by scaring people was able to reveal a heart so big in the latter part of his career that it actually broke the medical device trying to measure it.

---

And last, but definitely not least as far as the host goes, we have Jimmy Durante in Frosty the Snowman.

Durante had been a beloved stage and film presence for close to fifty years when he agreed to work on Frosty the Snowman in 1969. Rankin and Bass didn’t just decide that Frosty’s host would wear a suit and fedora and have a huge proboscis—that’s exactly how Jimmy Durante looked!

Durante, in fact, had such a pronounced nose, he became known as “The Great Schnozzola,” back when making fun of ungainly human body parts was considered a legitimate way to bill an entertainer.

I remember Durante clowning around and singing on variety shows when I was a little kid in the early 1970s, and I always enjoyed the hell out of him.

Here he is, doing his thing on one of those shows.

Tell me you wouldn’t want that guy for a grandpa.

Durante was a visitor from a different time, to be sure, having originally made his name in vaudeville via a broad form of mugging that had been out of style for many years by the time I became aware of him. But his endless good humor and gift for comedic self-deprecation were a very winning formula.

You can actually get another prime dose of him during the holiday season if you catch a TCM showing of The Man Who Came to Dinner, where, as a lascivious wild man inexplicably named “Banjo,” he manages to steal a very entertaining (if stage bound) picture.

I’m not kidding when I say this man was beloved. He exuded real warmth and a cockeyed kind of charisma. No one ever said, “You know who really bugs me? That Jimmy Durante guy.” Had anyone dared, they would have become a pariah in a wide variety of social circles.

Frosty the Snowman was the final acting role of Durante’s career, which again is a pretty nice way to sign off. I bet he would have enjoyed the idea that kids in 2024 are still watching him at Christmastime. They’re certainly not digging up sixty year old YouTube clips of The Hollywood Palace.