A MarkInTexas Made-For-TV Christmas: Jack Frost (1979)

 

Other than the fact that both holidays are during the winter, there's very little that Christmas and Groundhog Day have in common.  One is the biggest, most important holiday on the calendar, with commercials and songs and specials devoted to it, days and even weeks off from school and work around it, and often-elaborate decorations in homes and public places that can go up months ahead of time.  The other frequently comes and goes with hardly anyone noticing, nothing gets shut down for it, and no one ever decorates.  Groundhog Day does have an very popular movie devoted to it, of course, but other than that, the day has almost no wider cultural impact.

So that's why it's a bit surprising that the narrator of the Christmas special Jack Frost is a groundhog, or actually the groundhog..  Instead of Punxsutawney Phil, we have Pardon-Me-Pete, who explains early in the special that he has a special deal with Jack Frost that Jack will supply a shadow that he can be scared by, no matter how overcast the day is.  That way, Pete gets six more weeks of sleep and Jack gets six more weeks to play.

Of course, almost none of that has the first thing to do with the primary plot of the story, which takes place at least a couple hundred years earlier, in what I guess is supposed to be Russia.  There, Jack falls in love with a human peasant girl named Elisa whom he thinks loves him back.  So, he convinces Father Winter to allow him human form to woo the girl, only to not do any actual wooing when his wish is granted.

Jack Frost and his character design was introduced by Rankin/Bass three years earlier in Frosty's Winter Wonderland, where he played the easily reformed villain of the piece.  He turned up again, also in 1979, in the feature-length Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July (which may or may not have gotten a brief theatrical release), before getting his own special at the end of the year.  In his prior specials, he had been voiced by Rankin/Bass regular Paul Frees, but in this one, they went the celebrity route and got Robert Morse to voice Jack.  Frees, however, was involved in this special as well, playing both Father Winter and the show's main villain, Kubla Kraus.  Buddy Hackett sang and told the story as Pardon-Me-Pete.

Getting back to the story, Jack's non-existent attempts to woo Elisa runs into two snags.  First, on Christmas Eve, she falls for the newly arrived knight Sir Ravenal, and then the next day she is kidnapped by Kubla, the local evil king who insists on a 100% tax rate and has built a robot horse and a robot servant and a robot army (given that this takes places several centuries ago, its clear his talents were being wasted as an evil king).  Jack sacrifices his humanity to save the town from the robot forces of Kubla, who is essentially a retread of Burgermeister Meisterburger from Santa Claus is Comin' to Town.  Frees, who also voiced that role, basically substitutes Meisterburger's vaguely German accent for a vaguely Russian one.  The way Jack ultimately beats Kubla actually explains why the groundhog is in the story, though it's still a bit of a stretch to make him the narriator of the entire piece.

Jack Frost is kind of a weird special, but it's actually probably the best of the latter-day Rankin/Bass specials.  While none of the original songs are especially memorable, most of them are quite catchy, and Jack is a fairly engaging character.   Being voiced by Morse instead of Frees was probably a wise decision in that regard.  This isn't an all-time classic, but it's cute and worth watching.

Next time: Not very long ago, on a streaming service close, close by