Frosty the Snowman 1969

[3.5/10] This is surprisingly awful. I have fond enough memories of the special from childhood, but there’s just nothing here. The animation is cheap. The voice acting is bad. The story is practically nonexistent. The characters are thinner than a snowflake. The signing is repetitive and dreadful. There’s just nothing to this one.

Maybe that’s the problem of taking a sixty-second song and trying to turn it into a half hour special. The lyrics to the original Frosty song don’t have much plot in them. Kids make Frosty. He comes to life. He frolics for a while. He melts. The end! There’s not really a journey or an arc or anything beyond some charming color to it.

That could be a feature, not a bug. It means the team at Rankin-Bass could basically do whatever they want with this story. All you have to have is a snowman who comes to life and you've basically fulfilled the requirements. Does he make friends? Does he want something in particular now that he’s alive? Does he go on some kind of adventure? The sky’s the limit!

Instead, the special does the most slavish, literal, uncreative adaptation of the song imaginable. Frosty fits the description of the song. He’s stopped by a traffic cop. He parades around with a broom. Every sundry beat from the original lyrics is realized, but in a way that you could probably reduce down to a music video without losing anything.

The closest thing to an original element here is the introduction of a villain, by the name of Professor Hinkle, a faile magician who’s desperate to get his magic hat back once it brings Frosty to life, and Hocus Pocus, an animal sidekick who helps out Frosty. Both are generic, and forgettable. Hinkle has no personality or purpose beyond supposedly being able to make millions with the hat. And the bunny is cute enough, but does the standard animal sidekick shtick without much to distinguish him.

The same goes for the other characters. Frosty himself is a big nothing, with no more flavor to his personality than frozen water. Jackie Vernon’s Frosty voice is terrible, making him sound like a grown man trying to play a twelve-year-old boy going through puberty with his voice cracks. Karen, the little girl who befriends Frosty, has all the distinctiveness and personality of a spork, and the rest of her schoolmates are literally interchangeable.

I say that because the animation here is incredibly chintzy. It’s obvious that they used the same designs for multiple kids and just switched out the color of their shirts or hair. Everything about this special feels cheap or lazy. They do flashback montages for events that happened ten minutes ago. They reuse footage wherever possible. They have one song that they sing over and over again (mostly badly). Poor Jimmy Durante does his best to croon along to all of this, but he mostly sounds like a wet hog gargling gravel.

Even if the voice acting were better, there’s no real plot here. Frosty realizes it might start to get warm soon; the kids try to get him on a train to the north pole; hijinks ensue. That’s pretty much it. There’s a saccharine event where Frosty melts after getting a chilly Karen to an utterly random greenhouse in the middle of nowhere, but it’s stupid because he could just as easily let Karen warm up in the greenhouse while he waits outside. I’m not here to nitpick the finer plot points of a kids’ story, but it plays as a facially stupid choice that even a five year old would realize makes no sense.

That’s the most damning thing about this special. The whole thing gives off the sense of “Who cares? It’s for kids.” Things don’t have to make sense. The characters don’t have to be memorable. The voice actors don’t have to do a good job. The animation doesn’t have to look anything but lazy. It feels like they slapped this together and made it up as they went along.

The only thing you can really say in this one’s favor is that Santa’s speech at the end is kind of sweet. The idea that there’s a certain magic in Frosty, and even if he’s not there all the time, it never really goes away. The notion that it’s in a summer rain, and that he’lll be back next year is a comforting message to the boys and girls in the audience. There can be a hangover, so to speak, after the holiday season. Reminding young ones that the warm feelings they have during that time don’t have to go away, but can stay all year, and come back in force again the next year, is comforting and reassuring.

But it’s thin gruel for a hackneyed, disjointed, downright bad holiday special. There’s a great idea at the heart of the Frosty story, even if it’s just fodder for a novelty song. The notion of having a special surprise, something whimsical and magical that appears, only to know it’s destined to depart at the end of the season could be melancholy and sweet. Instead, Rankin-Bass take the most haphazard approach possible, giving us a slapdash effort that has nothing to show for itself beyond what was already in the song. It just goes to show, if you keep replaying something year after year, it automatically becomes a classic, no matter how terrible it may be.